A friend from long ago posted on a social networking site that she had somehow missed the TV show This Is Us. I didn’t respond to the post, but referred to it recently when a member of the Weekly View team, while sipping cider with me, said that she and her compatriot had both been unaware of the award-winning show. (I’ll not name them, here.) As for me, I have been addicted to the show since its inception.
Pittsburghers Jack and Rebecca (Milo Ventimiglia and Mandy Moore) meet, fall in love, marry, and have triplets. Their lives are changed when one of the triplets dies during childbirth, and a kindly doctor, (Gerald McRaney) convinces them to adopt a child who had been abandoned on the steps of a firehouse. The boy grows up as one of “The Big Three”: Kevin, Kate and Randall. Randall’s brother and sister are White; he is Black. The show is not linear in progression; there are many flashbacks. You have to fasten your seat belt because it can be a bumpy ride. Mandy Moore ages years within minutes, and Milo Ventimiglia will lose his beard, appear with a mustache or is clean-shaven in the same time. The three children are babies, adults, adolescents and teenagers, with all the attendant issues of growth and maturation. I missed a couple of seasons because I made the selfish decision to play league pool on Tuesday nights, but I recently binged my way through to the show’s season premiere on Tuesday, October 27. My cider-sipping friend told me that she found the show (which came on at 9 p.m. EST) and watched the two-hour presentation, despite the fact that she is an “early-to-bedder.”
Rebecca and Jack are from Pittsburgh, just as I and my first bride are. They drive from Pittsburgh to Los Angeles, just as we did. Rebecca is an aspiring singer who is told that she is “Pittsburgh good,” which may be what the Walt Disney Studios were thinking when they reviewed my art portfolio. Rebecca has clinical trials in St. Louis Missouri, a city that housed me for 19 years; they visit New York City, as I did when I went to see my first bride’s grandmother, and where my first bride still lives. I reconnected with a friend recently, and during a text message exchange, he wrote that he remembers the day he met me (in person), “like yesterday.” I sent him a laughing emoji, because I was an art director with whom he had not worked. My conversations and instructions to him were all by phone from St. Louis Missouri. I arrived in New York City and rang the bell to his studio; he opened the door and cried out, “CJ! You’re… you’re BLACK!” We laughed about that for years, and still do. In one episode of This Is Us, there is a flashback moment where Jack tells Randall, “When I look at you, I don’t see color. I see my son.” Many well-meaning people say that to people who are viewed through a color-lens, but as an artist, I’ve always rejected that concept. I see color, an ability necessary for the practice of my craft. Randall’s answer to his father is on point, though: “Then, you don’t see me.”
So, why is “This” me? There are moments of loving and anger, joy and despair and tragedy and triumph, and opportunities for me to cry, and for Jack to learn to see all three of his children, just as the photographer learned to see me.
Oh — did I mention that Jack and Rebecca are from Pittsburgh?
cjon3acd@att.net