Culture Uncovered!

One of the reasons I love history is that it's the gift that keeps on giving. There's so much of it, and so much to learn, that as much as you know or think you know, there's always more .. and more ... and more ...

I love learning about people who lived in the past who might not have been the most famous and powerful people of their times but who nonetheless lead interesting lives that sometime intersected with history. And as we get older, we start to see how much of our lives have also, at very times, intersected with history. 

And sometimes history can be wacky ... literally.

Recently I came upon some cultural history that, for decades, has been suppressed but that recently has become freely available ... thanks to YouTube. And boy is it wacky! 

In 1975 the Maysles brothers made the classic documentary Grey Gardens about Edie and Edith Beale, the reclusive cousins of Jackie Kennedy who were living in squalor in the Hamptons. But it turns out that a couple years earlier, in 1972, Jackie Kennedy's sister Lee Radziweil and her then-boyfriend, the photographer Peter Beard, went out to the Hamptons to visit the Beales and filmed them.

The result was a documentary that came out in 2016 called That Summer, and it's a fascinating, new look at these two legendary eccentrics in a context that is both familiar from Grey Gardens yet also humanizes them more than that documentary did. This was a part of the past that we thought we knew but, once this footage was uncovered, we literally saw and learned even more about these two cultural icons. 

And then ... there's Martin Lawrence. Yes, in the early 1990s, Mr. Lawrence was the star of his hit sitcom Martin! and he was on top of the world. Naturally he was invited to host Saturday Night Live in 1994 and, uh, let's just say that he brought a bit of a "Def Comedy Jam" mentality to the whitest comedy show on TV. He did the usual monologue and it went off the rails when he started talking about the recent John Wayne Bobbit case (the guy who got his weiner cut off) and then it becomes about Mr Lawrence's beliefs about the important of feminine hygiene.

It was so raunchy that it was edited out of the West Coast broadcast and all subsequent broadcasts. But, uh, well, now we can see if for ourselves. And it's naaaaasty! But it's a piece of forgotten cultural history that is now uncovered (you can see the edited and unedited versions below).

By the way, the musical guest for Martin!'s episode was the Canadian band Crash Test Dummies. They had a huge hit at the time with the song "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm", and it's a rather bizarre contrast to have had an aggressive black comedian host like Martin Lawrence with a superwhite band like Crash Test Dummies. 

While we rightly think we're living in bizarre times, when you uncover the cultural of the past, we should realize that the bizarreness was there all the time.