One of the many things I’ve learned from watching the Science Channel documentary series “Through the Wormhole With Morgan Freeman” is that someday, maybe, quantum physics will tell us conclusively whether God exists. If that happens, we’ll be able to put that question aside and devote ourselves full time to pondering the existence of Morgan Freeman.
Here are some generally accepted, Google-verifiable facts about Morgan Freeman: He was born in Tennessee in 1937. He started acting young but made the transition from the New York stage to movies relatively late — he didn’t make his first credited feature-film appearance until 1971, when he was 34 and played a character called Afro in a Jack Klugman vehicle called “Who Says I Can’t Ride a Rainbow!” By then, he was already on his way to becoming a TV star, albeit in the parallel universe of children’s television, as part of the cast of the PBS program “The Electric Company,” the funkiest educational kids’ show of all time. He was on that show from 1971 until 1977, which meant that throughout the blaxploitation era in Hollywood — when many black actors of his generation found work playing pimps and hustlers out to stick it to the Man — he was playing characters like Easy Reader, a bell-bottomed word hippie bridging the gap between Hendrix and Hooked on Phonics.
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