dual personalities

Last night, after scrolling through Amazon Prime in a fruitless attempt to find something to watch, I discovered the early 1960s TV show My Favorite Martian, starring Ray Walston as the titular Martian and Bill Bixby as his terrestrial host.

I watched a couple of episodes and was not disappointed — it was pretty entertaining in a 1963 sort of way, and it had reasonably good special effects. You can read all about the show here. My Favorite Martian got me thinking about what else I watched as a child. Most of my very early TV watching consisted of reruns like Father Knows Best (1954-1960) and the Donna Reed Show (1958-1966) that I watched during the day while my siblings were at school, and Leave it to Beaver reruns (1957-1963) after they got home.

Years later and still watching reruns, my dual personality and I yucked it up over F-Troop (1965-67),

a very silly sitcom that would never get made today. After all, they named the local Indian tribe the Hekawi because, “Tribe travel west, over country and mountains and wild streams, then come big day… tribe fall over cliff, that when Hekawi get name. Medicine man say to my ancestor, “I think we lost. Where the heck are we?” — how culturally insensitive is that?

I also went through a long phase of watching Hogan’s Heroes reruns (1965-71) every afternoon with my best friend. The show was on just before dinner, and it used to drive my DP crazy when I would run home just in time to eat but too late to set the table.

Hogan’s Heroes was charming and funny and we thought Richard Dawson, the wise-cracking British prisoner, was very cool. Back in those days it was okay to make fun of your enemies. In fact, some people probably thought it was wrong to make light of WWII or make the Nazis look like buffoons instead of unmitigated evil. They had a point.

As if to make up for the comic version of WWII, we watched Combat! (1962-67) starring Vic Morrow and Rick Jason. My brother was a big fan of the show, so naturally his two little sisters wanted to watch. We were even recruited to play army with him.

Sal Mineo as special guest victim with Vic Morrow in Combat!

Years and years later, after I graduated from college, when I worked at the library of our flyover university, reruns aired at 10pm every night. I’d get off work, grab a snack, and watch. My DP and her OM would watch at their house, too. Pretty soon we started a betting pool to guess how Vic Morrow would suffer in each episode: a wound to the shoulder, the leg, the head; temporary blindness; madness, or memory loss. We also played spot the ‘special guest victim’ – everyone from Sal Mineo to Telly Savalas appeared on the show (see the full list on Wikipedia).

I’ve left out too many shows to list, but you get the idea. Many of them are available to watch on Amazon or Youtube, and while I am not suggesting that you try to recapture your youth by watching them, it is fun to look back. Imagine that! At the very least you’ll chuckle over hair styles, clothes, and terrible laugh tracks. What TV shows did you enjoy as a child?

We had a pretty quiet week here and I don’t have much to show for it. I’ve been reading a lot.

I took a break from the wonderful, long Kristin Lavransdatter to read Lethal White, the newest volume in Robert Galbraith’s (aka J.K. Rowling’s) Cormoran Strike series. I enjoyed it; the author has maintained her characters well and the plotting was tight, if a little too elaborate. If you’re looking for meaning, you’d be much better off with Sigrid Undset. I’ve dipped into both the Pagels and Karon books and look forward to reading more, and although I’ve already read the Amor Towles books, they are so great that I needed to own them. I love receiving books at Christmas, don’t you?

My viewing week was quite eclectic. Inspired by an article our Idaho son wrote, the DH and I watched the documentary Dawn Wall (available to rent on Amazon) about two men free-climbing El Capitan in Yosemite. Free-climbing is when the climbers ascend without the assistance of aids (pegs, etc…) but are belayed from below so if they fall, they are caught. This is as opposed to free-solo climbing which eschews all ropes and safety devices. Both ways seem crazy to me, but the free-solo people are without question nuts. They do things like this:

Look, ma, no ropes! Alex Honnold free-solos El-Capitan by his fingertips

Nothing has ever made me so happy to be in my house with both feet planted firmly on solid ground.

In addition to watching other people act out their death wishes, I watched Netflix’s (borrowed from the BBC) new series Bodyguard, in which war veteran turned cop tries to save the British Home Secretary from a terrorist threat or perhaps even her own colleagues.

Bodyguard proved to be the expected mix of government conspiracy and backstabbing, twisty politics, although the main character was interesting and it had a better ending than I anticipated. The six-episode length was also a plus, since adding more would have overburdened the already convoluted plot.

Finally, I know you’re wondering whether the kitchen is finished. In lieu of a straight answer I’ll share a telling anecdote. The guys** noticed that our mudroom screen door has no handle (we had to remove it when it got stuck and we couldn’t get in or out of the door) and they offered to fix it. “How wonderful!” I replied. Then I went to the office and left them to it. When I returned home I discovered a shiny new knob

on the inside door, which didn’t need one, and the familiar gaping hole on the screen door.

If that doesn’t perfectly describe our kitchen/mudroom renovation experience, I don’t know what would. The current situation, of which the door handle represents but one minor episode, reminds me of a passage from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in which Marlow describes the frustration of not being able to repair a wrecked steamboat for want of a few rivets:

Did I see it? I saw it. What more did I want? What I really wanted was rivets, by heaven! Rivets. To get on with the work—to stop the hole. Rivets I wanted. There were cases of them down at the coast—cases—piled up—burst—split! You kicked a loose rivet at every second step in that station-yard on the hillside. Rivets had rolled into the grove of death. You could fill your pockets with rivets for the trouble of stooping down—and there wasn’t one rivet to be found where it was wanted. We had plates that would do, but nothing to fasten them with. And every week the messenger, a long negro, letter-bag on shoulder and staff in hand, left our station for the coast. And several times a week a coast caravan came in with trade goods—ghastly glazed calico that made you shudder only to look at it, glass beads value about a penny a quart, confounded spotted cotton handkerchiefs. And no rivets. Three carriers could have brought all that was wanted to set that steamboat afloat.

Yep, we’re feeling Marlow’s frustration, but we also laugh about it a lot. What else can we do?

*Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

**It’s probably sexist to call them ‘the guys’, but ‘workers’ evokes the Communist Manifesto and they definitely don’t fit that.