From 1950 to 1967, CBS ran the game show What’s My Line? Notable celebrity personalities served on the panel, posing questions of various contestants in order to guess their occupations. They were usually strange or exotic jobs, which would be difficult to guess. I recall one female wrestler who successfully stumped the panel.
By chiseling away with their questions, the panel attempted to carve out the “Real Me” vocational identity of the guests. Their outward appearances often belied their occupational prowess.
The lives of these What’s My Line? celebrities–among my favorites were Bennett Cerf, Steve Allen and Soupy Sales–could be just as strange, interesting and mysterious as the vocations of the people they interviewed.
Dorothy Kilgallen, for example, one of the celebrity hosts, was the only reporter to have interviewed Jack Ruby, the killer of Lee Harvey Oswald. She is widely believed to have later been murdered, so vociferous was her criticism of the U.S. government.
Celebrity status can, of course, be achieved through many other means besides being a guest or contestant on a popular game show. For example, the Olympic Games can bring out surprising—and sometimes shocking—performances from athletes, making or breaking their celebrity. The very public exposure of their talents on display may either impress through a great performance or dismay with a humiliating disaster. Then who, exactly, is the Olympian’s Real Me? It may be as fickle as a single day’s unanticipated performance.
Life can expose the Real Me of ordinary people through such uncertain elements as time, circumstance, environment, and the people we associate with. They can help determine our Real Me at any given moment. Like a many-layered mystery, the Real Me that we present might be kind, responsible or heroic. Or, at a weak moment, we can embarrass ourselves by becoming an irresponsible nogoodnick. Ouch.
Last Friday, I congratulated myself for being my best Real Me. With miniscule custodial help to clean my classroom, I took it upon myself to raid the janitorial closet, seizing broom, mop, bucket and detergent. For the next three hours I sanitized my room. Drenched in perspiration and aching, I fancied myself as something of a heroic figure.
Until, that is, I realized for how many months I had avoided doing this obviously long-overdue chore, leaving undone that which I knew to do. I easily qualified as a nogoodnik.
A What’s My Line? contestant rises or falls on the ability to conceal the Real Me.
But in reality-anchored non-TV-land, being unafraid of knowing the Real Me, and then nurturing the best possible Real Me, is the most hopeful way forward.