"Mary Kay Place, Mary Kay Place!"

I was never the only Lisa in the class.

No, never. All those years during the sixties and seventies, there were always like four of us.

And I know why.

My mother was one of the few women in the nation who actually admitted that in the hot and steamy summer of 1963 she and millions of other American women named their baby daughters Lisa in tribute to headstrong, beautiful ne'er doin' better Lisa Shea on As the World Turns.

(Lisa Miller Hughes Eldridge Shea Colman McColl Mitchell Grimaldi, that is).

None of this explains my later fascination with Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, of course.

Oh sure, there was the summer I spent each evening carefully circling the TV shows I'd be watching the next day--half hour by painstaking half hour, from say 10 a.m. until 5 pm. And even though, that summer, I was totally addicted to Ryan's Hope, and almost as much to The Young and the Restless ...and then, in college summers, to Santa Barbara...

But this isn't about me.

Wait, wait, that's not right. I blog, therefore this is about me. Kewl.

No simple series of events can explain my forbidden love for Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.

Nor can any of these events from my past explain how MHMH came suddenly to occupy a principal position in my occipital and temporal lobes at about 10:20 pm EST Sunday night.

There's a simple enough explanation for that. I can sum it up in three words:

Mary. Kay. Place.

She's excellent. She's eminently watchable. And she's on HBO's newest series and Six Feet Under wannabe, Big Love.

Currently rated BD at our house, for Benefit of the Doubt.

(Because it's too hard to keep repeating WTHSIATS, for What the Hell, Since It's After the Sopranos, that's why).

Anyway. MKP is a lovely actress, too seldom seen (though with a thriving career, thriving enough to entitle her to her own Six Degrees game, check it). But looks like all that modest ubiquity might be about to change, with the release of two excellent-looking indy picks in Nine Lives and Lonesome Jim.

Which I won't be seeing in the theatres.

Because I have kids, that's why.

Now wipe your mouth and go get your pajamas on.

Whatever. So, damned if I can figure out how to sign the petition to bring out MHMH on DVD without signing on to still another time-sucking e-list of amusements, but it's here if you want to add in.