"Hi...I'm Robert Osborne"

Admit it....you thought I was dead.
If in fact, you actually even read this...

Not going to apologize, or offer any excuses....

It's been awhile since I felt like I had anything to say....to offer humanity...if you will.

Maturity seems to bring out many things, different kinds of aches and pains where you stop and think 'wait a minute, when did THAT start being painful', an increased reverence for soft rock, and lately the march of time has made it seem that everyone familiar in pop culture is dead or will be soon.

For the most part I can't say I was surprised to see an early death for George Michael or Carrie Fisher, they seemed to live their lives with an appetite for self-destruction. I felt twinges of  remorse over seeing Debbie Reynolds and Mary Tyler Moore pass away. Last week though was the hardest for me. It was personal.

Last week, Robert Osborne passed away.

Robert Osborne was the genial, mellifluous-voiced host for Turner Classic Movies for over 20 years. For most of those 20 years, I was one of his most ardent fans. Probably not the most devout or zealous; I never wrote him a letter, or sent him a knitted sweater. For some reason that I've never really questioned, Robert was part of my life, like a favorite uncle who just happened to be the most well-informed movie fan on the planet. No really, he was...he wrote the definitive guide to old movies, "85 Years of Oscar, the Official History of the Academy Awards".

Bout of illness or surgery, Robert was there for me, broken-heart, Robert was there for me, a period of unemployment, Robert was there for me. With a kindly smile and a story about the movie I was about to see was my class film professor. Sometimes it felt like he was personally there watching it with me.

Some years ago, back in about 1988 when my grandma became ill and moved back to Ohio, while helping my mother go through her possessions in her Florida summer home, I came across old movie magazines, Photoplays, etc. They mesmerized me, the old advertisements, the pictures of the movies stars. I paged through and looked at them until the pages literally came apart in my hands. Yes, I realize if I'd been more careful, I could have probably unloaded them for some serious coin on Ebay. If I'd done so though, I'd never have had the experience of falling in love with Gable, Grant, Niven and Powell long before I'd ever seen one of their movies. I cut their pictures out, made collages and plastered my bedroom walls with them. Out when the Julian Lennon, the Wham posters and the Duran Duran; I was infatuated with these debonair leading men who had died before I was born.

About that time our cable company began carrying American Movie Classics (AMC), the place you now know as the home of the Walking Dead, and Mad Men actually used to have classic films all  day (and the world was better for it) introduced by Bob Dorian and Nick Clooney. Finally a chance to see some of my heartthrobs for real. So when the fledgling Turner Classic Movies (TCM) was announced in 1994, I was excited. Unfortunately, it would be another 5 years until the network actually made its way from a premium HBO-like pay channel to a basic cable offering where I could actually watch. Even then I was skeptical about this Robert Osborne, whoever he was. Nick Clooney and Bob Dorian were my guys.

Then I saw my first Robert Osborne intro and it was as if he'd always been there, that I'd always known him. Whenever I had free time or was sick, when it was Christmas, or Easter, Robert and TCM always had the programming I tuned in for. To this day, "Libeled Lady" is one of my favorite comedies because Bob said I needed to see it. Through Mr. Osborne, I learned to appreciate acting as it should be, how a movie can make you see life differently, it's power to pick you up when you are down, to inspire, to make you laugh, to make you cry.  I think in this day of 24 hour news and social media, of constantly revolving reality shows, people crave stories about a less complicated age and less 'reality' which is why TCM keeps gaining fans (younger and younger) and ratings. Without a powerhouse like Robert Osborne to helm it, I don't know if TCM would have ever gotten a chance.

Just the other weekend, I went to our local art movie house (back in the days before TCM and it's efforts on film preservation, we never even had a local art movie house and now it's planning to expand) to see a showing of "It Happened One Night" with Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, a movie that came out in 1934, before my parents were born, an 83 year old movie. The reaction amazing; to see the laughter and seen the joy on the faces of people who were connecting to this Academy-Award winning film directed on a shoe-string budget with Gable on loan from his home studio and Colbert who had to be persuaded to put off her summer vacation to film it. The first person I thought of was Robert Osborne, "I bet he would have loved something like this"

As I was leaving the theatre, two guys walking behind me who couldn't have been more than 18-22 years old were saying, "Dude, that was really good. I wasn't going to see this, but...man I'm glad I did".  I beamed. It seemed that life, that mankind felt better to me.

I had a similar reaction two years earlier checking my Twitter TCM feeds while waiting on my car to get tires, my favorite actor William Powell was actually trending. I marveled for a moment, 'I wonder what Powell would think?' When he died in 1984, no one had even dreamed of social media and here he is being searched, where he was born, who he loved. They tweet that they find him handsome, funny and name drop the movies he's been in.

If not for Robert Osborne, I wonder if it would ever have happened?

My DVR is full of TCM movies, many of which I already own on DVD or Blu-Ray, and I keep them not for the movies, but for Robert's introductions. They can't be replaced. It'll be a while until I can let them go.

When I learned that he'd passed away, via social media...I texted my Mom,

"Robert Osborne died. Absolutely heartbroken..."

It wasn't nearly enough to sum up the way I felt about him...not nearly enough. I find comfort in the fact that there are many others who like me, today...grieve.