Mare Tranquilitatis
…might well have been my favorite episode of the twelve-part miniseries, From the Earth to the Moon, if Buzz had been the first human to hop out of the LEM saying,
“One baby step for a man. One giant step for you, Alice, baby!”,
thereby making good, once and for all time, on Ralph Kramden’s metaphorical, tag-line promise to punch his ornery, tough-minded and independent wife in the kisser, as was his theoretical right in the 1950s, sending her to the moon.
“One of these days, Alice! Bang! Zoom! One of these days!”, said the uncancelled baby-man who would have been thrown under his own bus after the turn of Our century, and if that century was ours, you gotta wonder who the hell we were, are and will be now that we no longer stand for UCLA’s colors, nor Ukraine’s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98qw86DsdZ0
Maybe that little rewrite would have rippled backward in time to correct JFK’s inexplicable mispronunciation of the word “decade”, steeled the national will to thoroughly rape the moon for the past fifty years, and spread our human infestation throughout the solar system, and perhaps even beyond it to infinity and so on, Buzz.
But. No-o. Neil Armstrong hopped out first and delivered that other two-step homily that didn’t drop the other shoe that was so perfectly installed (like a Manhattan Project gadget) by the beloved The Honeymooners television show that warmed American cockles starting in 1955-56 and could have made it Our moon briefly, until international syndication democratized the allusion for the rest of the world, but, however briefly, the moon was ours, the domesticated moon might have led directly to visions of connubial bliss in microgravity, and extraterrestrial sex vacations, visions left unrealized for several decades by prudish remiss and a very few words of revised connective tissue. Alas. It’s probably just as well. I’ll have to stick with episode 5, Spider. Even less sex, if that’s possible, but one of my favorite “everyman” actors, Matt Craven, shines throughout that hour and the entire d’Cade.
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That was pretty easy!
Go figure.