This is a complaint, a cry, with no one of my age and of certain shared experiences to listen.

If the three in this picture, other than I, were alive I could share this link [since broken, an old comedy], then reminisce with Diane, or Patricia, or Fred; then, we probably would make odious comparisons between the innocent and truly funny comedy of yesteryear and the expletive-laden and coarse, or relentlessly political ‘humor’ of today.

Old friends gather at the home of Andrea Pavellas Slosarik and Ken Slosarik, 2007: (L to R) Diane Pavellas, Patricia Larsen, Ron Pavellas, Fred Pape.

The link above takes you to one of Johnny Carson’s shows in 1992 when he had as guest performers the Smothers Brothers, Dick and Tommy, who are at and within two years of my age. Johnny Carson, now dead, was 12 years older. I saw the Smothers Brothers perform, gratis, at San Francisco City College where I was attending, 1958-1960. They were just starting out and became very popular within a short time. They were Californians, as I was, and when they became wealthy, they bought and developed wineries in the wine region of Northern California.

There is much to say about them and Johnny Carson, but I can’t, not with those who would understand the underlying nature of the times and places we then lived in.

I struggle to find words to describe the feelings that this recorded performance and these memories evoke, that wash over me and thrust me onto a barren beach. A kind of emptiness, a hollowness, an ancientness.

I cannot go further.

I don’t cry, for I have already accepted my circumstance. But I do, deeply, miss my friends,

… and truly funny comedians.