Rant #2,496: Jam Up and Jelly Tight

How was your New Year's Eve and Day?

Mine was as quiet as it has ever been, and honestly, that was OK with me.

We celebrated on New Year's Eve by having Chinese food with my parents, and the meal was just so good. We had food left over, and had it all for dinner on New Year's Day.

Then, my wife and I watched "The Twilight Zone" marathon on the SyFy channel, a few hours of it at least. Name me one show on the current TV schedule that even approaches this series ... nope, you can't.

Admittedly, my wife and I fell asleep during the marathon, around 10 p.m. or so, but I awoke at a little before 11 p.m. to watch WWE Backstage show on Fox Sports I with my son. Funny, I mentioned to him that the show came on a bit early--at about 10:59 or so--and since it was obviously taped, when they did their countdown to 2020, they were off by a few seconds. And lo and behold, their countdown was off, so we turned on that Dick Clark travesty on ABC, and watched the actual countdown to the new year.

(The less said about that show, hosted by Ryan Seacrest, the better. What it was with Dick Clark at the helm, and what it has turned in to, defies description, and I won't waste any further mention of it here.)

I spent some time looking at the job postings on Wednesday, and actually applied for a few jobs on New Year's Day. Then. my wife and I had nothing to do during the day, so we ventured out to a local supermarket--Stew Leonard's, not your typical supermarket by any stretch of the imagination--picked up a few things, and that was that with that.

Yesterday afternoon, in between digitizing some LPs that I wanted to put into that format and listen to in the car, I watched a few movies, or actually, about one and a half movies, both off of YouTube. Both weren't very good, but are of interest because of their links to other things that are actually pretty interesting.

The first one, the one I watched all the way through, was called "Johnny Doughboy" and it is a 1942 film that I had heard about, always wanted to see with my own eyes, and I finally got to see it when a mention of the film on Facebook sparked my curiosity once again.

Let me try to summarize this film ... it stars Jane Withers, who was "Josephine the Plumber" in all of those Comet cleanser commercials from the 1960s to the 1990s. Anyway, people forget that she was a top kid actor in the 1930s and 1940s, and in this film, her character, also a top kid actor, wants to break away from the young roles and be taken seriously as an older female of 16 or so. Her agent--who just happens to be William Demarest, yes, "Uncle Charley" on "My Three Sons" two decades later, warns her against this, and she storms out on her own vacation from being a kid, driving--yes, at 16 years old--away from her estate and having her car run out of gas, leading her to another estate with a maid and an older, wealthy man.

In between all of this, a contest winner for the closest lookalike to Withers' character arrives at the star's mansion, all starry eyed about meeting her doppleganger. Anyway, one thing leads to another, and this young girl ends up subbing for the real thing for awhile, most notably in her dealings with a group of former child actors of some note, who want to put on a show to demonstrate both how patriotic they are and also, how available they are to a Hollywood that has shunned them and labeled them as has beens.

This group includes former Our Gang stars George "Spanky" McFarland and Carl "Alfalfa" Switzer, and the group wants Withers to headline this show. One thing leads to another and she does do just that, but their constant complaining and moaning and singing about how they are has beens really was kind of true by 1942, wasn't it?

Yes, this film is a curiosity in itself, and it is nice to see Alfalfa and Spanky in roles other than the ones they played in The Little Rascals. And as for Withers and Demarest, they ended up having long, long careers in Hollywood, albeit on television.

The second film which I have only partially watched is "Hot Blooded Woman" from 1965, although it looks like it was made a bit earlier. The black and white film has no notable stars, although the female star of this "roughie" movie--films that pushed the envelope way back when about what was permissible to be shown on screen, such as violence and sexual themes--became somewhat notorious a few years after starring in this movie.

The film chronicles the unhappy marriage between two young people, one who was a country girl who wasn't worldly and the other a gentleman who knew the ways of the world. Once they were married, the situations are reversed, and the woman becomes very worldly in certain matters (I will leave it to you to figure that out), while the man wants little or nothing to do with her.

That is pretty much it, and as I said, I have not finished the film, so hopefully, there is more than that.

But the interesting thing is that the female lead, Beverly Oliver, later became a footnote in history.

In the footage of the John F. Kennedy assassination from November 1963, there is a blond woman with her hair tied up in a scarf that can be seen, and it appears she is carrying a camera. Up until 197- or so, she was unknown, but Oliver proclaimed that SHE was the woman, and some believed her, some did not.

"The Babushka Lady" did have some credence to her story. She was an associate of Jack Ruby, the strip club owner who became famous as the killer of Lee Harvey Oswald. Oliver was a dancer who was friends with the top stripper at Ruby's strip club, so there was some validity to what she was claiming to be.

Since nobody else has ever stepped forward to claiming to be this woman, perhaps she is telling the truth. In fact, in addition to appearing in a few other films during her short movie career, Oliver made a cameo in Oliver Stone's "JFK" film.

Anyway, so there you have it. That is what I did during New Year's. Nothing too exciting.

And yes, I mourn the loss of the NBA's David Stern and baseball's Don Larsen. I heard about their passings yesterday afternoon. Very said indeed.

Speak to you tomorrow.