“You want to watch what?” I look up from the Marsala sauce I’m reducing for dinner. “Porn Stars?”
My teenage son blinks. His eyes roll. Before his gaze slides back to mine, I see him judging the distance between where we’re standing at the stove and the french door leading outside to the deck.
He’s about to cut and run. And he’s blushing, this kid whose olive complexion should make that impossible, only he’s my son and a few of my fair skin’s more embarrassing traits managed to infuse his DNA no matter how much the rest of him takes after his dad.
“Pawn stars,” he enunciates with the precision of a special ed. speech teacher humoring a challenging student. “It’s a reality show on the History Channel about a pawn dealer in Vegas. It’s cool.”
“The History Channel is doing reality TV?”I wait for the irony of the phenomenon to speak for itself. Another blink’s all I get back. “Reality TV, by definition,” I explain, ”is watching something that’s actually happening while it’s taped. So, naturally, a cable channel devoted to learning from civilizations past would be a huge player in the medium…” (more…)
