Andy Rooney's Ass

Attention, ad agencies: Receive national attention for a product without paying a penny to air it! How? Produce a commercial that's so raunchy you know it will be turned down by the network censors. Then those same networks will play your commercial, for free, on their news programs. If they call your bluff and allow the commercial to be aired, you can be sure that viewers will bring their eyeballs to the water cooler.

It happened with the Super Bowl commercials. After CBS turned down a commercial featuring Mickey Rooney's bare ass, every network news program showed it. Ironically, I have no idea what product was being advertised. Old asses, maybe.

And that wasn't all. The Washington Post published this correction: "The TV Column in the Feb. 8 Style section incorrectly described one of the Super Bowl commercials that were scrapped. The ad featured the bare bottom of Mickey Rooney, not Andy Rooney."

All those old asses look alike.

And now, from the ridiculous to the sublime?

I was intrigued by the story of Sarah Scantlin, the victim of a drunken driver back in September 1984. The driver served six months for driving under the influence and leaving the scene of an accident. Scantlin, 18 years old at the time, fell into a coma. For the next 20 years, she could communicate only with her eyes-one blink for "no," two blinks for "yes." Last month, she finally spoke, the AP reported.

Early in February, one of the nurses at the Golden Plains Health Care Center in Hutchinson, KS, called Sarah's mother, asked her if she was sitting down. Someone, they said, wanted to talk to her.

"Hi, Mom."

"Sarah, is that you?"

"Yes."

"How are you doing?"

"Fine."

Later, her mother asked, "Do you need anything?"

"More make-up."

I was stunned by that answer. Could the concept of "more make-up" have been lodged somewhere in her consciousness at the moment she was struck unconscious? She had, we learn, just won a spot on the Hutchinson Community College drill team and been hired at an upscale clothing store.

The nurses say that Sarah thinks she's still living in the 1980s. She knows what a CD is, and that it plays music, but she has no idea what a DVD is. When her brother asked whether she knew how old she was, she guessed 22. When he told her that she was 38 now, she just stared silently back at him.

Most poignantly, although she began talking in mid-January, she had requested staff members not to tell her parents until Valentine's Day. She wanted to surprise them. More than the 80s, Sarah is clearly still living in Kansas.