Bob Evans

When I was in high school in Ohio, I used to watch a lot of public-access television, the kind where for a small fee anyone can secure half an hour of airtime and broadcast a show. This was in 1991, so the programming was truly amateur and at times borderline feral: brain-damaged preachers and grotesquely unfunny improv comedy troupes and a lot of indescribable stuff that might be, for instance, a guy sitting in a recliner talking about his decades-long feud with his brother. Maybe public access is still like that. I haven’t seen it in fifteen years (one of the casualties of streaming). Anyway, there was a show on our local station called Paragon Promise. It was a psychic call-in show hosted by two women in their fifties, sisters. Their dramatic hair sat piled high atop their heads in a lazy beehive and was dyed dark, inky black. Their skin was pale, and powdered to look even more so. But they were nothing compared to their ancient mother, who sometimes appeared on the show, sitting between them. She looked so old it did not seem possible her heart could still be beating. She must, when she gave birth to the women, have been at least in her late forties. Now she seemed to have begun to shrink and shrivel. She had an apple-shaped and apple-sized face. Her cheeks and forehead were pasty white through the jet-black hair. All three women wore black clothes, head to toe. Most amazing of all was the length of the mother’s hair. It went down her back, touching her ass, the kind of hair where it goes beyond having “long hair” and turns freaky, as when somebody’s fingernails grow so long they start to curl. The episodes when she visited were particularly spellbinding. She hunched there between her daughters, and here was the thing: the mother never said a word. I literally never heard her say a single word on the show. I guess she just liked being with her children, and they obviously enjoyed having her near. She would look silently into the camera, and they would do their psychic call-in thing. And that was also great, because they weren’t very good at it, not that anyone is really very good at it, necessarily, but they weren’t good at the magic trick of seeming to be good at it, either, or they were pretty good at it but not as good as the people usually are who do that professionally. Viewers would phone in and ask for advice. A woman might call and say that she was worried her husband was cheating on her. One of the sisters might say, “Hmmm . . . I’m getting something. Is there a man in your life or your immediate experience named Greg, or Gregory?” “Um, no . . . I mean, not really, no.” “Okay, what about George or Gary? I’m getting strong g and r combinations.” “Um, no, not really, I . . . I don’t really know anybody named anything like that.” “Hmm, that’s funny, I’m usually never wrong about this stuff . . . Oh! Wait! I’m getting ‘grandfather’! That’s why I was seeing g and r. Do you have a grandfather who’s close to you?” “No, all my grandparents are dead.” “Well, listen up, honey, because grandpa is trying to talk to you from beyond the grave.”