Sunday, October 18, 2020

Finishing the Fairy Tale

Began the day with work. Though I did end up in the register twice, I mostly spent the day outside with the carts. The head bagger doesn't work Sundays, and one of the baggers who does work weekends is on vacation. Fine by me. The weather was too nice to be inside all day anyway. It was just as nice as yesterday, with pale blue skies, fresh breezes, and pleasant 65-degree temperatures. Ran into Jodie while I pushed carts; she said she bought more shrimp for the Eagles luncheon.

That sounded intriguing, so I went straight home after work. Stopped at my place to put away my jacket and a few other things, then went around to the door on Jodie's side of the house. Mark, Joya, Rose, Craig, and their kids were enjoying a tasty shrimp scampi on white rice with Caesar salad and Rose's butterscotch fudge when I arrived. Yum! It was buttery and rich, just right. Dipped my bread in the butter sauce.

The kids didn't last very long. Even with the new pirate-themed Nick Jr. show Santiago of the Seas on, they screamed and roughoused with each other a little too much for Rose's liking. She ended up taking them home early, well before the end of the first half. 

The rest of us didn't stay much longer. Craig and I left during halftime. The game was terrible...well, the first half was. The Eagles played horrendously and were down 17-0 when they left. I didn't see it, but they apparently came back in a big way by the fourth quarter. Not enough to win, alas, but losing 30-28 to the Baltimore Ravens looks a heck of a lot better than 17-0!

Spent the rest of the afternoon finally finishing Fairy Tale Blank. Charles is hailed as a hero by one and all, including his friend Brett, and gets a kiss on the cheek from Richard. He finally awakens right before the next show is to begin, and gets a surprise when he sees a pretty young woman on the bottom row who looks an awful lot like the witch. She says her name is Joan Collins, and she specializes in, well, rather witchy roles...

Whew! That one took me over a year, but between the Match Game marathons and all the hours I had, I didn't get to a lot of writing between late March and early May, and then I moved. It's my third novel-length fanfic. It's so long, I won't have the time to post it all tonight. Here's part 8; I'll post the first parts tomorrow morning.


Finished The Apple Tree, which I began this morning, while having leftover lentil soup for dinner. This oddity is an anthology of three musicals, all with the overriding theme of unusual boy-meets-girl stories featuring Alan Alda as the boy, Barbara Harris as the girl, and Larry Blyden running interference. The first one literally retells the beginning, with Alda as Adam, Harris as Eve, and Blyden as the snake in the garden. The second is a retelling of the ending-less short story The Lady and the Tiger. Harris is the princess who has to make the terrible choice, Alda is her lover, and Blyden is a balladeer. The third is the Jules Feiffer spoof Passionella, featuring Harris as a chimney sweep-turned-star by a voice in her TV set, Alda as her rough-and-ready Prince Charming who isn't what he seems, and Blyden as their fairy god...er, person. 

Evidently, critics took fault with this one when it was revived a decade ago, finding the stories dated and the music only ok. I wonder if it might do better nowadays, with anthologies having become popular on TV again. "Adam and Eve" is a touching rumination on finding love and growing old; "Passionella" is a hilarious spoof of what happens when we suddenly get everything we want. I'm less fond of "The Lady and the Tiger." The passionate operetta-style music doesn't fit with the shows that bookend it, and the conceit of the open ending works better on the printed page than onstage. 

Ended the night online with game shows on YouTube. I enjoyed Name That Tune so much last week, I looked up more of it and other music-themed game shows. In addition to a short-lived daytime version of Kennedy's Name That Tune, the show would see another revival in 1984 with Jim Lange hosting. This is the version I remember most from it's run on USA. It was a lot of fun to try to guess the Golden Medley and see if I knew pop standards as well as the contestants!

Name That Tune is hardly the only game show that revolved around guessing songs. Actor Richard Bly hosted the short-lived Face the Music in 1980. This is another one I loved watching on USA. This time, the contestants have to guess a series of songs that relate to a person, place or thing, and then guess that person. Evidently, the show was better-known for its wacky contestants than the gameplay. While the men in the episode I selected are fairly subdued, the lady is a pip, big, blonde, and very noisy!

Musical Chairs from 1975 is the rarest of the shows I watched tonight, with only about four or five episodes known to exist. It has a lot in common with Face the Music, only instead of using the song to guess a face, they used it to either guess a trivia question related to it, or guess the next lyric of the song. It's too bad the show didn't last long. It made history by having the first African-American game show host, ultra-hip Adam Wade. He occasionally joined a young Irene Cara, singer Mary Stuart, and soul group the Spinners to perform songs ranging from "The Candy Man" to "Country Roads" to the Spinners' nifty version of "Fascinating Rhythm." 

Try these shows out if you need a little background music this evening! As a bonus, Musical Chairs and the 1977 Name That Tune come complete with their original commercials. 

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