Afternoon Greg: It’s tough to say goodbye to my old VHS tapes and to Samantha Who?

I decided to finally do it.

On Sunday, I began the surprisingly emotional task of purging my home of the stscks and stacks of VHS tapes that I have accumulated over the past 20 years or so. I had stacks on the shelves in my closets and even filled a lower cupboard in the kitchen with these now-outdated videos.

I could not bare to part with them – until now. You just get to the point where you know you’re never going to watch them again.

It’s not so much purging the movies that made me sad – many of those have been replaced on DVD – it’s all the stuff I had painstakingly taped over the years. Stuff like Barbara Walters Specials, Wimbledon matches, skits from Saturday Night Live, award shows, talk show segments ranging from Rosie O’Donnell to Larry King, more of those Lifetime Intimate Portraits shows than I care to admit, episodes of Designing Women, I Love Lucy and on and on and on.

One tape had the entire Jane Pauley goodbye from The Today Show. This was a huge TV event because Jane was a beloved TV icon who people woke up to for 13 years. Her departure even made the cover of Life magazine and had All About Eve aspects since she was being replaced by the younger Deborah Norville.

Also on that tape was some of Chris Evert’s final US Open match (pictured,. left). I called in sick to work to watch Chrissie’s match against Zina Garrison and to this day, I have no regrets! I’d watched Chrissie play at the tournament every year since 1979 and seen her win the last two of her six titles there and lose some heartbreaking finals to Martina Navratilova. She was 34 years old and dropped to number four in the world and seemed to cali it quits at just the right time.

But even if I  wanted to save those two big events from the fall of 1989, all was already lost. When I put the tape in the VCR last night, it was just a scrambled mess. So, I reluctantly added it to the pile.

I once thought I would never be able to part with any of my Oscar, Golden Globe or Emmy tapes – ever. But here’s the thing: not only does YouTube make a lot of that available now, I’ve also changed a lot. I don’t record things on television or ever really watch old things because I have learned to live in the moment and have had a lot of exciting things happen in recent years. So it is really tough to get lost in an old recording of say the Oscars when I have such great memories of actually being there.

Still, those old tapes were often very comforting during times in my life when I was closeted and suffering greatly because of it. In a pre-Internet age, they were something that kept my mind occupied when I was living too much inside my head.

It’s time to leave a lot of that behind.

ABC DECIDES TO CANCEL SAMANTHA WHO? Are you kidding me?

This is such a good show and really gave its star, Christina Applegate, the kind of vehicle that allowed her to display all of her immense comic abilities. Her chemistry with co-stars Jennifer Esposito Melissa McCarthy and Barry Watson was terrific. And then there was the great Jean Smart who was given one of the best comic creations of her stellar career playing Samantha’s self-absorbed mother Regina. Jean won an Emmy last September – a time when cancellation seemed like an impossibility.

The sitcom’s ratings had dropped this season and, according to Variety, ABC decided it just was no longer worth the investment.

It’s a damned shame.