Rant #2,563: The "Dawn" of Correction

Funny how things work out.
 
In this case, it actually is kind of eerie, to be honest with you.
 
I was going to use “The Dawn of Correction” title for my Rant today regarding my feelings for the new year dawning and all the hope that it brings, but my purpose kind of was derailed a bit when an icon from my youth finally left the island that she has been indelibly stranded on for the past more than 50 years.

 Yes, I am talking about Dawn Wells, who played the iconic character of Mary Ann Summers on the classic sitcom “Gilligan’s Island,” who passed away yesterday from the COVID virus at age 82.
 
“Gilligan’s Island” was blasted by the critics from the get go as one of the silliest and stupidest sitcoms up to that point in time, but it made an indelible impression on Baby Boomer viewers like me, and the Sherwood Schwartz-produced show was perfectly cast, led by Bob Denver as Willie Gilligan and Alan Hale Jr. as Jonas Grumby, better known as “The Skipper.”
 
Jim Backus and Natalie Schaefer played money-loving Thurston Howell III and his wife Lovey Howell, respectively, and Russell Johnson was perfect as the all-knowing yet knowing nothing Professor, whose name was Roy Hinkley.
 
But what about the Ginger and Mary Ann characters?
 
Tina Louise, as Ginger Grant, the movie actress, and Wells as Summers, the wide-eyed small town girl, were characters that were not set in stone when the original pilot for the show was done and other actresses played the two younger women on the show.
 
But when the pilot didn’t do much, the show was recast, Louise and Wells were in, and the rest is history.
 
Wells was a former Miss Nevada who had had a decent career as a perky character actress a few years prior to her casting as Mary Ann, but once “Gilligan’s Island” began its three-year run on the CBS schedule for its 96-episode run, Wells was Mary Ann and Mary Ann was Wells, and the two could not be separated.
 
When the run of the show was over, Wells continued her career as a character actress, but the heightened popularity of “Gilligan’s Island” in reruns kind of made her stuck in time, and always looked at as one of the castaways no matter what else she did, and this was the effect on Louise as well, and that is why she turned her back on the series and just about all of its reunions.
 
But Wells was different; unlike Louise, she embraced the Mary Ann role for the rest of her life, never tiring of talking about her character, and she kind of reveled in the fact that people actually remembered her for being Mary Ann.
 
She appeared in all the reunion movies, the cartoon show, and just about anything else that sprung out of the “Gilligan’s Island” cottage industry for the rest of her life.
 
The perky Wells did have a bit of a dark side, too.
 
She was forever linked with Denver, who had become over time one of the most up-front potheads in the country, advocating for the legal use of the drug when this was the furthest thing from most people’s minds.
 
Wells and Denver were very friendly during and after the “Gilligan” years, and Denver and his wife and Wells actually lived in the same housing complex, which further linked her to Denver’s very up-front marijuana use.
 
Wells denied being as endeared to the drug as her former co-star was, but she was cited a couple of times for minor offenses related to the drug.
 
Once, after a traffic stop, the drug was found in her car, but she claimed that it had been left there by someone else and that it was not hers, and she didn’t even know it was in the car.
 
Yup. I believe she paid a minor fine and that was the end of it.
 
Wells also had major tax problems, which translates to the fact that for a number of years, she somehow forgot to pay her taxes.
 
It all came back to haunt her a few years ago, when she was threatened with jail time for tax evasion.
 
She went to her adoring public, begged for help, and the public ended up paying her tax bill, and then some.
 
But with her death, I guess you can say she finally got off that island that she was on for so many decades.
 
But it took the coronavirus to release her from that purgatory, and that is where this Rant was going to originally take off from.

 

During the past 10 months or so, our civilization has been on the “Eve of Destruction,” with our world changed so much by the coming of the coronavirus.

Even if you haven’t had the dreaded disease yourself, it has impacted your life in so many ways, changed the way we all do things and probably changed them forever.
 
And for the hundreds of thousands of people who have died from this disease—including Wells, and for that matter, my father in law—well, it has taken too many people away from us way too soon.

 
But 2021 may offer us “The Dawn of Correction,” as we now have a vaccine which will supposedly stop this scourge in its very tracks.
 
I don’t know if I fully buy into this—I think like the regular flu, the vaccines being touted now will mitigate the virus, as do the flu vaccines we have, and not fully remove the disease—but whatever the case, the existence of these vaccines gives us hope for 2021 and for the future, so yes, we might just be on the path to “The Dawn of Correction” in 2021.
 
Hopefully.
 
