Profile
Photos
Comments
The year was 1964. The PC had not yet been invented. The Rocky Mountains had just recently formed and cooled. NASA’s Space Program had just given the world Tang. People were still getting their music from vibrations created by grooves cut in vinyl disks called LP’s. Everybody was watching moving pictures in their living rooms through cathode tubes, and Gilligan’s Island assaulted the air waves for the very first time.
Back in those Pre-Pac Man days, the three major television networks all began their new seasons during the same week of September, and Premiere Week was a much-anticipated event in every red-blooded American household. Prior to that week, the major networks hyped their new shows for two solid months, and Gilligan’s Island was the show that got the most attention during that summer.
I remember the very first episode of the show because I was eleven years old, and I was being punished on the night the show first aired. My punishment was no TV during premiere week., which was nothing short of capital punishment to an eleven-year-old at that time!
However, I did manage to catch glimpses of the show’s premiere, because I sneaked downstairs when my parents turned on the television. From a darkened, secluded corner of the downstairs hallway, I watched the television over my Dad’s shoulder as he sat in his Archie Bunker recliner chair.
It was there, in my secret hideaway, that I fell madly in love for the first time in my young life.
The next day, the nation’s men were clearly divided into two separate groups; the Ginger camp, and the Maryanne camp. Yours truly was firmly entrenched in the Maryanne camp!
(Everybody know the premise of the sit-com, right? A group of people take a chartered boat tour and end up as castaways on a uncharted island. The group includes two beautiful women: Ginger and Maryanne.)
Ginger, the movie star, was much too vain, too artificial, too self-centered, way too glitzy and too shallow for my tastes. I mean seriously, what kind of a person brings thirty glamorous evening gowns with her when embarking upon a three-hour tour?
Maryanne, on the other hand, was cute, sweet, unassuming, perky, and just, well, the kind of girl that you could dream about and still have no problems bringing home to mom and dad! And there was something about how nicely she filled out those gingham shirts that were knotted just under her…rib cage, and those tight, blue short-shorts!
Maryanne was the all-American girl from Iowa, and I had an immediate crush on her that has lasted for all of these years. Sweet, innocent, healthy-sexy, pure, squeaky-clean Maryanne!
Then this morning, while listening to a news story on the radio, my bubble burst. The story was about Maryanne’s alter ego, Dawn Wells, who just turned sixty-nine years old yesterday. Seems that Dawn was driving home from a birthday party thrown for her, and she got pulled over by a policeman. During that traffic stop, it was discovered that there were half-smoked roaches (marijuana joints) in the ashtray of her car. So she was arrested and given a three-hour tour of the local slammer.
Maryanne!!!!! How could you????!!!!! How could you turn sixty-nine?????!!!!! That is inexcusable! You were supposed to stay twenty-three forever!
And marijuana?????? How could you be so…so…so human??!!! Do they even HAVE marijuana in Iowa? I’ve loved you for so long and so fervently and so purely and so loyally for these long forty-four years, and this is how you treat me? This is how I’m rewarded?
Fine, then! Be that way! I don’t need you any more. You can go out and climb up on one of your marijuana clouds and just sail away, high above all of those corn fields, into oblivion for all I care! I have too much respect for myself to allow you treat me like this! You and I are history!!!!!!
I wonder what Tina Louise is doing these days?
