Rant #3,324: Here, There, and Everywhere

I am back!

I did what I had to do for work, and once again, audio problems held me up, but I was able to get the job done, thank goodness.

I am still not sleeping well, but evidently just enough to get away with it. My recent nuclear stress test came back fine, and every medical test I have had during the past few weeks has come back OK, so all of this must be in my head. It remains a major problem that I have, and I am working on it as best I can.

And after pretty much giving away a few days to get my work done, yesterday was a somewhat slower day, and I returned to watching some TV and relaxing a bit, which is something I could not do the last few days.

I watched the usual stuff, baseball, local and national news shows, and classic sitcoms, the latter of which I just find so much more satisfying than the sitcoms being produced today.

Those old shows were funny. There is no "funny" today, because we have forgotten how to.laugh at ourselves. 

But off my soapbox ...

One of the shows I watched was an episode of "Family Affair," the sitcom about the well-to-do bachelor architect who unwittingly inherits his two nieces and his nephew when their parents perish in a fatal accident.

The show was charming back then, giving the viewer a sanitized view of upper-crust New York City in the late 1960s and early 1970s, with a nice mix of actors, including grizzly Brian Keith as "Uncle Bill" Davis, and sweet as sugar kids Kathy Garver as Cissy, Anissa Jones as Buffy, and Johnny Whitaker as Jody.

And then there was Sebastian Cabot, who played the very proper English Gentleman's Gentleman who was so unique on American TV that at times, he made the show must-see TV as he somehow morphed into as much of a nanny as Fran Drescher was years later on "The Nanny" ... but in a much more dignified way.

Anyway, I just love sitcom "confluences," where a star best known for his or her role on anothet sitcom finds himself or herself on another such sitcom.

And it is even more interesting to me when this confluence is of child stars.

The episode of "Family Affair" that I watched guest starred Eve Plumb, later of "The Brady Bunch," appearing on the show.

This episode, which might be the best of the series, features Plumb playing Eve, a child with an unnamed disease which eventually proves fatal.

Anissa Jones--who in real life had numerous problems that led to her own early passing--as Buffy becomes friendly with Eve, and in her final days, they hold a very early Christmas party knowing that Eve has little time to go.

This is one of the few shows in the series that is pretty much straight drama, and the kids in the cast really seem to understand their roles in what ultimately was a very sad episode.

I have seen this episode so many times, and it still gets to me.

And this episode really pulls no punches in its presentation of severe childhood illness way before the Shriners and St. Jude really brought the reality of childhood illness to light.

But to the point, we have a quartet of the top TV child stars of the day on one show ... even though Garver is admittedly playing a character five years younger than she actually was in real life, playing 15 years old at 20, so compared with Jones, Whittaker and Plumb, she is kind of long in the tooth.

I just love these confluence of sitcom stars, and recently, I have seen "Dennis the Menace" Jay North playing Dennis on "The Donna Reed Show" with other top kid stars Shelley Fabares and Paul Petersen, and then seeing an older, teenage North playing Chip Douglas' (Stanley Livingston) buddy on "My Three Sons" with other growing older kid stars Don Grady and Barry Livingston.

I have recently seen Butch Patrick of "The Munsters" on "My Three Sons," and Keith Thibodeaux, "Little Ricky" on "I Love Lucy" appearing in a gaggle of episodes.of "The Andy Griffith Show" as Opie's (Ron Howard) buddy. 

ln what can be characterized as "what comes around goes around," Howard himself appeared on a couple of early episodes of "Dennis the Menace" as Dennis' younger friend.

There are just so many of these to name, and older actors get into it too; I recently saw an episode of "Gomer Pyle USMC" that featured Al Lewis, "Grandpa" on "The Munsters," playing opposite sitcom all-stars Jim Nabors as "Gomer" and Frank Sutton as "Sgt. Vince Carter."

I don't see as many confluences after the late 1960s and early 1970s, but during this very fertile period for network sitcoms, I guess you could see anybody on any show as long as they had breath in their body.

Back to "Family Affair" ... I was always enamored with this show, and looking back, I think it had as much to do with the uniqueness of the French character as it had to do with the often vanilla images of late 1960s and early 1970s New York City as anything else.

(And during the New York Mets doubleheader yesterday, series star Brian Keith was mentioned by the announcers on the TV broadcast related to his last name being shared with that of a Detroit Tigers player and the first name of Mets' broadcaster Keith Hernandez... and yes, "Family Affair" was mentioned, and a picture of Keith was shown on air during the broadcast.)

But admittedly, being an older adolescent moving into my early teenage years, I know that my eye was kind of watching Garver as the supposedly young teenager Cissy.

I think I kind of found her cute in my own way, an older girl that was so straightlaced in the Mod 1960s; the only out-of-the-box thing about her was what her mane of hair looked like from episode to episode.

And today, Garver does commercials for telephones for the elderly and/or hard of hearing!

My, how we have all gotten older as the years have passed!

But those confluences never get old, at least not to me.

Have a good weekend, and I will speak to you again on Monday.