Rant #2,952: Keeping the Faith

It is Monday, and after a pretty dull weekend, I have a bit of insomnia, so I am writing this when most of you are sleeping … and I should be sleeping too.
 
I find that since I was forced into retirement, I do some of my best thinking during the wee hours of the night, when I don’t sleep much.
 
I have figured out that all my maladies that I have suffered recently have to do with my state of mind, the state of mind that was forced upon me by retirement at way too early in my life.
 
You get into a routine when you work, and after 40 years of that same routine—no matter where I worked—that routine was taken away from me, and it has had a toll on my body, not just on my soul and my mind.
 
Just this weekend, I had another mishap which I have never experienced before that I am not going to go into now, but it got me to thinking that when I had a steady routine, this stuff didn’t happen to me, but now, out of that routine, my body is really off of its axis, and all of these weird, out-of-left-field things are happening to me simply because my body is so out of whack.
 
There is really nothing that I can do about it; I can’t change my situation, so I just have to roll with the flow as best as I can.
 
So after a weekend where I did pretty much absolutely nothing, my body continues to fall apart, and there remains a black cloud over me, but at least I understand it now.
 
This past weekend was pretty dull: I watched a few horrid movies that aren’t worth mentioning—they make the film that I talked about on Friday seem like “Gone With the Wind” in comparison—and here I am at 2 a.m. in the morning, and I can’t sleep.
 
Anyway, to bide my time during this past weekend, I did watch on TV a little bit of a marathon of “The Flying Nun” that MeTV ran on Sunday.
 
As I have spoken about in past, I have been enamored of his series starring Sally Field since it premiered more than 50 years ago on ABC. I even read the book by Tere Rios that was the basis for the series, and a show about a nun who could fly because of her size and her headgear really enthralled me way back when as a kid and still does so all these years later.
 
Anyway, they had an episode on yesterday that I had not seen since it probably originally ran in 1967, and it hit a couple of targets for why I love the series to this day, as well as some other bull’s-eyes that I will describe to you as we go along here.
 
The episode, entitled “The Reconversion of Sister Shapiro,” was quite an interesting entry of the show, and demonstrated, watching it more than 50 years after the fact, how television and America 2022 is so different than it was way back when.
 
The show revolved around young Linda Shapiro, who was the “adopted” niece of playboy Carlos Ramirez—whatever “adopted niece" means--and who was coming to visit “Uncle” Carlos in Puerto Rico during the summer.
 
You might remember that on the show, Ramirez was the love/non-love interest of Sally Field’s Sister Bertrille character, and Alejandro Rey plays this character to the hilt on the show, balancing his girl-watching skills with his love tor the church and his sort of admiration for Sister Bertrille in a G-rated way, which she reciprocates in kind.
 
Anyway, Linda comes to Puerto Rico to be with her “uncle” as her parents tend to their business, but there is one problem—“Uncle” Carlos has a big business deal to complete, but it will force him to travel away from Puerto Rico for a few days and Sister Bertrille says that her convent will be able to watch over young Linda while her “uncle” is away.
 
So, young Linda—played by one of the most popular child stars of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Pamelyn Ferdin, who you might remember played Felix Unger’s daughter Edna on “The Odd Couple” TV show—goes off to the convent, where she is as bored as can be and can’t fit in with the other kids.
 
Sister Bertrille sees this, and when all else fails, she says that Linda can be her assistant, and Linda goes about shadowing the sister, and finding that even though the duties she is helping out with are pretty mundane for what is to be a summer vacation, she is starting to enjoy herself and her time at the convent.
 
And when she finally sees Sister Bertrille flying in the Puerto Rican tailwinds, young Linda is fully ingratiated with the sister, and decides that she wants to be a nun just like her new hero.
 
This is where things gets interesting, from both a social and a series standpoint.
 
With the name of “Shapiro,” young Linda is Jewish, although the words “Jewish” and “Jew” are never uttered on the show.
 
She is, of course, dissuaded from her choice of career, because “she is of a different faith”—that is as far as that theme goes on the show—and once “Uncle” Carlos returns and finds out about his adopted niece’s supposed conversion, he has a fit and claims that he let Linda’s parents down while they entrusted the young girl in his care.
 
But Sister Bertrille has a scheme to get young Linda to back away from being a sister, which she employs when Linda’s parents return to pick her up.
 
In what is one of the great admissions about an actual mistake in programming that was ever made on network TV, Sister Bertrille digs up some “footage” of her previous life as a carefree teenager, trying to show Linda that she should live life first before making any drastic changes to it.
 
The “footage” that Sister Bertrille uses is actually scans of Sally Field on her previous ABC show, "Gidget,” a program that ABC admitted it wrongly canceled despite its popularity two years earlier.
 
They still had Field under contract in spite of the cancellation, and her contract stated that she need to be put into another ABC show if “Gidget” failed, and that show turned out to be “The Flying Nun,” a show that Field did not like—because it took her out of her comfort zone as a young woman of the mid 1960s doing young woman things and wearing young women’s clothing and such—and to which if you believe the actress, was forced upon her by her stepfather against her will.
 
So ABC pretty much acknowledged Field’s popularity in "Gidget"—and their own mistakes—by using this “footage” in this “Flying Nun” episode.
 
And, getting back to the episode, the ploy worked, and young Linda “unconverted” herself and went back to being a young kid, but learned to be kind to others through the experience.
 
I just found the way that the show and ABC handled being Jewish so interesting all these years later, pretty much covering it up although it was the major plot device of the episode.
 
And what makes this all the more interesting—and kind of allows you to understand why it was done in the way that it was—was that this episode was written by Jews—Austin and Irma Kalish, who were the Goffin and King of writing TV sitcoms during this era—and was directed by a Jew and, in fact, the creative backing ot the entire series was Jewish.
 
Back more than 50 years ago, TV was far less open than it is today, and pretty much all the series on the air at the time had WASP-y  characters … network TV was not ready for Jewish characters and other "types" of characters during this period, so as not to "offend" Middle America, I guess.
 
But ABC, the third network at the time, would do anything to get ratings and to cut across this belief, and shows such as “That Girl,” “Bewitched” and even later on “The Partridge Family” shoehorned in Jewish characters on an episode-by-episode basis, in stories written by Jews, directed by Jews, on series that were often the creation of Jews.
 
The door was closed to Jews as Jews on network TV at the time, so even though Jews were creatively bringing us much of what was offered on network TV, having characters that were obviously Jewish was verboten, so these creative people had to go through the “back door” to get such characters on network shows.
 
So that episode was very interesting on a number of levels, and having not seen it in more than 50 years, I personally had forgotten that it even existed … but it is an interesting footnote to American television on a number of levels … yes, now we have “The Goldbergs,” but even that show took a few seasons to acknowledge that the title family was Jewish, and while its creative team is Jewish, it has taken a rather negative stance on being Jewish in America in the 1980s, so things really haven’t changed that much, have they?
 
So that was my weekend, and here I am, at now after 3 a.m. in the morning, and I am wide awake …
 
I guess my next step is to run a spell check of what I have written here and then go to sleep, or at least try to.
 
I will start counting sheep, but this poor Jewish guy wonders ...

Are sheep kosher?