"The Good Fight" is good for our cat

“The Good Fight”

My wife and I and our cat Zorro just began streaming "The Good Fight" on CBS. Our cat doesn't have much to say in the matter, though he seems to approve by sleeping between us while we watch. All he knows is that there is no whistling — whistling being the universal cat signal meaning there's a dog loose somewhere. We've watched a lot of shows with whistling lately. So, while he sleeps, we laugh.

"The Good Fight" is not technically a comedy. Still, every episode seems to have something in it that makes us laugh out loud: a visually constructed incongruity (two people in Trump masks having sex in the window of a skyscraper); Diane Lockhart's (Christine Baranski) face during a #metoo episode when a much younger woman tells her character "you're a second-wave feminist," get out of the way, you deserve a rest; the TV news parroting the latest Tweets from Trump (or are they?) which make Baranski's character react "did I just hear that?"; or a Trump-appointed judge who can't figure out how to zip up his robe (or has food in his mouth when he shouldn't). As for the Trump-appointed judge, Baranski’s character confuses him by pointing out the law. 

The show isn't for everyone. But this is one Hollywood show that doesn't argue "we're not prejudiced" because it bathes in being just that. It's a show for the resistance.

On the other hand, it's also smart about identity politics, harassment issues, ICE tactics, racial stereotypes, Democrats being no different than Republicans when it comes to winning, and non-disclosure statements used by almost everyone these days. The framework seems to be our reality, where few people agree on how to solve anything even if they're on the same side. 

The core ensemble includes Baranski, Delroy Lindo (Get Shorty, Malcolm X), Michael Boatman, Cush Jumbo, Audra McDonald (Fresnophiles make a note), Nyambi Nyambi, Sarah Steele and Rose Leslie (Downton Abbey fans make a note). What makes the show fun for a geezer such as myself are all the "where-are-they-now" actors rolling through each episode. They include Bernadette Peters, John Larroquette, Tim Matheson (Animal House), Alan Alda, Rob Reiner, Louis Gossett Jr., Andrea Martin (SCTV), and Jane Curtain. Many others require a glance at IMBd or Google to figure out why their faces are so familiar.

Zorro’s publicity portrait.

I was a fan of "The Good Wife." Many of the same characters return. After all, it is Chicago, and it is about lawyers. My lawyer friend says the "lawyering" part of "The Good Wife" was good for a TV show. In "The Good Fight," the same writers and producers picked up where "The Good Wife" left off. Unfortunately, the description in IMBd makes this show sound awful: "When Diane Lockhart's life savings are lost, she must start from scratch at a new firm." I guess that's true, but it's like describing your own life like this: "When (your name here) discovers there's no more milk, (your name here) goes to the store." 

For the most part, the show also seems to hold up to the modern bane of entertainment, Google. For me, it passes the "that didn't happen, did it?" test.

I know many of you will hate this show for its politics. But it's why we like it. And Zorro seems to like it, too, if only because it passes his "not fond of whistling" test and he can get some rest after a long walk from his food bowl or the last place he slept. 

No bed required.

Privilege in the hills

I have never been arrested. But I was given the benefit of the doubt once when I didn't know any better.

In 1972, my life was photography, ping-pong, travel, and being clueless. I was about to graduate from high school, go on a three-month backpacking trip to Europe and then head off to U.C. Davis to become a food scientist, whatever that meant.

Hardly working

Using a squeegee

To make money for the trip, I worked three summers and countless Saturdays for a janitorial company in Pasadena, on Lincoln Blvd. It's where I learned how to clean windows with a squeegee, hang and clean Venetian blinds, how to break down boxes for the pickup (they did recycle paper back then), and how to pack a van so that the stuff in the back wouldn't crush me if I had to stop suddenly. All lessons I use to this day.

By my third summer, the boss trusted me to work a few night shifts by myself at the San Marino public library cleaning toilets, sweeping, vacuuming, and making a note of the ballast's going wrong in the overhead fluorescent lighting. My boss came by one night to check up on me. It never occurred to me to open a book. NOT BUSTED! Remember? Clueless.

The job gave me insight into how super-rich "others" manifested their passions. We worked in one Mediterranean-style mansion in San Marino that had a pipe organ. The keyboard was in the living room while the bellows and mechanics took up the basement. The larger pipes came up into the walls at one end of the living room, where hinged baffles adjusted the volume. I guess pipe organs either are loud or they're not. "We" were there to help take it apart and dust it, prepping it for a repair that was to be handled by an expert. I was there to clean the bathrooms.

