The Big Tent

I've been watching The Mickey Mouse Club for the last couple of days, having stumbled on two six-hour tapes of half-hour editions of the show from the Disney Channel, recorded in 1998. This is a windfall, because the DVD I bought only has about a week of shows from the first week of the first season, cut to oddly different lengths. Disney+ also has the exact same sad, disappointing little package. This is much better. I'm hearing a pair of sisters from Los Angeles singing an upbeat harmony number right now. That's not in the set.

I have no idea when these were originally broadcast, but I think these are the same 1960s cuts we used to watch in the later rerun days of the show. There's some jumping around, but we get a lot of Spin & Marty continuity. The Spin & Marty show dominates, in fact, taking up half or more of each episode. Since each starts with the same theme song followed with a measured daily schtick, there's only time for one act before the serial starts. At the end, the credits seem to reflect each show's contents, which is why I'm guessing they're the 60s rerun. They look like an optical credit roll.

What interested me most after a while was the opening segment that goes by each and every time a show starts. Mickey is tossed on a hoop like firemen catch falling kids with, and celebrated by a cast that consists of Ranger Woodlore, Four Bears (one of whom would be Hubert), Horace Horsecollar, Clarabelle Cow, Minnie Mouse, Daisy Duck, Huey, Dewey, Louie, Goofy, The Three Pigs, Black Pete (aka Peg Leg Pete), and The Big Bad Wolf.

I noticed Pete first, and it's nice to see the company villain allowed to join in the fun, and there's the Wolf as well, cheerfully working that hoop with Mickey in it. But wait. I'd seen the longer version of the opening, and something felt off. I dug it out. It's three minutes long and starts with built-in callouts to the sponsor. Suitable for an hour-long show, maybe! The fanfare is familiar, but then we have some different bits. Pete smiles in a star-shaped cameo early on! The Wolf, on the other hand, is seen tied up, for frogmarching and ritual humiliation in the triumphal Mickey Mouse Club parade! 

The minute-long version is in there too, though, and even in this earliest opener, we have the hoop finale with Pete and Big Bad as cheerful voluntary participants. They have it both ways! I hope B.B. is getting extra pay for being tied up and kicked. That's simple stunt work, right? All cartoon characters can do it, and it pays the bills, and then everybody goes to the cookout. Well, not Ferdinand--ha ha!

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Never Thought This Could Happen To Me

I knew at the time it happened that this was unusual, but as it recedes into the past, I still can't help being impressed at the sheer unlikeliness of it all. 

 

I came home from working at University of Houston one PM to find that someone had nailed a door up over the front window of our two-bedroom ground floor apartment. It turned out that this was because the front window had been breached. It turned out to turn out that we'd been robbed.

By the time I entered the story, the police had already been there. As it will turn out, they already knew who did it, and where they were likely to find them. Then they found them and brought them in. This is because our apartments, about a city block away from The Astrodome, were all on an electronic security system (which I accidentally tripped at least once). Our criminals didn't set it off when they broke in the front window to enter, but in order to easily carry our color TV out, they had to open the door, setting off the alarm.

The alarm, in turn, alerted the security guy for the apartment complex, a policeman under any name, he lived rent-free in return for willingness to check things out. He heard the alarm, saw the act conclude, and followed the perps enough to bring in a description and license.

The police, as they told me later, had been watching the criminals (a couple? oh, details) for a while, and when they "caught" the "squeal" as we savvy folk say, they asked the pair's preferred pawnbroker to kindly let them know when they came in with the stuff, and they did, and the cops took them in.

It stood this way for a while. We waited to hear back. We were anxious to have our new TV, which we'd purchased at Target only weeks before, instead of the tiny black and white portable that my sister had imparted to me in the 70s, which was too insignificant to steal. When we realized we would need to prove ownership, I went back to Target and found that the serial number was recorded in a registry they had to keep for thirty days, and since I asked on Day Thirty, they gave it to me so I could prove it was our TV. 

I called and asked if there was something I needed to do, since I wasn't hearing back. Oh, yeah, they said, come on in and get your set. Perhaps that's when I went and got the number. Anyway, I went in, and was treated to the glory of the vast property room (rooms, really) of the Houston PD. The guy who brought me down watched me pick out my comparatively humble set and gestured back at what seemed like three caverns full of consumer bounty: "Any of this other stuff yours?" he asked. Which is why I have all these projection TVs and yachts and things, if you've wondered.

But there it is. Our apartment was violated. They had the crooks before I got home and found out. They got the goods. They got us our TV back. If I'd called sooner, we'd have had it back sooner. There were never any echoes or repurcussions. 

