Part 54: The Riley Shepard Show, Cable Access
Today is Sunday, November 29, 2020. On Friday, the outgoing POTUS tweeted these theories about voter fraud:
"Biden did poorly in big cities (Politico), except those of Detroit (more votes than people!), Philadelphia, Atlanta and Milwaukee, which he had to win. Not surprisingly, they are all located in the most important swing states, and are long known for being politically corrupt!"
Then more over the weekend:
"The 1,126,940 votes were created out of thin air. I won Pennsylvania by a lot, perhaps more than anyone will ever know. The Pennsylvania votes were RIGGED. All other swing states also. The world is watching!"
Multiple sources called this election differently "Specific allegations were made, and we have massive proof, in the Pennsylvania case. Some people just don’t want to see it. They want nothing to do with saving our Country. Sad!!!"
Yes. The world is watching, and people are gobsmacked. As you can see, Twitter labeled these as disputed claims, but many are wondering if social networks are doing enough, since the label seems somewhat easy to ignore. At some point this week, Trump seemed to acknowledge the election results, but then right after tweeted something about "massive fraud" and said this about overturning the election results:
""We have all the evidence, we have all the affidavits, we have everything, all we need is to have some judge
listen to it properly without having a political opinion or having another kind of a problem."
Meanwhile, Biden has finally been granted what normally would be taken for granted in a transition, access to information and security briefings.
On the COVID-19 front, hospitals and staff are overwhelmed with patients as cases surge, but just yesterday I had three clients tell me the same exact story: all of them had sisters that held the firm belief that the reaction to the virus is exaggerated, and the virus is just like the flu. It was the strangest thing to speak to three women on the same day who are going through the same experiences with their sisters. The holiday season brought out surreal conversations within these families, and the deniers saw no reason why they couldn't gather for big, indoor dinner parties this holiday season. One of my client's sisters said, "I choose the economy over health."
264,000 people have died of the Corona Virus so far in the United States, and I'm wondering how bad it will get this winter when so many have these "alternate facts" about the pandemic.
My mother, Jan Svetlik, worked on this painting, below, when I was a kid. I was around ten years-old when she started it. We were living in Oxnard California, when one day someone told Jan that the oil company, Exxon, was going to get rid of their red pegasus logo. She sought out an Exxon station on one of the busy roads, and took a bunch of photos before the signs went away. The canvas she chose was large, and she filled it with blue sky (A nice twist...better than a brown sunset, which is pretty much what Exxon can take credit for as well as Shell and the others...) and at first she made it a unicorn, as you can see, below. In a later version, she took the horn off the pegasus, deciding it was silly.
During this time in Oxnard, she invited her art students to paint at her studio space. One of her students saw this painting and said, "Wow, my brother designed that logo for Exxon." Small world. Anyway, this one never sold. My mother still has it, sans horn.
Ok, here's the deal. I suck at technology. I uploaded two videos on this Wix blog but they are both the same. One was uploaded from my computer, the other from a Facebook post on my Riley Shepard, Cowboy page, and I'm not sure which one works best. Perhaps they both do and I'm a goober, or perhaps neither will work.
In one of the blogs, I mentioned that my father had a cable access television program, and that I was somewhat mortified at the time (the mid-90s?) by the whole thing. Fact check: It wasn't my friend John who told me about it, as I wrote in that blog. Now I can't remember who it was. John called to say, "hey, that wasn't me. I don't watch cable access." Point taken. I don't, either. Maybe it was my old friend Tim? Anyway, my father moved back to Porterville after living on the beach in Ventura where he was managing an aspiring musician. His announcement that he was moving back to Porterville after all the trouble he'd been in there... well, it took me by surprise. Pretty quickly, he met a lady named Ruth, and next thing I knew, they were married.
I said, "Dad... so... she's going to be your sixth wife?" He said, "Listen, our generation didn't just shack up. We got married."
This was way before I found my half-brother, Richard, the one who told me he can't find divorce papers for Riley and his mother, as mentioned in previous blogs. So...that complicates my thoughts about whether Ruth and Riley were actually married or not. Probably not.
Ruth and Riley worked on this "Riley Shepard" show together. My sister Lisa said that they were really having fun with it. When I first was able to get those 25 or so boxes of my father's long lost belongings from Larry Bastian, we hauled them all to my friend Tim's house, who lived about thirty minutes from Larry's storage unit. We sorted through the stuff for hours, making the inside of Tim's place look like a cyclone hit. There were about five boxes full of the tapes of this cable access show Riley produced. They were on the kind of tape that a television station would give you, and there was no way for me to play them. It pains me to write that we threw them out. David, my husband, had rented an SUV to drive six or so boxes back up to Seattle, and these tapes...well for one thing, I'd have to pay to have them converted. Also, they'd been stored for ten years in an old shed behind Ted Ensslin's house, and even the books had water damage, so there was no telling what shape the tapes were in. I hated throwing those tapes out. I regret it at times, and can see what screws up hoarder's brains. Everything has potential value.
Luckily, David found a VHS tape stored in an old box of stuff, and lo and behold, it was a tape my Dad sent me back in the 90s so I could see his show. I'd forgotten I had it. The links below "should" allow you to watch a clip from the VHS I have, I simply filmed the television with my iPhone.
Another item that was in those boxes, tons of newspaper clippings, as mentioned in the Dear Ace blog. As I've said before, Riley was an avid reader, but he'd cut out so many newspaper clippings they filled boxes. It also weirdly broke my heart to throw out the clippings. I wanted to read each one, but it would've taken me weeks, and we had 12 hours to go through the stuff, pack up, and hit the road. Riley used the news bits for topics of interest on his cable access show.
It's good to have this short clip here, especially so whatever actor gets the role in the movie can hear Riley's voice. Ok, I came back to edit this, as even my own sister, Marion is like, "What movie?" Hello, there's no movie...yet.
Next up, blog 55: Riley's essay on the death penalty.