Another job took us to Beverly Hills to clean and tidy up a modern ranch-style house situated on a hillside. It had a ballroom with a parquet floor and a bandstand. At one end was a two-story tall glass window that overlooked the smog hanging over the city of Los Angeles. I'm sure the nighttime views were terrific, though. I vacuumed what felt like a mile-long hallway while the others disappeared into various rooms in the house. The place belonged to Diana Ross. She wasn't home.

The rest of the year, I was a high school kid. When I wasn't at school, I lived in the pool, Middle Earth, or my bedroom. I lettered in swimming a couple of times. I was the only senior on the swim team who was not also on the water polo team.

The Mighty Mustang swim team with Walt Culbertson as coach, clothed.

Swimming can be the most boring thing ever. I persevered and even spent my summer vacations swimming for a club team that used the pool at CalTech. I enjoyed competing against myself. By that, I mean, I was never really very good, but I kept getting better. By the time I hung up my Speedos, I could have qualified for a spot on the 1924 U.S. Olympic team.

All this points to me being a loner. And I liked it that way. Outside of activities such as scouts, lunch, and swimming, only a few people beyond my family were allowed into my inner sanctum. They were both named Steve.

One I had known since Miss Maguire's first-grade class at Altadena Elementary, the other I ate lunch with almost every day in high school. My grammar school friend Steve eventually moved to the other side of town with his family. He ended up going to Pasadena High School.

My friend Steve from grammar school visiting the Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna, Austria.

While we were together in scouts, we drifted apart as kids do. Still, he was going to be my travel partner in Europe because our parents stayed in touch. He was interested in girls, surfing, and (looking back on it) reefer. I was into science, Life magazine, and practicing my photography.

My other friend Steve and I ate lunch almost every day with the same group of friends on a grassy mound in the quad of John Muir High School. I don't remember how we met. It was just kind of organic. He and I tended to like the same things. Ping-pong and science topped the list. Our lunch-time pals were smart and funny and active in school activities, including student government.

Nixon was president, Vietnam was still a possibility for us, and table-tennis was the rage. Steve would come over to my house to play ping-pong. The table was under a low-slung pergola held up by a wooden post. As good as we were playing against each other, we could never master what we saw the Chinese do on TV. Our knuckles couldn't take it because of the low ceiling and the post. Those hazards forced us to play like Bobby Riggs against Billie Jean King. Our nasty backspins were so aggressive we could land the ball on the opponent's side of the table and watch it bounce back over the net toward us.

Steve and his family invited me over for New Years once. It was the first time I had Japanese food or sushi. It was a special day.

He never ate at my house. But then, no one else did either. My mother assumed my friends were slobs and wouldn't have it. She always referenced my 10th birthday party to prove it. Someone wiped their chocolaty hands on her curtains.

Steve and I shared a physics class that gave us access to an oscilloscope and a ruby laser. And by access, I mean the teacher let us take the equipment home. I wonder why the chemistry teacher didn't do the same. Maybe the answer was, "Kaboom!"

We designed our experiments to prove or disprove what we had read about in the news. Three stories intrigued us:

1) A Life Magazine or National Geographic story described making three-dimensional images on a glass plate using a ruby laser – holograms.

2) A lie detector connected to a plant that ID'd a murder suspect in solving a murder.

3) How laser light sent from Earth bounced off a mirror on the moon that could be seen on Earth. In theory, if you could stand in the middle of the shaft of light on the moon, you could see where it came from on Earth.

Magnifying glass and chess pieces bathed in ruby laser light.

We started with holograms. We made them in the basement of my house. It's a long story, but you needed a cellar. I still have the plates that show a magnifying glass focused on a chess piece. The piece is upside down and enlarged in the glass. If you were to tilt the plate slightly, you could see behind the magnifying glass, and the standard size chess piece turned right-side up. Steve invited a girlfriend over to watch us work. I'm not sure how impressed she was with the laser setup. She seemed to be more interested in Steve. I think we put her to sleep.

Oscilloscope and plant witness.

In another experiment, we tried to recreate the conditions under which a plant could identify emotions — the murder story. We used an oscilloscope instead of a lie detector. Steve hooked it up to a rubber plant in his house. We yelled at the poor plant. Steve ate yogurt in front of it. We might have killed an apple. Nothing.

Nothing that is, until Steve's girlfriend showed up. She was more than excited because she had received an acceptance letter from UCLA. She came by to tell Steve because he was to go there, too.

She didn't know about the experiment, but Steve and I looked at the oscilloscope as the squiggle on its screen was going nuts. I think Steve was excited about her news, but I couldn't tell. We just proved plants recognized human emotions!

A room with a view over the Rose Bowl. The laser in on the ladder.

The last experiment involved pointing the laser out from a window at my house toward the Rose Bowl. It was this experiment that gave us our first experience with the cops.

