NON-FICTION | A CAUTIONARY TALE |
We Watched as Lawrence, Kansas Was Reduced to a Nuclear Wasteland
Was art imitating life — or would/will life soon be imitating art?
What were you doing on the evening of November 20, 1983?
The chances are good that if you were old enough for your parents to let you — probably ten-years-old, or so — yours would have been one of the hundred million pairs of eyeballs glued to the TV screen that evening, just four days shy of Thanksgiving.
Or, if you were under that age, you may have been shooed off to your room by your folks, heeding the warning that movie actor, John Callum, delivered the day before. He advised that young children should probably not watch it, and parents should be ready to field questions raised by their older kids who did watch it.
I’m referring to the made for television two-hour extravaganza called, The Day After.
You might wonder how a movie could be so important that ABC would preempt the hugely successful series, Hardcastle and McCormick, to open up a two-hour block of time for it?
Not since the series finale of M*A*S*H would a single block of time command such hypnotic power over the TV watching population. The ever-popular…
