By Sue Fagalde Lick
The art of dinner conversation is dead, overwhelmed by the big-screen TV.
It's one thing for old married folks to dine on TV trays in front of Monday Night Football, but when a girl puts on pantyhose and earrings, she'd like to have her date pay some attention, even if they only go to the local pizza parlor. If she has to compete with sports on the big screen, forget it. She might as well go out alone.
Due to a defrosting snafu, my husband and I wound up at a pizzeria last weekend. They ought to call it a television den, with pizza on the side. The screen was bigger than my kitchen table, and the sound was up so loud, conversation was impossible. As I looked around the mainly male crowd, all eyes were fixed on the television.
My husband quickly joined the group, looking past me to the basketball highlights on TV. When I tried to speak to him, there was no response. What fun is this, I thought, loading up my plate at the salad bar.
Every place we eat lately is the same. If it doesn't have a television, it has a jukebox or video games--or both--playing so loudly we can't converse. One new restaurant in San Jose has soft piped-in music, but for some mysterious acoustical reason, human voices layer into such a roar that one must shout to be heard. Yet the place is so popular, people wait in line to get in.
Back at the pizza parlor, a family came in--dad, mom, a boy about 5 and a girl about 7 years old. On the TV, basketball ended at 8 p.m. (isn't that bedtime?) and segued into a Sylvester Stallone movie that was so violent I couldn't stand to watch. Dozens of people were slaughtered in the first five minutes, blood spurting everywhere. The children stared, expressionless, their pizzas untouched. The parents chewed and watched, hypnotized.
"Those kids shouldn't be seeing this," I said. My husband agreed, but kept watching and sipping his beer.
More bodies. Bad language. Sexist and racist attitudes. I was about to ask the manager to change the channel, but then the family got up to leave. Thank God, I thought.
The little girl lingered, unable to stop watching the mayhem on the television. Come on, her mother ordered. The boy stared, too; he had to be physically pulled away.
I remembered Thanksgiving at my brother's house and how my niece and nephew spent the whole day watching senseless B-movies on television, ignoring the family that had traveled many miles to see them. I felt again the chill of fear I felt then. For those children--and sometimes, I admit, for me--television has become more real than life itself. What have we done to our kids and to ourselves?
Lost in the glow of the one-eyed monster, as our family used to call it, we ignore each other and don't even taste the food we're eating. Can't we turn it off?
When our pizza and beer were almost gone, I put on my coat. "Are you finished yet?" I nudged my husband. Still watching the Stallone movie, he drank the last sip of his Samuel Adams, and we went out into the cold night, not having talked at all.
Sue Fagalde Lick is editor of the Saratoga News.
This article appeared in the Saratoga News, Wednesday, January 17, 1996.
©1996 Metro Publishing Inc. All rights reserved.