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.