The Man from Glad and the mattress (pp. 494–495)
He was inserted several times a month in a mock-up of a car interior, where he would be filmed in a tight trans-windshield shot receiving an emergency radio summons to some household that was having a portable-food-storage problem. He was then inserted opposite an actress in a generic kitchen-interior set, where he would explain how a particular species of Glad Sandwich Bag was precisely what the doctor ordered for the particular portable-food-storage problem at issue. In his vaguely medical uniform of all white, he carried an air of authority and great evident conviction […] and received, for the first time in his career, fan mail, some of which bordered on the disturbing, and which he sometimes liked to read out loud at night in the living room, loudly and dramatically, sitting up with a nightcap and fan mail long after my mother and I had gone to bed.
Context
The Man from Glad production notes, delivered in the memoirist's flat technical register: the father isn't described acting, he's described being "inserted" into shots — "a tight trans-windshield shot," "a generic kitchen-interior set" — passive components of a filmed apparatus. It's the household's first brush with the economics and pathology of being watched (an impressive salary, fan mail "bordering on the disturbing," performed aloud at night), and the son who records it in shot-vocabulary is the one who'll later build lethal apparatus of his own.