We planned to turn it on, point the monochromatic red light at a road just above the stadium lights, and drive over and measure the width of the beam. I had never been in that neighborhood, one of the richest in Pasadena – Linda Vista. If I had to guess, the road we chose was Linda Glenn Drive, about 5 miles from my house. In 1972, there were a few houses there, but it was mostly empty lots and new constructions.

We grabbed my camera equipment, hopped into my family's VW camper van, and headed to Linda Vista. I think I told my parents where we were going, but I'm sure all they heard was "laser" for the hundred thousandth time.

VW camper vans weren't exactly known as stealth vehicles in those days. I can still recognize the clatter of an underpowered VW engine as it tries to push a metal shoebox down the freeway. The clattering of that engine driving that same box up a hill brought out the neighbors.

Before the internet, these neighbors were probably avid readers of The Pasadena Star-News. My English teacher Mr. Hoyt pointed out that the Pasadena Star-News liked using the phrase "roving bands of..." followed by the boogie-man of the day: "drug-crazed hippies," "negro youth" or "child ballot thieves."

Steve and I, I guess, fell into the "drug-crazed hippy" category only because we were prowling the neighborhood in a VW van with "That's all Volks" painted over the head of Porky Pig on the front tire cover.

The problem with laser light is that its beam is very focused, which is why NASA could point it at the moon and know where to place its mirrors. Over a short distance, it was a bit more tricky. There was little margin for error. If we pointed the laser too high or too low off the road, we wouldn't be able to see it, and our experiment would be a bust. So, we drove up and down Linda Glenn Drive while staring off toward Altadena, the VW in first or second gear just creeping.

Then bingo! We saw it — a brilliant pinpoint of red light just above the stadium lights of the Rose Bowl. We got out of the van and stared off into the distance, and then walked up and down the street to measure the width of the beam.

Red glow of a laser light throws a shadow of a telescope and my body onto the family VW camper.

It was at this point that a Pasadena police cruiser pulled up.

I can't remember the exact conversation we had with the two officers who approached us, because it was just that.

"What are you two doing?"

"Looking for a laser."

Looking toward Altadena from Loma Linda, 1972.

"A what?"

"The light of a laser."

"We got a call. "

By now, one cop had walked up to the van. We pointed, "Look!" He turned toward the Rose Bowl and Altadena.

"What am I looking at?"

"That red light on the hillside. That's the laser."

At some point, we probably babbled about lasers, the moon, our experiment, our high school, JPL (in two-part harmony like Alison's Restaurant). In short, we were putting him and his partner to sleep.

He told us to finish what we were doing and to get out of there.

I took some pictures. We measured the beam. And we left.

While we may have been hippyish, neither of us were black. I can't speak for Steve, but while I was probably surprised by the cops' visit, I never believed it would turn out any different.

That's privilege. I was 17.

You could hear him coming

My brother Kevin would have been 65 May 19.

He probably would have celebrated it like he did any other birthday: In Vegas, hanging with friends, drinking with his friends, blowing things up with friends, and talking trash about his friends, women, parents, me, sports, video games, etc.

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Kevin Funk, born May 1955.

To many, he had a charismatic personality. I never understood it because I was his older brother by 15 months and always seemed to be just outside his wave of influence unless he needed another glass of instant iced tea or more paper or ink for the mimeograph machine. We later switched to dittos.

He died in September 2004 of a stroke, technically. But he lived most of his life with complications of muscular dystrophy and scoliosis.

He lived with my parents his entire life. It was a situation he resented and yet accepted. My parents took their responsibility seriously and provided him with a home, meals, an office, physical therapy, surgeries, a van with a wheelchair lift, and a "ceiling crane" that lifted him from his wheelchair or bed to the bathroom.

They seemed to afford him every bit of independence they could while he lived in their home. The three of them preferred it that way.

Before he entered grammar school, he wore braces on his legs like the ones Forrest Gump wore as a kid. Which meant he could never sneak up on you.

As a teenager, he walked with a single crutch. He was too bent over to use two. It had a noise of its own. Eventually, he settled on motorized transportation.

Until I left home for college, he and I played or worked a lot with each other. As it turned out, our play became our livelihoods.

The staff of Wacky included, left to right, Bob Tajima, Gary Funk, Kevin Funk, and Steve Cline.

Kevin started a monthly humor magazine called Wacky Magazine when he was 13. A few of his friends and myself made up the staff. I was as much tech support as anything. Someone had to take care of the ditto fluid and crank the machine. We had 35 paying subscribers. MAD was trembling.

Wacky entered a "float" in Altadena's Old Fashioned Days Parade. We used our '68 VW Westfalia camper van. Kevin drew a mural, and we taped it to its side. He rode. I drove.

