TALK SHOW JON!!!!!

the freckles on my
left arm line up like the big
dipper. like you care.








the first time i ever saw jon stewart he was doing stand-up on the mtv half-hour comedy hour something like twelve years ago, chainsmoking in black jeans and a black sweater, all cute and silly, and smitten was i from the first instant. now, i'm smitten all the time by this or that, and a lot of it passes, but this little comedian told a joke about gays in the military that went i think like this:

"i don't really understand why the military is so opposed to gay men, i mean, they love their country just like the rest of us. what do they think's gonna happen, you know, like they'll be out in the middle of a battle and a general will go, 'officer, shoot that man!' and the private'll look up and say

(and at this point my jon made THE MOST DARLING FACE, all wide-eyed and pouty and innocent and puppyish and my heart said FUCK! and that was that, if you must know, but anyhow)

'i, i can't, sir, he's adorable.'"

i remember this about stand-up on mtv and nothing else. and when jon became the host of you-wrote-it-you-watch-it, i did watch it, with ardent religious fervor, just as i watched the half-hour jon stewart show when mtv made that happen, where i first saw jim rose roll his face in a broken lightbulb and developed an unsettling crush on his sidekick howard (i think it was the flowery shirts), as i later watched that same talk show in its syndicated hour-long format on the local network that eventually (and maybe sadly) became the wb. and while this show was on the air at some ungodly hour of the early a.m. i decided that i was going to go to college in new york city, maybe to columbia, even though they didn't really offer a curriculum suited to what were then my academic goals, but that didn't matter; what mattered was that if i were in the city i might be able to finagle myself an internship on the jon stewart show and someday, some glorious insurpassable day, get my desperate little hands on the talk show jon doll, that tiny malformed idol that controlled my mind and soul with its conjoined plastic digits.

the day that my junior year of high school ended i threw myself onto the couch, all freshly showered and bursting with jubilance at the idea of not having to miss a single installment of the jon stewart show all summer long, mentally collating school applications and outlining arguments to convince my best friend to forget about marine biology and move to manhattan with me just for kicks because DAMN IT, SARAH ANN, I NEED THAT DOLL!!!

the show opened up with a pan to the audience, and i noted with more than a touch of alarm that many of its members were holding up signs that read, "we'll miss you jon!" in sloppy blood-red lettering. what was this? miss him? where was he going? he couldn't leave, i had made plans... sadly, my chickens, oh so terribly sadly, our plans count for nothing in this cruel world, not mine, or yours, or even jon's.

my mother passed the living room on her way to bed and paused in the doorway to ask me why i was crying. i informed her in a nearly inaudible whisper that the jon stewart show had been (*sob*) cancelled.

what's lovely and overwhelms me with gratitude for my lineage is that my mother momentarily froze with horror herself, and the next day when she told my father, he was stunned and bought a blank vhs cassette to tape the remainder of jon's episodes on. because they loved him too, and here's why:

in their hearts, they knew as well as i did that he was meant to be their son-in-law. forget the fact that he's closer to their ages than mine, they'd long ago accepted my disdain for all boys under the age of 26 (thankfully, at least in their minds, that cutoff has not risen, even now that i'm in my twenties myself). forget also that he was a cult celebrity whom i was unlikely to ever meet unless i forced my way into the ranks of his coworkers; i was a focused, determined little girl. and for all three of us to fall for him on sight, i mean, if ever there was a sign...

so we followed him and his career through all of its ins and outs, we watched him whenever he hosted the tom snyder show, waiting patiently for him to come into his own. and now we watch the daily show contentedly from our respective homes, ignoring the references made to his wife because she's irrelevant, missing howard and the black sweaters and the ashtray but happy enough to know that jon is still jon, no matter what, the picture of tranquility, not a doubt in nary a one of our minds.

i will have that doll. he's going to hand it to me on our wedding day.