A few thoughts about You Can't Take It With You (1984).

I saw this early 1980s TV version of You Can’t Take It With You when I was in high school…long before I saw the 1938 film. It made a huge impression on me. Those who are familiar with it know it’s about an eccentric family. They live together in a large house, and each member pursues their own highly improbable and impractical dreams. The grandfather is a bit of a philosopher, and he firmly believes a person should do what they want rather than what is expected of them. I needed to see this play when I was 17.

Many snobbishly dismiss everything that’s on TV as trash, and a quite a lot of it is trash, but you can also find high quality entertainment on TV such as this play. TV provided me glimpses of a wider world, and it let me know that there were other ways of doing things and seeing things. I hate to think what would have become of me if the only thing I was exposed to while growing up was the culture of southern West Virginia. In the film The Boys in the Band, there’s a scene in which Donald is giving Michael attitude for being a movie lover because he thinks movies are garbage. Michael retorts, “It may come as a surprise to you, but there was no Shubert Theater in Hot Coffee, Mississippi.” Thanks to TV and especially PBS, there was a kind of Shubert Theater in my little hometown of Oak Hill.

I saw this version of the play once and once only. For a very long time, I’ve wanted to see it again, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. There’s a crazy expensive used VHS tape for sale on Amazon, but I’ve not had a VCR in over ten years. Tears came to my eyes when I found this on YouTube last night. I hated going to bed without watching it first because I feared I’d wake up to discover it had been removed.

One of my favorite lines: “Your mother believes in spiritualism because it’s fashionable. Your father raises orchids because he can afford it. My mother writes plays because eight years ago a typewriter was delivered here by mistake.”