Watching the PBS show featuring Bonnie

In the Me and Mine section of Bonnie's Radical Mother page one of the things she says is "You may have seen me and mine on 'Life On The Internet' the Discovery Channel/PBS show. We were the homeschoolers featured in the education installment." And alongside is this small picture from the show, featuring Bonnie with her two youngest children Jackson and Coleman.

On July 26 we had a home-ed party at our house, and one of the things we did to remember Bonnie was to watch this show. I had ordered a copy of the tape from PBS, and Grace Sylvan was kind enough to bring a TV and VCR so we could watch it. The following is what I posted two days afterwards in response to a question about the show:

I watched it three times with various people. The first time I was really choked up about "Oh Bonnie!" and "Oh what beautiful children!" The second time I was thinking things over, like "now I know how to pronounce 'Sooke'." For the third time, having by that point given up all hope of finding my Pogues and Who tapes (arrgh ... turns out they were in the car!!!), I put on my Zappa compilation CD to add to the soundtrack, and was just entranced -- there is Bonnie in her homey kitchen looking and sounding happy and relaxed and interested and confident and experienced and knowledgeable and so on. There is Bonnie laughing and looking mischievous -- not for long, because it's not that kind of show, but definitely enough for picturing her cracking jokes like crazy if she were sitting there watching it with us.

Bonnie was right there up close -- whenever she was onscreen talking she basically filled the screen from the waist up -- and not having a TV I'm not used to seeing this kind of thing any more, so sitting on the floor myself right in front of Grace's (thank you Grace!) big TV, it was so tempting to want to feel that I was just right there sitting in Bonnie's kitchen while she was talking to someone else. Because that kitchen is where we all really were, virtually -- Bonnie's computer was in the kitchen, so all the time they lived in that house, when Bonnie read our words and wrote to us that was where she was.

Then last night I brought up Bonnie's Radical Mother page to see if there had been any changes (nope). I'd looked at it many times since Bonnie died, so by that time I'd gotten very used to the conflicting ideas (now I'm starting to think of Sarah Lawrence's definition of "coercion") of knowing that Bonnie was dead, but having her page obviously make it seem like she was still right there able to read and answer mail as always. However, now that I had seen that show, it just struck me hard all over again, because unexpectedly it was like in my mind I now saw/heard Bonnie sitting at her computer saying each word out loud as I read through the page.

I'm still trying to reconcile Bonnie's TV voice with the more sly and intimate one I've had in my head all this time, but I wouldn't expect anyone to sound the same on and off TV anyway. :-)

After the things Bonnie had said about the PBS show, I was expecting to hear/see a lot of "um ... er ... um", but it really wasn't like that -- again, Bonnie sounded very relaxed and on top of things. Grace said that the person who'd done the transcript had messed up -- that she'd read the transcript online earlier and it was the transcript that had a lot of the um ... er put in. Not an "eh" to be heard either ... no wonder Bonnie wouldn't give me her number when I asked to call and hear her say that.

It was fun to see Coleman burst out with "Dyno-mite!" while using a dinosaur program, Bonnie laugh, and my Sam laugh too.

You know, I just went to the PBS site to see if I could find the transcript to see what it said for that part, and on their Life on the Internet: Cyber Students page I found this message:

(* Regretfully, Bonnie Bedford passed away on July
11, 1997 after a long battle with cancer. Bonnie has
affected positive change for thousands of adults and
children through her internet connections, both in
email and from her homepage. Her spirit and influence
is kept alive through her Web site.)

BTW, click here for a Spanish version of the PBS Life on the Internet page featuring Bonnie.

I still haven't found the transcript ... PBS's search feature really stinks. And if I click on old links to it from search engines or try typing in likely locations myself I just get their "Whoops! The file you requested is not available." page.

Here's an exchange I had with Bonnie in April of 96 on the home-ed mailing list:

> I'm tempted to do some frame grabs from that PBS show so I can
> better cater to the large demand for incriminating pictures of you
> with various film and recording stars in minivans ...

That is low. That is so low. That is really stinking rotten low down low.
How do you come up with such ideas?

> oops, there I go
> forgetting again that I'm one of those really self-righteous people
> who doesn't have any kind of TV equipment, damn ...

Oh, well then I can relax.

Bonnie (so relaxed I'm drooling)

So I was thinking again, gee, I should get some video-capture thing and camcorder/player to put on my computer and make a huge .avi file so everyone can see Bonnie smiling and laughing, and Sam can write screenplays and film people acting them out, and so on, but if you saw either the tiny size of my crappy old monitor or the huge size of my credit-card bills or all the computer junk I've bought recently already, you'd just be laughing at me. (You're probably already rolling your eyes at all the run-on sentences in this letter.)

I could just go on and on about all this ...