On Tuesday, I saw the best show ever on The Learning Channel - a station which I has now been simplified to just "TLC" so people don't need to know how to read, they just need to know the alphabet. There are a whole bunch of shows on there with medical oddities and other Davis McDavis-centric things, and since I never really flip through channels I had no idea they existed. I'm excited that this Sunday is "Help Me! I'm A Hoarder!." which sounds super. But that's another story, never mind, anyway....
The show I saw that was so good was The Boy With The New Head, and it was about a boy in Uganda who had a rare disease that caused his skull plates to fuse together prematurely as a baby, so by the time he grew up his skull was too small and so it grew into a point and his brains were pushing his eyeballs out of his skull. He looked a lot like Zippy The Pinhead crossed with a walleye. I put a picture up there so you could see. When I first saw him on the TV I thought he was some sort of special effect for what I presumed was a Burger King commercial, for some reason, and that's what made me stop to watch the program.
On the show he was flown to the US and given a new skull and they fixed his eyeballs. I can't even begin to tell you how joyful this show made me. On the same day, Handsome Mister Goats had been relaying to me some bitchy comments the queens on his Co-op board "design" committee, which oversees our apartment building's renovations, and they had been emailing back and forth to each other, complaining about the lack of taste in the choice of floor tiling in our building's elevator, and their disapproval of a potted plant that sits out front.
"I guess the war in Iraq has ended," I told him, since we are now apparently able to spend time worrying about things so excruciatingly unimportant as elevator floor tiling.
It was great just to see what a kid who grew up in a mud hut thought of the US: he loved it! There was a short video where he narrated a walk through the house he was staying in in the US while undergoing his multiple surgeries, and he was amazed by every little detail of the house he was staying in, starting with the door, which was something his mud hut did not have in Uganda.
"This is the door which we can close, and this is the tap which produces water, and this is the sink. I like it because it is so clean. And this is the machine which cooks the food." Things which you and I "take for granite," as they'd say on The Cosby Show, was something he thought was new, fresh, and interesting, and it pleased him to see these things with the eyes he had on the side of his face.
This boy had what was assuredly the happiest day in his thus-far short life when he was given a mirror and allowed to see the result of the first of his three surgeries, which was that he now had a skull that was not pointed on the top and looked like a normal person. Now, he still had to turn the mirror to the side of his head to see his new skull because his eyeballs still popped out on the side of his head like a walleye, but he couldn't have possibly been more pleased. It's making me misty-eyed just recalling it.
To paraphrase Whoopi Goldberg in The Blessed Oprah's shining moment, also known as The Color Purple: "I'm poor, black, and I may even be ugly, but goddamnit, my skull is no longer pointy on top!"
The kid was such an inspirational story about being happy with what Oprah has given you, because at the end of the day the "happy ending" for the kid was really just what most people get to start out with: a round skull and two eyeballs on the front of their face. I just sat there crying on the couch when he was finally reunited with his mother an father, who had to stay in Uganda while he was getting his surgery in the US.
He went back to his village, where he was now a celebrity because he'd been to what must seem like a strange, magical land to his fellow villagers, and was able to be the center of attention with his new eyes, non-pointy skull, and wonderful stories like, "I think the thing I liked the most were the doors that opened by themselves. And then when you went through, they would shut again!"
Next time I'm feeling sorry for myself, I think I'm going to pat myself on top of my flat skull and have a cup of shut the hell up.
Here's a lovely video, the most tasteful video I've ever seen with total frontal nudity. If strip clubs were this awesome, I'd totally go to one:
