Who plugged Gran’ma into the cable box?

By Phillip Kaplan


An old cable box at that, from ’88, the one with the round black dial that had no remote and obscenely clicked fuzzed hell on the screen for each channel change.  Someone left Electric Grandmother alone with it, somehow they mated. And if someone out there is concerned all the hard work Danny Tanner put into his full house will disappear from our collective works of philosophy, come down off the ledge.  A brave, if winded soul is undertaking the project.

It is wonderfully imperfect asthma our Electric Grandmother has, fitting.  It’s right that something with ‘Grandma’ in the title breathe heavily, just a little.  It makes it like pilled-up-granny is communicating with you through Nick at Nite, a Caleco, and a raw electric current coming strait up through the mildewed crawl-space where the past TV-Guides are kept.  Some black noise-box makes the tone for the lone Grandmother figure, who holds only a mic, rambling happily from song to song, shouting randomly at acquaintances who pass by – just as gran’mas do – the Viuex Electrique offers heartfelt lessons about the wife of Danny Tanner, Nintendo, Tom’s girl, basement life -----

/   Fuck Rainbow!”  /

A yell from the crowd at Andyman’s Treehouse on Fool’s Day came crashing with delight to the stage.  Electric Grandmother is “pleasantly disturbed” someone told me.  I like that.  It wasn’t too close for comfort.

Gran’ma then told me about getting robbed.  In Westerville.  By young kids.  Gran’ma, electrified, saw them at Blockbuster, followed them, glared at them
and then wrote a song about them.  It endears you to Grans,

especially if some punk sucker has stole any of your shit. I like that too. Remember that show with Jim J. Bullock and Ted Knight?  “I can teach you but I’d have to charge,” says Electric Grandmother.  Want to learn?  Be taught by music so preter-obsessed with 80’s culture that it taunts dementia’s boundary.  Lourie Loughlin.  Kimmy the neighbor girl.  Stamos.  Doogie’s friend Vinny, remember when he got rejected from film school?  And there’s Doogie, all, “I’m a teen doctor,” and shit.  Vinny should have cloct him.  Fuck you, Doogie, delivering a baby in a mall is plain hokey show-off crap.  Ostentatious prick, tell us next about how you have scars from the shrapnel of an exploding appendix mine.  What was that made-for-tv movie with Patrick Duffy and Lonnie Anderson, where Doogie plays a boy plagued by limp legs?  I hope Vinny gave him those.  It’s all family ties in an electric way. Step-by-step it gets worse, this 80’s slope, slipperier it gets the more you dance on it.  Oh well, sweet and kindly old Electric Grandmother has your hand, puts candy in your ear.  Weird ol’ gran’ma.  An eccentric.