Many of us around here used to be huge fans of the Red Green show. It even got the the point where some folks referred to each other as the characters, though usually in a decidedly unflattering way. Buster and Stumpy were regularly referred to as “Ol’ Man Sedgewick,” Big Paul usually got called “Uncle Red,” and pretty much anyone in town you were patronizing got called “Harold.”
The one thing we did not have was a Bill.
For those of you who were either too young, too old, or too cosmopolitan, the Red Green Show was a Canadian sketch comedy that played a lot on the local public television station. It was about life in a remote small town where the average age seemed to be mid-to-late forties, and the average IQ and emotional development seemed stuck at the same point as the kids discovering MAD magazine. So naturally, you can see why there would be an appeal.
Well, Bill was the nigh-indestructible idiot of the show. Everything he touched imploded, exploded, fell, burned, sank, or floated away… sometimes at the same time. But his genius was that he managed to drag the other characters along, characters who, one must assume, had marginally better survival instincts than insurance.
Well, there was a lot of discussion at the time about why there were no Bills. Surely, we were all Bills at one point or another. There wouldn’t be any good tall-tales if we weren’t. But nobody in town lived in that state of grace between divine madness and living cartoon character 365 days of the year.
That’s when we realized that all our Bills had gotten killed off. We had been more-or-less Bill Free since 1983, when Earl Streethaur managed to decapitate himself with a kid’s scooter while trying to prove perpetual motion wasn’t a myth. Prior to that, “Zitz” Feldman set himself on fire while making ice, Hammil Earnst managed to run himself over with a Buick while sitting in the cab of his pickup, and lest we forget poor Ivan “Poboy” Taylor who bled to death doing card tricks.
Yes accidents happen, but some folks just have no damn good sense. You mourn their passing, but wonder whether they were the only ones who didn’t see it coming.
