A Harvest

by William Pym

Shady Lemonade, a singularly educational 1967 episode of the television show Gumby, found the hero and friends sweltering on a summer day. “It’s almost a hundred in the shade”, notes Prickle. The combination of unfiltered, close Klieg lights and gooey clay brought a frighteningly literal metalevel of urgency to the scene. A sign across the street reads, ‘lemonade, all you can drink for ten cents’. Gumby has forty cents, just enough for total refreshment and salvation for all of them. “Boy, I could drink a gallon,” boasts Pokey as they await their first round of drinks. No one notices the waiter’s beady eyes and bully’s rasp. They drain their glasses and order another batch. “Yes sir,” says the waiter, his true colors unfurling, “that’ll be forty cents more.” “But your sign says all you can drink for ten cents,” says Gumby, pluck barely hiding bafflement. “Well that’s all you can drink for ten cents.”

They’re turfed out into the painful sunshine to cook up a subplot wherein a serendipitous encounter with an eccentric millionaire sees the gang open their own business, next door to the soda jerk, where all-you-can-drink lemonade costs a nickel. A happy ending. The lesson of this four-minute adventure is markedly more complicated than Gumby’s typical journeys in basic altruism, responsibility, good nature and adventure. The child viewer is taught, for perhaps the first time, about the manipulative potential of semantics as it’s practiced everywhere. Creative interpretation and deceptive weighting is, as Shady Lemonade terrifyingly implies, widespread enough to touch a child’s breezy world, to touch one of the few activities they allowed to engage in and care about, like buying a glass of lemonade with a dime.

As the child learns that rules and words can be twisted around to mean their opposite, she learns both more about the world and of reasons to trust the world less. The child must hope for a worldview where sense and nonsense are balanced, where a combined use of rules and an acceptance of chaos encourage a working mind and a lubricated life. It is a challenge that does not go away. The practice of Anissa Mack, both her work in general and the Durham Fair project in particular, displays an eagerness to invent the most sensitive rules and appreciate the world’s absurdity as finely as possible. Humor, history and education will arise as we figure out, then define, the important contemporary territory of Mack’s work.

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