Tea with Tavis
Gene Shalit Was Still Alive?
In fact, the entire reason this story exists is because I apparently respected him enough to assume he had been dead for decades.
Friday afternoon, I was scrolling Facebook when a headline from People magazine stopped me cold:
Gene Shalit, longtime Today Show film critic, had died at 100.
One hundred.
One hundred?!
Now before anyone comes for me, let me be clear: I am not laughing at Gene Shalit.
I am laughing at myself.
Because my immediate reaction was:
“Wait… Gene Shalit was alive?”
Growing up, Gene Shalit always seemed approximately 87 years old.
Not 87 now.
Not 87 in the 1990s.
Not 87 in the 2000s.
Just… 87 forever.
He occupied that strange category of celebrity reserved for people who somehow entered the public consciousness already elderly. The mustache was elderly. The bow tie was elderly. The hair was elderly. The movie reviews were elderly.
Gene Shalit looked like he taught Film Studies at a university that existed entirely inside a Norman Rockwell painting.
Then my brain immediately flashed back to an old episode of Sex and the City.
Miranda was sparring with a cocky lawyer colleague who compared her to Gene Shalit before shoving her toward a car.
At the time, everyone got the joke.
Today, half the audience is probably wondering:
“Who the hell is Gene Shalit?”
Which may be the most Gene Shalit thing imaginable.
The man lived long enough to become a historical reference inside a historical reference.
And honestly?
That’s kind of iconic.
The older I get, the more I realize there are certain public figures who become frozen in time. Not because they stay young, but because they become permanently old in our collective memory.
They stop aging.
They simply exist.
Like a human landmark.
Like a television monument.
Like that one lamp in your grandmother’s living room that has somehow survived six presidential administrations.
Gene Shalit was one of those people.
And now that he’s gone, I find myself unexpectedly smiling.
Not because he died.
Because he made it to one hundred years old while an entire generation quietly assumed he’d already retired to some celestial retirement community decades ago.
That’s a pretty remarkable trick.
Rest easy, Gene.
And thank you for the mustache.
⸻
Chip’s Critics Corner 🐾
Good evening.
My name is Chip Ferguson.
Unlike humans, dogs do not have this problem.
If another dog is one hundred years old, everyone involved is already aware that something supernatural is occurring.
Humans, however, routinely lose track of elderly television personalities.
You simply assume they have wandered off somewhere comfortable and continue existing indefinitely.
I reviewed Gene Shalit’s photograph.
The mustache receives five stars.
The bow tie receives four stars.
The hair receives six stars despite the scale only going to five.
As a professional critic, I am obligated to respect greatness when I see it.
Final verdict:
Gene Shalit survived long enough to convince countless people that he had already died years ago.
That is a remarkable achievement.
May his memory be a blessing.
And may all future mustaches aspire to such greatness.
🐾
— Chip, Film Critic Emeritus