Lucky Thirteen

The man who could have aced my Wednesday quiz lives in New Jersey, turns out. Except he doesn't yet know I exist. We'll fix that. He even would have gotten Ernic Kovacs. Thanks, Frank, for keeping the torch lit in New Jersey.

Anyhoo. I got more to say. Natch.

So: You don't think thirteen is a lucky number?

Think twice.

How about a baker's dozen? Huh? Huh?

I'm lucky enough to be 41 and counting (my birthday, September 12--it fell on the Thursday before Friday the 13th in 1963, incidentally--and I'll have my wishlist up by then), so I remember the golden days of hippie public TV, most of it from WNET13, which we watched in Dallas on KERA13. I think the public stations got that channel because it was cheap and no one else wanted a jinxed number. Or maybe they were making a point. I don't know. It was the sixties. Everything and nothing was funny.

I watched shows like The Great American Dream Machine, produced by and starring Marshall Efron for two short-lived years before being pulled for lack of funding and plentitude of kiss-my-ass-White House attitude. After giving people like Chevy Chase and Albert Brooks a leg up in the business, Efron has pursued a frankly depressing career of bit parts and voiceovers, including a two-year stint as Sloppy Smurf on the Smurfs (a show I won't dignify with a link).

I also remember climbing into the family bed (we were that kind of family) to curl up and watch late-night episodes of An American Family (which was most assuredly not that kind of family). If you can't do the math, I was ten at the time.

Incidentally, I don't know where I was when Lance Loud: A Death in an American Family was broadcast.

Maybe I was actually earning a living that year?

Naah.

categories: amusement film life miscellany