I know! Hard to believe, right?

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Neighbors

One year, early on in our time here, I took Sarah trick-or-treating through the neighborhood. A block from our house, almost parallel with it, was a house that was being rented to a Chinese family. This was their first Halloween in the neighborhood, maybe their first ever, and they were in compliance with the needs of the holiday, having chosen a treat, which they were handing out to costumed kids at the door. These were fruits, the size of a big gumball, wrapped in clear plastic.

To my horror, they were all over the ground, starting just steps from the doorway.

My neighbors were coming to the door, saying their bit, receiving the candy, and then dumping it on the ground. It was thicker than crab apples under the lawn mower.

I took mine, thanked them, and ate it on the spot, for all the difference it made. I never saw any of them around after that, and someone else has lived in the house for quite some time.

My neighbors. I'm still disgusted.

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On The Set

"You don't need an invisible god threatening you with Hell to live a moral life." I said on a social network. "You only have to believe, as I have since youth, that you are the star of your own TV show. Now, if you will pardon me, I have to sing my background music."

As usual, it was true. When I was four and traipsing around the block (and in later days, to neighboring ones), I was The No. Because why not. Somewhere in there, I remember drawing a flashlight on a tiny chalkboard, with "THE" in front of it, and this was a logo for The Flashlight, but I never was The Flashlight, you see. I was The No, and I hum-sung the theme, roughly to the tune of the chorus of The Erie Canal (14 tons).

The No
Is a comin', comin', comin',
The No
Is a comin' to your town
You can always tell your neighbor
You can always tell your friend
That the No's moving pictures
Are never gonna end.

Or maybe aren't a-comin' to an end. I had alternate versions, which is another story. Not sure what The No's essential nature was, apart from being mine. Not sure what The No did, apart from walking around whilst pondering how good I must look from the camera's point of view.

I also did Magic Man one time, for the duration of one iconic pose. Got the shot? One and done! Classic.

Uncle Don vocalized wherever he went. There's a photo of him in a stroller with his mouth joyfully wide to its greatest circle, and he told me "I was probably singing. Maw said I was always singing a little tuneless son, happy as anything." Similar, but not a theme song. Not a TV show (or, considering the exact wording of the song, an endless series of motion pictures*).

Scoff if you will, but it keeps me on the straight and narrow. In keeping with the times, there's barely a shred of the theme music (though it's alluded to frequently when Our Hero goes over or near the ubiquitous Erie Canal, for instance), and the camera work is fashionably wobbly. Once in a while, another character is featured prominently. This never used to happen!

Hey, I know what! Maybe our shows could do a guest thing. Nothing big, just maybe a quick cameo. Those are great for ratings.

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* I remember pretending once, at that age, in that particular yard, that I'd just invented motion pictures, by putting a bunch of slides on a turntable (tangent to the rim) and shining a light through. Even then, I knew that wouldn't quite work, but I also knew on some level that we were kids playing a game, and it wasn't going to have to stand up to scrutiny from the Royal Academy. 

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No Mow I

It's not that I hate to mow the lawn. I do. But I also think it's better to let the stuff grow. We have all this heat, and it was dry for a while, and I didn't want to cut off grass that was shading grass. We shouldn't have these crewcut turf lawns, acre on acre, that can only be serviced by bands of roving lawn guys with no mufflers. Let it grow longer. Let it seed itself. Let different colors of blooms contend.

The back part of the yard is slowly being returned to conditional ferality. With no cross-yard traffic from up the hill, it's less critical to keep a path mowed. I'd hoped that the fireflies might make a comeback here, like the year or two back there when I could see them IN MY OWN YARD. I've left undergrowth to grow under. I've shut off my lights--but that's a drop in a bucket of endlessly illuminated nocturnal existence. The fireflies don't stand a chance, even if the people I live among were to never pour another drop of RoundUp on their pool-table lawns ever again.

Noise is the side-product of it all. If I mow my lawn on Monday, the lawn guys might arrive before I'm done, or they may wait a whole hour before they descend to mow the two yards alongside ours and one of the ones across the street--same service, all three, and I think they HQ in a former firehouse, playing Euchre while they wait for the bell and sliding down a pole to race over here and run their motors. (Actually, I think one of them lives next door, based on the sound of the motor of his pickup, which he starts every morning before eight, and runs for ten minutes or so before getting back into it and pointedly revving it a few times, then he motors off. To the firehouse I mentioned before, which is v. important to my story.)