The Town of No Return - The very first Avengers episode featuring Emma Peel... upon which I imprinted at a very early age. The carpetbag on the train, out of which Steed pulled a treat-laden, three-tiered tea tray, china cups and saucers, a cream pitcher, and a steaming teakettle, began my life-long enchantment with a proper British tea. (My parents both loved the show and used to watch it all the time when it was first on in the US.) I must have been only two or three during the first run, and I think the family was living in Moscow, Idaho, but I remember the episode where there was a crazy inventor who had invented special shoes that let you walk on the ceiling, and an episode of Emma Peels that overlapped with one of the other Steed companions, where the two of them were in a jail cell or some sort of room together, both with amnesia, and they couldnt remember who was who. And also, this episode... The only part of which I remembered was taking all of the fancy picnic/party stuff (how I interpreted it at the time) out of the suitcase, and the steaming tea kettle full of boiling water. I remember asking my Mom how they could possibly have a steaming to kettle of water in a suitcase like that, and her saying something like,Well… They just did. I think she implied either that it was like a fairytale/ playing pretend, as they did on TV, or that they were extra-tricky secret agents who could do things like that. This show, along with Batman, and Star Trek, are TV programs that I remember our whole family watched together and that I really liked...back in the 60s, before I was 5, before we moved out to Park Forest, Illinois, and before my brother was born... when we lived in Moscow, Idaho, and Blue Island, and downtown Chicago (Hyde Park), while my dad was going to U of C. Where we saw the moon landing, too - when we lived in Hyde Park, at the Piccadilly hotel in Chicago. I remember that I was playing in the living room, and Dad insisted that I come over to the television and watch man first walk on the moon, telling me that I would remember that moment for the rest of my life. I remember being kind of annoyed, and telling him that no, what I was going remember for the rest of my life was him telling me to come and watch men first walk on the moon....because I was heartily sick of all of the childrens television programming - what little there was of it - having been preempted for weeks by coverage of the space program. I had to spend a lot of time at babysitters houses while my Mom worked, and my Dad had classes, and a lot of them were either grownups with no children, or had children of a vastly different age then I, or spoke a different language so that they didnt have childrens books in English. I couldnt play outside because it was a terrible neighborhood, in a big city, and there wouldnt be toys I could play with, or other children, or books I could look at, or crayons or anything. It was incredibly boring, and the only thing to do was watch TV, which was mostly soap operas back then - which were also very boring. If I was lucky, there were game shows, and reruns of shows like Gilligans Island, Love American Style, or Hazel on channel 9... and during certain limited times of the day, shows actually intended for children, usually on only one of the five channels that peoples TVs could get back then - black-and-white VHF channels only: 2,5,7,9 and 11. (CBS, NBC, ABC, WGN, and WTTW.) But for ages before the moon landing, any television shows of even marginal interest to me were preempted by space coverage - newscasters sitting in front of maps of the path between the earth and the moon that the spacecraft were going to take, with model moon rockets, repeating the same limited information over and over. It was exciting at first, but then so repetitive and boring but it drove me crazy - because the one slightly entertaining thing to do to pass the hours, had been taken from me. Little wonder then that my four-year-old self was blasé about the moon landing - of course, of course, of COURSE it was happening, because it was only thing anybody had been talking about for we for weeks and weeks and weeks. Little wonder then as well that I vividly remember the few shows that were actually entertaining to me - where smart, funny (I got wit, even when I was really little), fun people were obviously having a blast, getting to dress up in costumes and run around performing in stories, pretending to have exciting adventures. I got wrapped up in the stories they were telling, as well - but the really best part was that it let me see that there were other people on the planet like me. People who liked to make up stories, people who liked to film them... People who liked to play dress-up and act out the stories and be funny for other people. Extroverts with imagination and a good sense of timing - my people! Unlike the people in my family, or anybody else I saw around me - people who tended toward being smart introverts, quiet and unassuming and on the shy side, blending in once they crossed the threshold of their own front door, preferring to read about other people doing things rather than doing things themselves. That wasnt me. MY people were on television...or in the movies,
Posted on: Tue, 19 Aug 2014 07:35:40 +0000
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