PUNCHING THROUGH

Bert Parks (remember him singing "Maggie's Farm" in the Brando film, The Freshman? Pure gold.) hosted many a TV game show in the '50s. One was called "Beat the Bank." A daily feature of this primitive show was a muscular man whose task it was to punch himself out of a paper bag. The bag of course was body-bag sized and the contestant slithered into it as it lay on the studio floor. The objective seemed within any human's reach. Punch your way out. In 60 seconds.

No one ever succeeded. The bag would jerk to the side as each blow was thrown like the second-hand of a digital clock, but was too well constructed to be penetrated by the human fist. Paper composition and the laws of physics conspired against the doomed muscleman, who you would guess operated a jack hammer when not making a fool of himself on national TV.

Surprisingly, no simple Houdiniesque aid was ever employed. (A sliver of concealed razor blade would have been sufficient to win the $100 reward, but this was after the $64,000 question scandal and besides who isn't man enough to conquer a brown paper bag?)

Whoever came up with this quasi-Sysyphian labor almost certainly was not out to create a metaphor for human frustration. But after some forty years, the spectacle still lingers. Do we all ooze from the womb into a brown paper bag from which entropy is the only escape? Or is the womb itself a brown paper bag from which we must be forcibly expelled? Both could be true.

How many of us spend our 60 seconds of life punching fruitlessly at a thin membrane that separates us from the light? Can one even train for such an undertaking?

Superheros could do it, but that's precisely the point of superheroes, isn't it? Overcoming reality. The laws of the natural world. Perhaps the laws of the spiritual world as well. Did Superman every pray? Did he ever need to? Maybe he was on speaking terms with the Almighty. Maybe the Almighty is irrelevant in a Superman-graced universe.

Most of us remember Bert Parks as the unctious tuxedo-clad belter of the climactic "Here She Comes. Miss America." Younger folk may know him as the entertainer at the Kimodo Dragon banquet in "The Freshman." For me, he'll always be the guy who consoled the losing bag-puncher with a variation of the line: "I thought you almost had it. You came awfully close."