Old News from the 4077th

Time shows its passing in the most benign and pleasant of places.

So, a friend of mine lent me the first season of M*A*S*H* last week. I have been addicted ever since. Having been a passive fan of the show, this is significant; for I take pride in the fact that I am not usually taken in by any TV show, past or present. In other words, if I watch any one show for three consecutive weeks, it's an anomily. To me, most sit-coms and evening dramas are a far distant second to a good PBS documentary, a non-fiction book, or a nap.

But as I watched one episode after another, laughing childishly the entire time, I concluded that had the show premiered today it would be as well received as it was in 1972. This sudden and extended revisitation with M*A*S*H* took me by complete surprise...and I found myself analyzing why I love this show so much.

I have my suspicions. First of all, the lines out of certain characters' mouths are timeless, perennially hip, and purely hilarious (specifically Col. Blake, Radar, Major Frank Burns, Hot Lips Hoolihan, and Hawkeye.) Ahhhh, Hawkeye. What a character! What lines! Then I noticed that another reason the show never feels "dated" is because everyone is in military garb, which always stays in style because it hardly ever changes.

Having been baptized in all things M*A*S*H* for well over a week, I decided to explore what Wikapedia had to say about the show, along with some details of the actors who for eleven years filled the screen with an olive-drab world filled with audible laughter. I was stunned by what I saw: Col. Blake and Major Burns are dead...and have been for years. Hot Lips is 7o; Hawkeye, 72. But I had been corresponding with their young versions for well for over a week and could not immediately bring myself up to date with their very real agedness. The emotion I was experiencing was something akin to sand falling from my fingers, or time running out in a race. How did these people get so old so fast?

Late last night, with a reluctant and somehow foreign pit in my gut, I went back to the remaining four unwatched episodes. Every wry Hawkeye grin had a twinge of sorrow in it. Every endearing Burns-Hoolihan love moment possessed the campy cuteness of

a "first kiss" by two ten-year-olds. All at once, the actors had become the playful shadows flitting about the playground...and with the early evening overcast, gone.

In 1983, what was left of the M*A*S*H troupe marched out of the 4077th and onto other dreams, obligations, other sitcoms, cinema, theater, and the rest of their lives. For those of theoriginal cast who remained on the series from beginning to end, their tour of duty had been nearly four times as long as the real Korean Conflict. Did the show really last eleven years? I am sure that time went fast for

all involved.

For me, time shows its passing in the subtlest of ways: In an old song heard while driving on the highway on a random Tuesday morning, 3am. A child's accidental grown-up facial expression, there and gone in a trick of the light. Or maybe the shape of the moon swimming in a sea of clouds in a late autumn midnight. Usually, these moments, cathartic as they are, can be all but forgotten within a space of hours...leaving me free to feel unconvicted, not guilty, and still safely young. Not so with this last one from old snapshots of the 4077th. What can I really say? That I'll never see M*A*S*H* again without it creating a paradoxical sense of urgency? Maybe. Maybe not. I can hope for as much.