But it is probably going to take the entirety of the year to find out, because the vaccine won’t be available to the general public until late spring at the earliest.
 
Next year at this time, we will probably know if we are still at “The Eve of Destruction” or right smack dab in the middle of “The Dawn of Correction.”
 
Whatever the case, this past year has been a horrible one for myself and my family and probably for everyone else too.
 
I lost my father this past year, not to COVID but to pneumonia, something that he had kicked a couple of times in recent years but ultimately couldn’t beat this time around.
 
I have seen my world crumble around me due to the coronavirus, and while we all say that we can’t go through another year like 2020, 2021 doesn’t appear to be starting any different than 2020 ended … but at least we have some hope now that things will get better, that perhaps we are on the right path now.
 
Who knows? I mean, who really knows what the future will bring us?
 
I certainly don’t, and whether you are your average Joe or somebody working on the front lines of this scourge, you don’t know, either.
 
Nor do our leaders, who seem to know less about the condition of the human condition than the average person does, but they are our leaders, so we have to follow what they say and do, even if it is highly contradictory.
 
In effect, we are all “The Professor” now, knowing what we know but not knowing enough to get us fully off this horrible “island” of sickness that we are on.

Are we still in "The Eve of Destruction," or at we at "The Dawn of Correction?"

Let's see what happens.
 
So goodbye to 2020, welcome to 2021, and let’s keep our fingers crossed that 2021 will be an improvement over 2020.
 
Have a good and safe new year, and I will speak to you again on Monday.

Rant #2,562: You Got What It Takes

Maybe I should be dreaming about my stimulus check, which is supposedly in the mail as we speak today, but I had a really bizarre dream last night that kept me going so much that I completely overslept.
 
Let me backtrack first before I tell you about the dream.
 
Since not having to go to a workplace for so many months, my sleep pattern has definitely changed.
 
I used to wake up at 4 a.m. in the morning, do what I had to do for two hours—including writing this column—and then go to work.
 
With no place to go since October 2019, I usually sleep until 6 a.m., or thereabouts, and begin my day.
 
At night, my sleeping habits haven’t really changed that much.
 
I watch pro wrestling with my son at least four days a week, and I have always fallen asleep in the middle of the show, whether well into it or right from the beginning.
 
No big deal when I was waking up at 4 a.m. I would just slide into bed, and wake up at 4 a.m.
 
But now, with no workplace to go to, I usually sleep until about 1 a.m., and then I can’t get to sleep until about 3 a.m., tossing and turning and sometimes going into the living room to sleep there.
 
I recently decided that if and when I fall asleep during the wrestling shows, when I woke up, I would not go into bed, but I would persevere and watch the show until the end, and then go into bed.
 
The ploy worked for a few days, but yesterday, I found myself to be very tired and worn out, for whatever reason.
 
So yesterday, I tried to watch the wrestling show with my son, passed out at about 8:15 p.m., woke up at about 9:30 p.m., tried to watch the remainder of the show, passed out again, and woke up briefly when the show was over at 10 p.m., and then I went into the bed.
 
I woke up at about 1 a.m., fell black asleep until about 3 a.m., but I felt it was very warm in the room—not an uncommon occurrence for me, I often feel warm when others are cold, like my wife—and I went into the living room to sleep.
 
I must have been in the living room for a good two hours, and then I went back into the bedroom, and didn’t get up until about 6:30 a.m., which is even more odd because my wife has to work today, so she gets up at about 5:30 a.m.—and I heard absolutely nothing.
 
So with this cockeyed sleep of more than 10 hours behind me, I told my wife that I had one of the weirdest dreams I have ever had. I don’t remember too much about it, but let me relate it to you and maybe you can figure it all out.
 
I was a kid again, going to P.S. 30 in South Jamaica, Queens, the neighborhood I lived in while growing up that is known as Rochdale Village. I have spoken about this place many times in my Rants, and it still holds a certain place in my heart even though I haven’t lived there in nearly 50 years.
 
Anyway, I was in class, and they were having “glee club” —I put that term in quotes because that is what my dream said it was, and not the “chorus”—auditions, and I wanted to be a member of the “glee club.”
 
Suffice it to say that I never wanted to be in the “glee club” or “chorus” or whatever it was called way back when, because to this day, I cannot sing a note, and even as a young kid, I knew that this was not my thing.
 
But in my dream, I wanted to be part of the “glee club” so badly that even when I was told that I could not be a member of this group, I wanted to be part of the “glee club” so bad that I actually tackled the teacher who led this group, and I mean tackled her so hard that we both hit the ground as if I was on the football field, not in the classroom.
 
