I rode in an Uber yesterday. It was a short ride from the local high school to Town Fair Tire to retrieve my car.
I had left a play a few minutes before intermission, hoping to get back before intermission ended.
As I climbed into the car, the Uber driver asked why I was at the high school on a Saturday.
I explained to him that I was attending a student performance of “The Crucible.”
“I saw the play for the first time on Broadway back in 2002,” I told him. “Laura Linney and Liam Neeson were starring in that show, so this version isn’t quite as good, but it’s not bad.”
This somehow triggered the Uber driver to say, “It’s kind of like that ‘Kids Say the Darnest Things’ show.”
“I don’t think I know that show,” I said.
“Oh,” he said. “It’s great. It’s Bill Cosby’s show. It’s hilarious. I love that guy. He’s a comedy genius.”
I wasn’t sure if he was kidding, but then he went on to tell me how much he admired Cosby for his comedy and the way he made people laugh without swearing or crossing the line into sex, violence, or “any of that adult humor.”
“Is this really happening?” I thought.
He went on to extol the virtues of Cosby’s family-friendly comedy.
I didn’t have the heart to tell him the truth about Cosby.
I was also afraid to discover he knew the truth about Cosby and didn’t care.
I looked up “Kids Say the Darnest Things” after the play.
It was a television show wherein children were asked questions about life, and their answers provided the entertainment. Bill Cosby hosted the show from 1998-2000, and Tiffany Haddish later revived it from 2019-2021.
Apparently, my Uber driver doesn’t know about the Tiffany Haddish version of the show, or he doesn’t care for it.
He’s also somehow still watching the Cosby version of the show, though I couldn’t find it streaming anywhere. He’s likely enjoying it on YouTube, where clips of the show are still available.
Other than his worship for a man found guilty of sexual assault in multiple civil trials and one criminal trial (though that verdict was overturned), he was a perfectly lovely man.
One important note on that overturned conviction:
It was not overturned because he was found innocent. The court ruled that prosecutors violated Cosby’s due process rights by prosecuting him despite an earlier prosecutor’s promise not to do so.
I don’t think my Uber driver knew any of this background or history, but again, I was afraid to ask.
It’s sometimes better not to know.
Also, sometimes you are lucky enough to experience something that has absolutely never happened before in all of human history. In this case, it was a conversation about Arthur Miller’s classic “The Crucible” pivoting into praise for Bill Cosby and his television show from 24 years ago.
That was the first, and almost certainly the last, time that will ever happen in this universe.
Lucky me.
You never really know what will happen when you get in an Uber and decide to chat, as I often do.
