Jack Soo’s Curtains

One of my favorite episodes of M*A*S*H is season 1, episode 2, “To Market, To Market.” The actors were finding their characters, and Colonel Blake’s repeated, “nope, it’s oak,” after each person correctly identifies the material from which his desk is made is still funny nearly 50 years later. But the thing about that episode I think about the most is Jack Soo’s curtains.

Hawkeye and Trapper travel to black marketeer Charlie Lee’s (Jack Soo) office to buy some hydrocortisone. Our heroes cannot afford the price, but they offer Blake’s 100-year old wooden desk instead. Before they make their deal, Jack Soo’s character shows them his pilfered merchandise, some of which he keeps in his “showroom,” which is just some shelves behind the kind of beige drapes you’d see in any home from the 1950s.

I think about these curtains often, mostly wondering what happened to this mundane item that has been part of my consciousness for almost my entire life.

Sometimes I wonder if they were thrown in the trash, and rest now in some windy landfill around Los Angeles. The wind is a key part of the image that I create. I think about those drapes ruffling a little in the wind as they rest on a pile of some of the other stuff that’s been discarded, with anyone who sees them likely unaware that they were a part of important television history. I realize that by now they would have decomposed or settled to the bottom of the garbage pile, but I like to think of them fluttering, so I do.

I also like to think they were used more than once, in other TV shows. It seems possible they were. I imagine that there probably was a set designer at one time who knew how often they had been used, and on which shows. Who knows, maybe they were in Archie Bunker’s place, or Fred G. Sanford’s home. I know it’s unlikely they ended up in the latter, because he was on NBC and M*A*S*H was on CBS, but you get the point.

In the best of times, I imagine they were purchased at a resale shop by a cost conscious consumer, and still hang in a home somewhere, blocking the light when necessary, and providing privacy. They looked like quality curtains, and it would be a shame if they went to waste.

Maybe these are the sort of things one thinks about if one has watched the same TV show too often. I know these are not particularly clever or important thoughts. But they’re my thoughts, and they’re what I think when I see Jack Soo’s curtains.