In real life, the teacher I was tacking would have been maybe Mrs. Rampey if I was as young as the dream portrayed me to be, and in real life, this was a teacher I had no use for at all, a teacher who really never treated me very kindly because that is how she treated anyone who she felt had no musical talent.
 
I remember way back when that I lost my recorder—it was probably stolen—and I was relegated to the back of the room with all the other students who didn’t have a recorder either through it being lost, stolen, or they simply could not afford to buy one (no allowances were made back then for kids too poor to buy the instrument).
 
I remember that I felt so out of it in her class, and she did nothing to placate those without recorders, gave us no work to do and pretty much ignored us.
 
Anyway, back to the dream …
 
So I tackled the “glee club” teacher, whether it was Mrs. Rampey or someone else, and I started to sing to her a song that I knew the words to, to get her to put me in this group.
 
What was the song that I sang to her as I tackled her?
 
It was the Dave Clark Five version of “You Got What It Takes,” and I sang it to her so well that she allowed me into the group!
 
And that is all I remember.
 
Now, why did I sing that song to her?
 
I have absolutely no idea.
 
I know the words to so many songs, or kind of know the words, and yes, as a kid in 1967, this was not only a huge hit for the band, but I absolutely loved the song, and still do.
 
I still remember their rendition of the song on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and that the lyrics were just so easy to remember that you just had to sing along, even me who was tone deaf.
 
“You don’t drive no big fast car, no
 
You don’t look like a movie star
 
And on your money we won’t get far
 
But babeeeeee, yeah yeah,
 
You got what it takes.”
 
Those are the partial lyrics, but I can still hear the DC5’s Mike Smith singing those lyrics so happily on the Sullivan show, that the happiness was infectious.
 
And in my dream, for the first time in any dream that I have ever had in my 63 years, or at least for the first time in any dream that I have had that I can recall, I sang those exact lyrics—over and over and over.
 
After I woke up, the dream was still fresh in my mind, and I wondered what the dream meant.
 
Had I heard the song recently on the radio? No, I can tell you that I have not heard that song on the radio—even satellite radio—for quite a while.
 
What did the basics of the dream represent, when the teacher allowed me into the “glee club?”
 
I think the whole thing is related to where I am today as opposed to where I was a year ago.
 
A year ago at this time, I had been out of work for more than two months, with no sense of hope and no future, and believe me, as you know, all of this hit me hard, even though for the final months of my place of business’ existence, I pretty much knew that when they were finally done, I was pretty much done too.
 
Flash forward a year, and I am not only semi-retired, but I have a remote job to keep me going, one that came to me completely out of the blue, right before my unemployment was set to run out.
 
So right now< I am content, and I think that that is what the dream meant.
 
I did whatever I could during those horrible months to find a new job, ran into nothing but brick walls for a variety of reasons, and then VOILA!, right out of the ether I had something.
 
I was part of a real-life “glee club,” finally, not told why I wasn’t right for the job but told that I would be perfect for such a job.
 
And that is how I go into the beginning of the new year, meaning that I am content.
 
And that is what the dream meant.
 
Sorry Mrs. Rampey … all these years later, you were WRONG about me, You never gave me a chance to show you what I could do!
 
So Mrs. Rampey represented the workforce, the companies I applied to, and my rendition of “You Got What It Takes” was my proof that I could do a good job if given the chance.

And like the work I do--which is pretty much an extension of what I was doing when I lost my job--I know what I am doing inside and out, so it had to be that song, a song I know the words to inside and out.
 
See, I did figure it out on my own, and yes, evidently I do have “what it takes.”
 
Funny how the mind works, isn’t it? 

Rant #2,561: Downtown

A few days ago, a popular tourist section in downtown Nashville, Tennessee was taken out by a mad bomber who decided that since he wanted to end his life, why not take the city with him?
 
The guy evidently was an electronics expert, and he knew how to set things up so that he could do this without being detected, which in this day of surveillance cameras all over the place, is kind of hard to believe, but he did it.
 
Whether he wanted to die a martyr—a neighbor claimed that he told him something to the effect that “everyone will know my name” without any explanation about what he meant—or he just wanted to make a statement about telecommunications companies—the explosives went off right in front of an AT&T building in the downtown area—remains to be figured out, but this guy was a crazy person, but a crazy person with enough knowledge about how to do such an act—
 
And he did it.
 
