INTO THE AIR

Full story originally appeared in Witness.

We found her, as we found everything, on TV. In those days, untold weirdnesses were ours to discover, waiting at the furthest reaches of the dial in the strange realm known as public access. Here were niche entertainments steeped in bargain-basement production values, as if peeking out from under the tablecloth of the networks’ extravagant banquet of glitz and spectacle. Programming as community detritus: beige-carpeted sets in fuzzy focus, populated by dour academics in stiff-backed chairs, or earnest teenagers in Vaselined spikes, or city councillors scathed in cheap light. And late at night, there were the cryptic experiments, possessed weirdoes staring back at their sleepless viewers, speaking in codes of arcane practices and hidden meanings, truths too true for regular broadcast. 

But Mistress Bianca’s Universal Garden beguiled us like nothing else. The show’s opening, which we would come to know and cherish, began with an image of tasseled velvet curtains, suggesting our television sets had finally become the strongboxes of mystery we’d always hoped them to be. A synthesizer’s resounding drone, then the curtains parted and there she was, Bianca herself, seated against a subtly glinting backdrop of a wispy cosmos, her smile’s grid of gilded caps slicing through the prevailing murk. In the choppy nonreality of low-res video, everything moved slowly, laboured, as if Bianca and the surrounding studio were all sealed in some transparent gel. But none of this muted her radiance, or the thrill of all she promised us.

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