The 1978 hit reality show Mork and Mindy which followed the daily life of a young American single woman in Boulder, Colorado who was offering sanctuary to an illegal extraterrestrial alien only enjoyed high Nielsen ratings for the first season. As the Department of Immigration and Naturalization closed in American Mindy married Ork's Mork in order to grant him citizenship to the human race and possibly even the United States. With all the sexual and romantic tension drowned in matrimony the public's interest quickly waned.
Though Mork crossed the border of our atmosphere in an egg ship he was born to another American woman some years earlier who was visiting Ork on a procreation vacation. Betty Bacall aka Lauren Bacall had lost her husband Humphrey Bogart to cancer the year before and with only a son and a daughter by him in tow wished to breed extraterrestrial children who could invade the Earth before cell phones became ubiquitous. Mork was her fourth son in a brood of thirteen children she bore that year on Ork. So Mork actually was already an American citizen through his mother.
A former teenage model and knuckle cracker from the Bronx, Betty Bacall was determined to bring down the Dick Tracy comic strip that exerted such a paralyzing influence over the culture. Believing DT was conning frightened males into a false machismo that celebrated brutality toward women and insensitivity to the needs of children and farm animals, beautiful Betty used her cover as a model to infiltrate Manhattan's Fashion District and sabotage two raincoat companies that were coming out with Dick Tracy inspired yellow coats and fedoras.
Though not an engineer herself, while on Ork Bacall was told by the Orkians that the signature Tracy two way radio wrist watch would be developed on Earth in her lifetime. Wise Betty realized that this was more communication than almost any human being could handle. Most people could barely survive the daily face to face interactions and more removed correspondences they were already getting. The reality of science fiction like powers to both look at and speak to people at a distance should be reserved for leadership and security personnel specially trained in detached communication.
By the late seventies, Bacall's earth career and Broadway rebound were fading. Sexless gumbots tinkering in their garages were rushing us into a robot future just like the Orkians predicted so Bacall contacted her alien brood. The Orkian-Earthling half breeds had had a bad time of it on Ork and few would even reply to their mother's transmissions. Only Mork, who had previously spent most of his childhood in Chicago and Detroit on a special surveillance mission undercover as the only child of a Ford Motor Company executive, responded. He understood from chronicling America's development of nuclear weapons and the even more deadly luxury sedan that Earthlings were way over their heads with their technology. The trouble with Earthlings is geniuses invent things and then imbeciles use it, Bacall often said.
Though Mork in his show tried his best to warn the human race of the dangers they were creating most Americans and even some Europeans mistook him for a character in a sitcom and laughed off his warnings. As the ratings tumbled Mork and his mother scrambled for a strategy to convince the Earth's leading country to stop its suicidal ways. Bacall again revived her acting career with the Broadway hit, Woman of the Year. Interviews and invitations to the circles of power revived briefly but eventually disintegrated into an illustrious career.
Mork took on the name Robin Williams from the man who thought he was his father and the rocking bird. He would spend the next three decades walking around in shoes, exercising his right of flatulence and making the world laugh.
The cellphones he and his mother tried to prevent quickly took over his chosen planet and enslaved its inhabitants. People who could barely feed their children or provide them with an education could not live without the techno terrors. The addiction to them replaced alcohol and drug use as the greatest danger behind the wheel of automobiles. Both callers and the called upon ceased acknowledging members of their species within visual distance and dismissed people in their presence during phone calls as shadows or holograms.
Lauren Bacall was sad to see the world grew up in saved from fascism only to be lost to techno-idiocy. Her Orkian son, though hugely successful in his career, was especially grieved. The Earth's atmosphere was not refined enough for him and he suffered mental, physical and spiritual problems which led to his chosen demise. His mother on hearing of his death chose a stroke to bring her curtain down. If all the troubles of the world burnt on the wick of one candle Mork would have laughed it out while his mother would have just put her lips together and blown.
Don Arrup
Satire1
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