A television drama in real life

BY MICHAEL FRAZER

I had to beg my parents to let me stay up until 8:30. It was ten years ago, I was in the second grade, and The Cosby Show was premiering on NBC Thursday night. As long as I could remember I had been watching Bill Cosby's Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, the cartoon adventures of the comedian's childhood gang. Though the shows contained the typical humor of after-school cartoons, what separated Fat Albert from all the other shows I watched was its sense of reality. Each episode was introduced by a live, fully-grown Bill Cosby, who explained that all the adventures of the cartoon kid Cosby, his brother Russell, and their crew of misfits were indeed drawn from real life. Now Bill Cosby had a new show, as a father with children of his own, and I was expecting something with the same truthful humor.

What I most remember from that first episode was the character Theo, the only son of Cosby's Cliff Huxtable. Theo was barely 13, yet had decided he needed to shave. The sitcom's conflict surrounding his desire may now seem clichéd, but it was the first such sitcom I had ever seen. I found the story, the dynamics, and the characters hilarious. Through the rest of my childhood, Malcolm Jamal-Warner's Theo continued to undergo the trials of a boy becoming a man, an experience which I knew awaited me. I thought back to Theo when I first started shaving myself. As much as I always knew there was a real Bill Cosby behind Cliff Huxtable, I knew there was a real Cosby son behind Theo, a boy who experienced life much as myself. It was not until last week, however, that I learned his name.

His name was Ennis Cosby. He was shot to death early on Thurs., Jan. 16, on a Los Angeles freeway ramp while changing a flat tire. A dyslexic, Ennis Cosby's troubles in school were the direct inspiration for Theo's academic difficulties. Like Theo, he overcame these difficulties, and, also like Theo, he went on to succeed in college. Ennis' later work at Columbia University Teacher's College in special education, an effort to help others facing dyslexia, was the inspiration for a short-lived sitcom his father produced, entitled Here and Now. He was a doctoral student at Columbia when his life was so suddenly cut short.

"What's the big deal?" my friend from California asked me. "Do you have any idea how many people are killed on the freeways each year? This would never have made the newspapers if this guy weren't Bill Cosby's son." My friend is absolutely right, of course. There are countless young men who lose their lives in violence without anyone giving it a second thought. Ennis Cosby never did anything to set himself apart from the many anonymous victims of violent crime. We all know Theo Huxtable, however, and in that way we all know Ennis Cosby. His struggles growing up were our struggles; his accomplishments were our accomplishments. It is this which makes his death so tragic.

Bill Cosby has a new sitcom on CBS and, quite frankly, it is terrible. Playing an unemployed man who only succeeds in bothering his wife and getting fired from a series of menial jobs, Cosby has lost the magic which charmed his earlier shows. Perhaps his new sitcom does not ring true in the way his previous work did because it is not drawn from real life. Cosby's real life in the past few years has consisted more of tragedy than of comedy, with Ennis' death preceded by that of his sister in a hit-and-run accident when she was only 16. His happy years of childhood and fatherhood, however, have been immortalized in the television shows which I enjoyed so greatly during my own childhood. On the stations all over the world where The Cosby Show is still aired in syndication, Ennis Cosby still lives as Theo Huxtable, and children are begging their parents to let them stay up until 8:30 with him.

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