My brother used acrylic paint to depict Porky Pig waving with the salutation "That's All, Volks!". It should be hanging in a museum. I never saw another one like it.

When I left for college, my dad took over the printing and mailing of Wacky. But eventually, the magazine gave way to higher education.

By the time Kevin went to the University of Colorado Boulevard, a euphemism for Pasadena City College, he was already in a wheelchair most of the day. He later took art classes at Long Beach State, my mother wheeling him to his classes. His artistic schooling ended with a few classes at Pasadena Art Center. My mom would drop him off, and one of his classmates would help him get around.

During this time, he was drawing cartoons and getting paid for some of them. Many ran in a Los Angeles business magazine, and some found their way into a few Pasadena publications. Unfortunately, he didn't keep any clips. He did keep the originals.

What do you mean, “You didn’t know it was loaded?”

Do you serve crabs here?

I told you to another pen number when writing an exposé.

Of course, if you can convince the public that the company is above bribery and payoffs, there'll be a little "something" extra in your next paycheck.

The organic food platter is the same as the hash; only I don't pick the flies off it.

Waiting long?

He created a few menus for restaurants and worked on a couple of annual report publications for my dad's company.

He sold light bulbs over the phone. He hated that job because it identified him as having a handicap. And if that was a problem, it was more your problem than his.

More often than not, you saw that side of him if you went to lunch or dinner with him. A server would begin taking our orders and then say, "What do you think he'd like?" We all knew the routine. There would be a pause as the server explored our faces for an answer. Kevin would say loud enough for the next table to hear, "He'd like a steak, medium-rare, a baked potato, and a Jack straight up. And, an iced tea with a straw!"

In his 20s, he moved to Philadelphia with my parents and became a thorn in the side of the Bryn Mawr city council. He wanted the Playboy Channel on his cable TV and wheelchair access to civic buildings. Neither existed at the time in Bryn Mawr. They did before he came home to California.

The receptionist for his first Pennsylvania doctor's appointment had to meet him on the sidewalk because Kevin couldn't get into the building. She asked him, "What happened to you? Get hit by a truck?" He never met the doctor. He told my mom, "Get me the hell away from here."

Back in California, he sold model rockets over the internet under the name "Discount Rocketry, Buy Low, Fly High." It's still in business: https://www.discountrocketry.com and little has changed. He sold to hobbyists and schools.

He produced a magazine for the San Diego rocket club DART (Diego Area Rocket Team). It was an acronym looking for a meaning. Not his idea, but that put him contact with all kinds of people in the (San) Diego area including miliatry personnel.

The rocketeer

In Bryn Mawr, PA.

He built rockets. He attended rocket launches at Fiesta Island at Mission Bay, where he sold his wares and launched a few missiles. The more spectacular events took place at Lake Lucerne, Calif, just east of Barstow. It's the place made famous recently when "Mad" Mike Hughes died trying to prove the world is flat. My son and I would travel with Kevin.

Moapa Paiute Travel Plaza, North of Las Vegas on I-15.

When Kevin wasn't planning a launch, he was planning an explosion. He loved fireworks and was always looking for a safe place to blow them up.

His favorite was 40 minutes north of Las Vegas at the Moapa Paiute Travel Plaza, where I-15 meets The Valley of Fire Highway. I don't know how he found these places, but I am glad he did.

On more than one occasion, we visited the plaza with my son Alex or later with my stepson Stephan. Back in the 90s, the building was the size of a suburban grocery store. The only difference is that it sold mostly fireworks (the insane kind), alcohol, and tobacco.

Kevin would buy the fireworks he wanted to see. We'd go outside to one of several launch pads near the building and proceed to launch rockets, mortars, and strings of 500 to 1000 firecrackers. We'd launch till there was no more to launch.

On the 4th fo July, he would bring his arsenal to Bakersfield.

Alex Funk watches from on top of The Gladiator as his uncle Kevin sells model rocket parts to club members.

I'm not sure what his politics were. We rarely talked about it. If I had to guess, he was a contrarian. If you loved Ronald Reagan, he'd have 100 reasons why you shouldn't. If you hated Ronald Reagan, he'd have another 100 reasons why you should love him. Around women, he would make it clear he hated Oprah Winfrey. Around men, you weren't so sure.

I think he just liked to piss people off. It was entertainment. Maybe he thought it was funny. He probably meant the offense.

As for my relationship with him, it never seemed to change. I was his older brother. I don't recall being mad at him or having a knockdown argument like brothers do in the movies.

Maybe it's because I always heard him coming.

Kevin on the road in Pennsylvania in the early 1980s.