Comic imitates McCain

He's just a baby-faced 25-year-old guy, but comic impressionist David Siegel of Durham has 72-year-old John McCain down cold, like Rich Little had Reagan.

Just check out his sample video (www.collegehumor.com/video:1823751) and you'll see how satirical impersonations are done. Even without the makeup and bald/gray head pieces, Siegel manages a dead-on, unquestionable impression of the Republican nominee for president. There's the raspy voice, the whistling "s" sound pronounced as "sh," the hunching of the shoulders and all the facial tics. It's uncanny.

"It's a bit of a caricature," Siegel says. He started doing McCain last fall for an improvised political comedy show in New York. He was so good that a friend suggested he post a clip online. That caught the attention of Denny's restaurants.

He was invited to participate in the chain's "Vote for Real" contest, in which participants submitted their best impressions of both major candidates (view Siegel's winning entry at (www.vote4real.com).

"They're doing a marketing push for 'real breakfast,'" Siegel says. "I guess this was a viral marketing effort on that path."

His reward for winning is one free meal per month at Denny's, all through the next president's first term in office. For Siegel, who graduated from Durham Academy and UNC-Chapel Hill, the McCain impression is just one of a bag of tics that includes U.S. Reps. Charlie Rangel and Barney Frank. He majored in political science at UNC and calls himself "a political junkie."

Trained in the Triangle Comedy troupe Dirty South Improv Theater (he performed there with brother Dan Siegel during a visit home last week), he's also a member of the Upright Citizens Brigade in Manhattan, which includes "Saturday Night Live" cast member Amy Poehler.

Last week, David Siegel did his McCain impression in full makeup on the New York City morning program "Good Day New York" on Fox 5.

With all this attention and a rapidly updated resume, he's keenly aware that a McCain win in November could mean a major career opportunity for him in television sketch comedy.

"It's a real ideological struggle for me," he admits. "Do I want my actual candidate to win, or the candidate I do a good impression of to win?"

On Oct. 11, Siegel will perform his McCain impression at the World Affairs Council Gala "Fake Debate" in Philadelphia, with MSNBC's Chris Matthews as moderator.

Kids without TV

For many boomers and Gen-Xers who grew up as "TV babies," it seems inconceivable to have lived without the brassy theme from "Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C." or the perky theme from "The Facts of Life" ringing in our ears every afternoon when we got home from school.

A tiny subset of a new generation of parents has children humming a different tune, according to a Wake Forest University study published last Thursday.

The new tune goes something like this: No television. At all.

The study by associate professor of communication Marina Krcmar is titled "Living Without the Screen," in which Krcmar (pronounced crutch-mar) examines why some parents buck the national trend of three hours of TV a day.

Krcmar (whose three daughters don't watch TV either) interviewed 120 adults and children from 62 households where TV is taboo. She also interviewed 92 participants from 35 households where TV is allowed.

She found that the rejection of TV tends to be embraced by parents with either strongly conservative or strongly liberal points of view.

The reasons usually cited for the decision are that parents don't want the values expressed on TV to have "power" in their homes, and that they want to encourage more family interaction and individual creativity.

Krcmar says that roughly 1 or 2 percent of U.S. households don't have televisions, and that the number of non-viewers may actually be higher. Some televisions are used just for DVDs and video games.

One major upside for parents enforcing a TV blackout is that their children are far less consumerist than those with a steady diet of television.

"That is one of the things that the parents talked glowingly about," she says. "They talked about being able to walk into a grocery store, pick up what they needed, and walk back out. And the kids never asked for anything."