They wobble, but they don't fall down.

Some people collect Hummel figurines. Some people collect estate jewelry. Some people collect classic cars.

I collect 1970's-era Weebles.

In the early 1970's, I was on this show called Romper Room a couple of times. I used to watch it, and got a chance to be on a couple of episodes when I was 4 or 5. It was a sub-optimal experience. The sets were flimsy, and the mirror didn't really swirl around like it did on TV.

But one of the things that Romper Room provided to the American culture was the "bop bag", an inflatable plastic clown that one could hit like a punching bag. It was bottom-heavy, so when you hit the thing it would list sideways and then right itself. It taught kids that the best thing you can do when you're feeling ornery is to beat someone up with your fists. (Since I can't stand clowns, I don't really have a problem with it in this case.) When Hasbro bought the show in 1969, it started marketing these little plastic versions of bop bags called Weebles.

The ones I like are the ones made around the mid-1970s. The examples shown here are a combination of Disney's Winnie-The-Pooh Weebles, as well as some made by Sesame Street. There's also a clown Weeble, which I keep in the little treehouse because, again, clowns are creepy and weird. I also have the box for the treehouse.

Weebles aren't very expensive. The most I've paid for a Weeble is about 15 bucks. Someday I'll take them to the Roadshow. But it's a fun little diversion to keep me from acknowledging the roiling sea of rage that exists just below my serene surface.

Auction estimate or insurance value?

It's time for me to admit something.

I love the Antiques Roadshow.

Others have chided me for this adoration. They think that the long-running PBS production (which, like most good American television, was co-opted from British TV) is a warhorse of a program... an old fart's show. All I hear is "Girl, why are you watching that crap?" and "Turn that shit off and put on American Idol."

No. I'm not turning it off. I love the Roadshow. I love watching the new episodes. I love watching the re-runs. I love watching the commercials advertising new episodes and re-runs. And I'm not alone. The show is returning to Madison several years after its previous visit to our city, and the 6,000 available tickets sold out within 30 minutes. The Roadshow is clearly a covert favorite... a secret pleasure hidden away from public scrutiny much in the same way homosexual desire was concealed not so long ago.

Is loving the Roadshow the new gay? Is loving the Roadshow the "love that dare not speak its name"?

The Roadshow is a wonderful combination of several delicious qualities of human nature. It's very much an everyman phenomenon. The people who bring their family heirlooms and garage sale treasures are not the fabulous jet-set types whom one would naturally expect to own such baubles. They are most certainly among the hoi polloi, which allows the viewer... any viewer... to identify with them much more immediately and intimately. The celebration of average people as being caretakers of extraordinary things is a rarity among reality shows (of which the Roadshow is most certainly one). The "Real Housewives" and the Kardashians are occasionally interesting to watch in a slow-down-next-to-the-horrible-car-accident kind of way, but one doesn't really identify with them. With the Roadshow, it's personal.

Most families have a collection of special items that are passed down through the generations. The American concept of history is a murky one, with our historical memory too often being restricted to pundits and cherry-picked sound bytes. Tangible heirlooms provide an immediate and unmistakable connection between present company and the ancestral past. In a country that celebrates the new and shiny, a program that shows the value of the ancient and dingy is a welcome aberration.

And if you want something that's craven and prurient, the Roadshow has that for you as well. The very best of segments fall into one of two categories: the unexpectedly high valuation, and the unexpectedly low valuation.

The former category is characterized by shrieks of surprised delight followed occasionally by tears. The tears are often the result of the current owner thinking back to his fixed income grandmother's tiny house in the country, in which a much-beloved object was interwoven into the fabric of the family's memory without realization of the market value of the piece. This is the best kind of art... pieces that are lived with... things that are quietly and elegantly present during the daily lives of the owners without regard for the auction estimates.

The latter category is a guilty favorite. Occasionally, one observes an owner of an object whose entire sense of self is fractured when the appraiser informs them that Aunt Tillie's beautiful priceless vase from the Ming dynasty is instead a plastic piece of crap made in Korea in 1982. The stunned silence after the appraiser utters the auction estimate is laden with confusion and denial, and is absolutely one of the best sources of Schadenfreude on the planet.

What would you bring to the Roadshow for valuation? I would likely bring a collection of old kerosene lamps that my grandmother gave me. They're not likely very expensive... she wasn't a wealthy woman... but she was an antiques dealer in Rochester, NY and had a very keen eye for collectibles. I would like to know more about the lamps... where the came from and how they were originally used. Of course I could never sell them. Grandmother wouldn't have allowed that.