Morning With My Sister

Had a quick start this morning with breakfast and What's My Line? Turned the TV on just as they were going into the second guest. No one got close to figuring out the lady was the first female high school football referee in the state of Michigan. Soupy Sales, on the other hand, guessed in a few questions that the Mystery Guest was one of his favorite actresses, the lovely and multi-talented Joan Bennett. The third was a man who made a new type of coffee cup holder.

I just got online when Jessa arrived. We looked over all the phone lines and various companies...and came to the conclusion that the lines are fine the way they are for now. She and Joe are ok taking over Dad's payment for my extra line while I figure things out. For now, I think I will go to the T-Mobile behind the Acme tomorrow and pick up a new phone. As I was reminded last night, my cell phone really is done for. I'm worried it'll die completely one of these days. 

Even after we finished online, we continued chatting. She's now working for Amazon packing boxes for shipping. She only works during the weekend and one or two days during the week, but it's not much money or insurance, and it's very stressful. She did get the chance to give me sleep socks for Christmas, and I finally got around to giving her the last bag of Christmas cookies I made. We watched The Match Game-Hollywood Squares Hour while looking at old photos of Dad, her mother and my first stepmother Kaye, and Uncle Ken when we were little.

Jessa dropped me off at work. Thankfully, no problems today. I pushed carts and gathered trash and recycling almost the entire afternoon, except for the 15 minutes I ended up going in for a cashier so they could go on their break. By the end of the night, I had another bagger out with me and not a whole lot to do. Thankfully, there were no mistakes with Uber this time, and I went straight home. 

In fact, I got home so fast, I arrived in time for the second half of Match Game PM. This was the very last episode of the nighttime show in 1980. This time, it's Bart Braverman's turn to flirt with an especially cute contestant, while Betty White sat in for her friend Brett and made jokes. We skipped way ahead in 1988 on Sale of the Century. The champ had a hard battle with a smart lady who bought a fax machine, but he just barely got ahead in the Speed Round and won the bonus round puzzles with one second left.

Finished the night online, watching Idiot's Delight on demand at TCM. I enjoyed Clark Gable's goofy girlie dance routine from That's Entertainment so much, I thought I'd look up the movie it came from. Harry Van (Gable) meets Irene (Norma Shearer) in Omaha in 1919 when she debunks the drunk mentalist he's working for. She thinks he could be so much more; he thinks her claims about being Russian and her dreaming are as phony as a three-dollar bill. Twenty years later, he's taking a group of girl dancers through Europe when they're stranded at a hotel in a country about to go to war. Among the other guests stranded there are an arms dealer (Edward Arnold), an agitated pacifist who is convinced the arms dealer's weapons started the war (Burgess Meredith), and a young couple on their honeymoon (Pat Paterson and Peter Willes). There's also a blonde countess with a fake Russian accent who seems awfully familiar to Harry...

Honestly, the dance number is the best thing about this. While Shearer and Gable do have chemistry, the movie was based after a play and comes off as wordy, static, and preachy, and the anti-war plot has dated very badly. The movie uses two endings, one based after the original play for international audiences, one ignoring the bombings for US audiences. Neither ending works very well or makes a shred of sense. If you love Gable or Shearer, are familiar with the Pulitzer-winning play of the same name, or know what was going on in 1939, you may want to check this out at least once. Everyone else is better off catching Gable's vaudeville number on That's Entertainment or online.