Certain things I miss with watch on demand

Last weekend, I attended my first multi-day group event since early 2020. 

There’s something special about gathering with a group of folks who have interests similar to yours, swapping stories, recalling favorite moments from beloved books or movies or television shows. 

We did a lot of that this weekend, which set me to thinking about the joy of the shared experience, and how that is evolving, what with the internet and endless options for streaming media. 

I wasn’t especially aware of it at the time, but I grew up in a pretty simple era.  

We didn’t have a television when I was a wee tot. When we made the leap to bring a TV to our living room, we only had access to one channel, a mix of the best of what was then available. 

By the time I graduated from high school, I think we had four choices on the dial: NBC and CBS, PBS after KENW-TV went on the air in 1974, and ABC (on occasion and if we held our mouths just right). 

The ever-reassuring Walter Cronkite delivered all the news we needed to know in 30 minutes each weekday evening. That was plenty. 

Monday morning at Dora Elementary School, most of my classmates would have spent the evening before watching “Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color” just like my family had (even better, by the way, when we upgraded to a color television).  

By junior high and high school, my friends and I were hooked on the weekly sitcoms “Happy Days” and “Laverne and Shirley,” while our parents chuckled over “All in the Family,” or shushed us to watch “60 Minutes.” 

On Saturday afternoons, my brothers and I cranked up our dusty feed barn radio to listen as Casey Kasem counted down the top 40 songs on the American Billboard charts, the same songs we and our classmates belted out together on the activity bus on the road home from away games. 

If any of my generation managed to snag a vehicle for an evening run to Portales, the radio dial was almost certainly set to pick up the far-off tunes broadcast by KOMA in Oklahoma City. 

Until it burned in the great Portales fire on March 10, 1978, we had access to one and only one movie screen in that era. 

(Not entirely true: there was the drive-in on U.S. 70 southwest of Portales, but with the exception of one miserable family outing … fodder for another column … we were not drive-in goers.) 

We scored an invitation to the “gala” grand opening of the new Tower Twin on Nov. 16, 1978, delighted to be in the first audiences for the side-by-side screenings of “Jaws 2” and “National Lampoon’s Animal House.”  

(For the record, we watched “Animal House,” because I’m pretty sure my mother was expecting a harmless Disney movie with raccoons frolicking a mix of flour and molasses in the kitchen they’d just ransacked rather than an R-rated flick about frat houses.) 

All this to say that as much as I love the plethora of entertainment choices we now have at our fingertips, and the convenience of “watch on demand,” there are things I miss: the delicious anticipation of the next episode of a popular show, the satisfaction of reliving an experience shared by most of my friends. 

“Slide over, won’t you? Oh, yum, the cooks made rolls today. Did you see the second part of ‘The Horse in the Gray Flannel Suit’ last night on Disney? Wasn’t it the best thing ever?” 

Betty Williamson vacillates between feeling overwhelmed and waxing nostalgic. Reach her at:

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