Na-Nu Na-Nu

Photo of Mork and Mindy coming down the Boulder Canyon at the beginning of their show.

Robin Williams always portrayed Real. In-your-face Real. Fearless Real. Real with a smile and a wink.

The Mork & Mindy TV show with Robin Williams and Pam Dawber ran from 1978 to 1982.

It was situated here in Boulder CO, 2 blocks off the Pearl Street Mall.

I was in and out of University then, also here in Boulder. Like I have been for 41 years.

Boulder was still nice and wonderfully weird back then [probably before we became the smartest city in the U.S. (most BS and PHDs per-capita), and fittest city in the U.S.]

Being weird was… normal – lots of drugs, public drug-use, selling, buying… public laughing, singing, wearing funny clothes [even men!], be openly romantic… massive Halloween parties on the mall with 10s of thousands of people.

If you were a business and were going to make a go of it on the Pearl Street mall, you catered to the party ‘do whatever you want to do if it don’t hurt no one’ culture. This led to some very interesting business models.

It was awesome. It was relaxed. It was cheerful. It was non-commercial.

The Mork & Mindy show portrayed Boulder ass-backwards.

Mork was the normal one, the rest of the cast was your typical psychopathic Hollywood conceptualization of normal, normal hippies, normal bankers, whatever [well, not Jonathan Winters… he really WAS an alien :-). And Pam Dawber, she was a metaphor for all that less-weird women have to put up with when dealing with more-weird men].

They eventually included The New York Deli which opened on Pearl Street as part of the show in one of the later seasons. I knew people who worked there. I think my brother eventually worked there.

With the real house on Pine Street and this real restaurant, it was just really, REALLY, R-E-A-L-L-Y confusing at the time.

Where did Reality stop and Fake Real begin?

Seems like a silly question. Just like Robin Williams often seemed silly. But they are not. Not really.

For me, this is what the show was about, what Robin Williams was all about, what Weird Boulder was about, what being young and experimenting with life is all about.

A question which no one has answered and hardly anyone asks anymore.

But Robin Williams asked it. And kept asking it. And still asks it through his body of work.

…

O Captain! My Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills;
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding;
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;

Here captain! dear father!

This arm beneath your head;

It is some dream that on the deck,

You’ve fallen cold and dead.

 

…

Our congressman, Jared Polis, in front of Mork & Mindy’s house

 

Later, the front of Mork & Miny’s house