That is scary in itself, and now, with him dead and part of the rubble that his deed left behind, authorities may never know the real reason(s) that he did what he did, and they are now trying to piece together any clues that they can find to try to figure out this whole thing.
 
They have found a person who was supposedly highly intelligent, and electronics expert, someone whose home turned up lots of items that would attest to his vast knowledge.
 
They have searched his credit card receipts, found that in addition to what he already had, he had purchased some other items that could be linked to explosions, and that this was not a random act, it was an act that was meticulously planned over a period of time.
 
He even set up a van with loudspeakers, telling the populace of the explosion before it actually took place, on a tape loop with a supposed female voice warning people to stay away.
 
The police have said that he acted alone, so I figure that that “female” voice was created by him to throw authorities off.
 
But looking for every clue they can find, the authorities have said that that tape loop also included a popular song from yesteryear, a song whose lyrics they are now combing through to try to find out exactly what they mean in the context of what this sick person did.
 
The song id “Downtown,” one of the most beloved songs of the “British Invasion” era that spawned the likes of British acts led by the Beatles taking over the American music charts and changing the music we listen to forever.
 
The song, written by Tony Hatch, made Petula Clark an international star, rising to the top spot on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1964 and spawning a career for Clark, already a star in Europe but prior to this song, never quite hitting her stride in the U.S.
 
The song is Clark’s signature tune of her 70-year career, and has been covered by many other artists, including Dolly Parton.
 
But what does this song have to do with the Christmas Day bombing? That is what the authorities are trying to find out, and the answer may be within those lyrics.
 
Here are the lyrics of the song, from the metrolyrics website (https://www.metrolyrics.com/downtown-lyrics-petula-clark.html):
 
“When you're alone and life is making you lonely
You can always go downtown.
When you've got worries all the noise and the hurry
Seems to help I know downtown.
You can always go downtown.
When you've got worries all the noise and the hurry
Seems to help I know downtown.
Just listen to the music of the traffic in the city
Linger on the sidewalk where the neon signs are pretty
How can you lose?
The lights are much brighter there
you can forget all your troubles, forget all your cares
so go downtown
Things will be great when you're downtown
No finer place for sure downtown
Everything's waiting for you.
Don't hang around and let your problems surround you
There are movie shows downtown.
Maybe you know some little places to go to
where they never close downtown.
Just listen to the rhythm of a gentle bossa nova
You'll be dancing with 'em too before the night is over
happy again.
The lights are much brighter there
you can forget all your troubles, forget all your cares
so go - downtown
Where all the lights are bright downtown
waiting for you tonight downtown
you're gonna be alright now
downtown
downtown
downtown
And you may find somebody kind to help and understand you
Someone who is just like you and needs a gentle hand to
guide them along.
So maybe I'll see you there
we can forget all our troubles, forget all our cares
so go downtown
Things will be great when you're downtown
don't wait a minute more downtown
Everything is waiting for you
downtown
downtown
downtown
downtown
downtown
downtown
downtown... “
 
What do the lyrics mean, and what did these lyrics mean to the perpetrator?
 
On the surface, they appear to be pretty innocuous; you can be part of the crowd if you go “downtown,” and going there will cure all the ills that you might have in your life during the time that you are there.
 
And I guess that that, in itself, might be a movie for what happened.
 
This guy felt so isolated, so thrown away be society, that the only place he could feel wanted is “downtown,”
 
So he went there, decided to blow himself up to take him out of his misery, and take that area with him.
 
Seems simple, but he could have also used the song as part of his manifesto to throw off the authorities.
 
Maybe his plan was more dastardly than that.
 
The Nashville police—whose heroic actions perhaps thwarted this deranged lunatic from taking out anyone else with his deed—have stated that we may never know what prompted this miscreant to do what he did.
 
Are the answers in the lyrics?
 
With this downtown area in rubble, and with Nashville of course looking for not only answers but the will and strength to rebuild this area, one other unfortunate byproduct of this horrible deed—and really nothing compared to the destruction that was the deed’s aftermath—is that the song “Downtown” will never be looked at again as just a popular, innocuous song from the mid-1960s.
 
I doubt you will hear that song on oldies stations for the time being, with those stations putting it on hold as the investigation unfurls.
 
Maybe one day, “Downtown” will return to just being what it was intended to be, a great pop song, but right now, it carries way too much weight because some mad bomber decided to make it his theme song.
 
Hopefully one day, when downtown Nashville is rebuilt and flourishes once again, we can also look at “Downtown” in the way it was intended, not in the way this horrible person stole it from us for his own dastardly means.
 
Hopefully those times will come soon.