Do Donuts Have Holes?

Gene Cox in our lifetime

Gene Cox. He's an anchorman, a veteran anchorman who's been the main man over on Channel 12 in Richmond for as long as I can remember. I never thought much about him, other than to notice that at least he could read a teleprompter, more than one could say for his partner, the vaguely desperate-sounding Sabrina Squire.

The expression on Gene's face is neutral with a capital 'N'. He's put a lot of work into it. Not reconstructive work, nothing so trashy as that; he'd never go for that. But he's an anchorman, so really, all he has are his face and his voice. Sight and sound. He's got to look and sound like he knows what he's doing, knew what was going to happen and already formed an opinion about it but isn't going to tell us what it is (even though we all really want to know what he thinks because he's "people," like us).

He usually did. But for a while he did a little bit more. Late in the newscast, he would stop the show and offer a couple of small thoughts about something that had struck him as worth mentioning. I thought at the time that they were twaddle. I could never get over his even tones of resignation, of little hope. Really, what I wanted were the R-Braves scores. Finally, he stopped doing these segments, and I assumed he stopped because he realized he looked foolish.

About a month ago, Grip's publisher handed me a book of Gene Cox' Glazed Donuts (a book of "Afterthoughts") with a look of giddy confusion. "I got about six of these things. You'll love it. It makes no sense whatsoever." The fact that a book had been sold, compiling these things. . . sounded like a challenge.

And so, late in the evening, while I tried to pound out another non-sequitur for my column ("BoSox Nip Nix Talk With Pixie Stix, Vaughn: 'It's a languor thing.'"), I repaired to Grip's fabulous smoking lounge to take a crack at Gene Cox's Glazed Donuts.

"I talked to a lot of kids last night. Not yours, of course. I think it was the kids down the street." ("School Closings," originally aired 1/18/94). What?

"Occasionally, there is a new candy in the machine. We're a test market, you know. But wafers, sugar and soybeans don't make the cut." ("Chocolate," originally aired 7/29/92) What the hell is this, Don?

"The GARDEN WEASEL has a one hundred percent lifetime guarantee, which is good, because most things with moving parts don't last that long." ("Weasel," originally aired 5/593) I'm outta here.

These were all out of left field. I wasn't ready for this. I hadn't been told there was just stuff like this. It was just stuff. No nothing. Stuff. One of those random broadcasts from a easily-mocked backwater in the pop-cultural geography.

I picked it up a couple of weeks later and read it all the way through, early in the morning, with no TV on and everyone else in the house asleep. And then it hit me again. It's just stuff! If some hairpiece like Jerry Seinfeld can make a sit-com about the going-nowhere lives of a bunch of whining New York sharks, why can't Gene Cox offer his Central Virginian Poor Richard's Almanac? At least Gene's heart is in the right place.

With this moment of clarity behind me, I was able to soak this up the way I was supposed to, like a guy leaning over the fence talking to his neighbor. Not the guy you have fun with all the time, but the guy you invite over for BBQ because he has the good deviled egg recipe. The guy who has raised talk about the weather to a new art form.

I think that was what Gene is shooting for here. Since he's not the fun guy, a lot of what he has to say is boring, pointless and irrelevant. He goes on and on about Milli Vanilli (we just doesn't get the Milli Vanilli) and women in locker rooms (he's against any reporters showing up there) and people who use big words (he's for them if they don't use them all the time) and how real Murphy Brown is (real enough to watch her manners). One has to respect the level-headedness and his overall tone.

And Gene is gentle in a world that lacks that quality. He didn't quit doing his bits live because he felt he looked stupid. Some people were actually offended by what he was saying ("...[O]r thought I was saying," he writes in the afterword, and that's as bitter or cruel as he gets in the entire book), and so he decided that he should quit. No fuss. Personally, I can't see that anything he said would offend an eighty-year old nun, but Gene, like his "Afterthoughts," is not trying to make a fuss.

It's easy to disregard banalities. But that's where we live. That's what makes them banalities. This book is the good side of banal: comfortable, self-contained and satisfied with what it is. Agree or disagree, it doesn't matter, this is one gentleman's small opinion. Andy Rooney can go choke on his own bile. I know whose book I'm keeping.

--- Tyler Magill