I own three Bill Cosby albums on cassette: The Best of Bill Cosby, Himself, and Those of You With or Without Children, You’ll Understand.
The Best of Bill Cosby has great stuff, like all of the Fat Albert material before there was a Fat Albert show. Himself is amazing, but it’s cut down from the film, and plus there are so many great faces he makes that you obviously can’t see listening to a cassette. Those of You… was good too, but it was my least favorite of what I owned.
I know about where they are. I mean, I know they’re in the house, in one of three or four places. I’m certain they’re stored fully rewound, vertically, and in a dark and climate-controlled place.
And when I see them again, I’ll just throw them away. I don’t ever want to hear them again.
Yes, I wrote Making Peace with Cliff Huxtable at Rocket City Mom, but that was more about the betrayal we all felt, and feel, and how to deal with it. It was about how to break off what gave us those wonderful feelings, and separate them from the man. The message is good, even if the messenger is flawed.
But I didn’t say “go watch The Cosby Show,” did I?
I don’t care to consume Bill Cosby anymore. Given all that now seems highly plausible—or even likely—I don’t want to think about what he might have done before he took the stage for Himself, or after he shared, several years before I was born, about Fat Albert and Old Weird Harold and Junior Barnes.
I don’t want to consider the drug-enhanced manipulation then, or the apparent lack of repentance now.
He was one of the top four or five key pop culture figures who shaped my childhood and adolescence.
But now, he’s deleted.
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I completely understand. I never watched any of his comedy routines – I saw a part of one once when I was about 19 years old, and thought it was trashy. But I did grow up watching Fat Albert & The Cosby Show. Heartbreaking that those memories are now tainted.
Wow, he didn’t do a lot of off-color stuff even when he was young. You probably got a warped impression of his material. But, no matter now.