Friday, June 24, 2011

Thursday, June 24th, 1976



A very good afternoon, following a fast morning and followed BY a rotten evening.

Dad accidentally woke me up at 4 AM!

Went over the river to Pogues about my Senior pics at 11, then made it to Bell Block just as they were putting up the new comics. I saw MURDER BY DEATH, got Wendy's and still had enough left for the E-go mag on Duke.

The evening was marred by a tornado warning with CD sirens and everything. Mom actually seemed scared and I got scared, too. All this was after a very hard night over at SS. Mom and I played TROUBLE to take our minds off the weather and then later caught the last half of MARY HARTMAN, MARY HARTMAN.

NOTES: With no mention of my dad during the evening's tornado scare and him waking me up at 4 "accidentally," I'm going to assume this was a period where he was working odd hours. After a lifetime of switching jobs every couple of years--from foundry to insurance man to liquor store (where he was fired on day two) to night watchman, etc, etc. he had lucked into a government job...as a janitor at the Post Office. It was the happiest job he ever had and, after being hit by a car in 1978 caused his forced retirement he ended up with a quite nice annuity.

TROUBLE was a game...well...still is! I saw it at the supermarket last week! It's a simple travel around the board game based on "pop-o-matic" dice that come mixed into the center of the game itself. I had gotten it in the late sixties and it was easily my mother's favorite of all my board games. Sometimes she (and later my dad) would just get the board out and mess with the pop-o-matic thingie! I still had that same TROUBLE game when I got married and my wife and I would sometimes play it also. Later, our son just loved it...to death. Under his watch, the original box was finally destroyed and most of the little "men" you traveled around the board with went AWOL.

MURDER BY DEATH may get only a casual mention here but it's a sillier than normal Neil Simon farce in which many big stars--David Niven, Maggie Smith, Peter Falk, Peter Sellers, etc..--played parodies of the great movie detectives, all trying to solve the same inane mystery. It was something different for the then very popular playwright/screenwriter and was not his most popular work...although it remains one of my favorites.

3 comments:

  1. Loved Simon's follow-up, THE CHEAP DETECTIVE, as well! Peter Falk was great!!

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  2. And POOF! Just like that, I learn that Falk has passed away. Crap.

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  3. Currently watching the MHMH ep that would air tonight for affiliates who started the series on its original premiere date, "s1 e124"; then I cross-checked with your local paper listings that night and found out with safe assumption your station (WXIX-TV ch 19) are 2 weeks behind in evening run, airing "s1 e114" (The last few segments were Tom, losing his second job and hitting the alcohol harder, asks Grampa Larkin the meaning of life, and Mary coming to terms with her next-door neighbor Howard's homosexuality.)

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