Picture of Lance Loud courtesy FindaGrave.com
I was blithely watching “Royal Wedding” the Saturday night before Easter on Channel 13, PBS—one of those vintage movies where the cast (Fred Astaire, Jane Powell, and the ever-tasty Peter Lawford) make the drivelly content worthwhile, when, at the end of it, Neal Shapiro, president of 13 made an amazing announcement: It was going to air the entire run of “An American Family,” all 12 episodes of it, that night. This had not been done in 20 years, and I somehow vaguely remembered that happening: just watching it with my jaw dropping in sheer astonishment. I’m not sure if they did it as a one-gulp marathon back then, but here it was: an entire night of the Pat and Bill Loud Show, with of course their five children in tow, the most unforgettable one being their eldest Lance.
So, although my eyelids were getting very heavy, I watched until the screen went blank, or I did, and had to go to sleep. It was like Proust’s dipping the madeleine into the lime-flower tea, a total recall of a time that is so far back as to seem fictional, and yet so utterly delectable in its youthful perfection (as well as imperfections) that all I could think of was: God, now a whole new generation of kids will want to dive headfirst into an Early Seventies revival: the wonderful, body-fitting clothes, the music, the attitudes, the flowery smell and feeling of it. And at the center of it, glowed Lance and his mother Pat, with a relationship that was so Oedipal, so Hamlet-and-Gertrude, that it shocked the living crap out of mainstream America (and even blasé New York) when it was first aired on PBS in 1973.
