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¡Es Más Cheaper Que Viagra!
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Reflections on the End of The Dick Van Dyke Show! Part I!
LAST NIGHT I finally finished my entire one-episode-each-night viewing of The Dick Van Dyke Show. It took me many more nights than there were episodes, however, because the show disappeared from Netflix for about two months when I was about forty episodes in! What the hell?! I’m the one person who, like an idiot, still thinks Netflix is a good deal and this is how they repay me?!
But they brought it back, so I resumed watching exactly one episode per night, precisely at 8:00 to 8:30 (episodes 1 through 18), 9:30 to 10:00 (episodes 19 – 87), 9:00 to 9:30 (episodes 88 to 114), and then, 9:30 to 10:00 again (episodes 115 through 158). I figured to truly understand the show, I needed to watch each episode in its original time slot.
And now that it’s all over, you know who I’m going to miss the most? No, you don’t and don’t bother guessing. I’ll tell you.
The one I’m going to miss the most is Millie.
Yes! Ann Morgan Guilbert as Laura’s best friend and next-door neighbor Millie Helper! No I’m not drinking!
She was funny. Hell, she was better than funny, she was very funny.
I became such a Millie-booster that it got to the point around here that Denise would check synopses of upcoming episodes in advance and as I’d sit down in my easy chair with my large vanilla Frosty and my bag of Green V green peas snack
(The Filipino market is just across the street from Wendy’s), she’d be like, “Oh, I think you’re going to liiiiike tonight’s episode. It’s a Milllllllie!” and I’d be all like, “Um, spoiler alert!”
But how can you be mad when you just found out you’re getting a Millie?
Anyway, if I knew I was getting a Millie that night, she’d know to leave the room and keep the goddamn kids quiet for the next 25 minutes.
I was always thrilled when I was getting a Millie. If someone told you you were about to see an episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show and it’s a Millie, you knew you were in for a good time – I don’t care if Millie only has one lousy line in one lousy scene. That woman made the most of it.
Forget the silly, overrated “It May Look Like A Walnut” episode. The one where Laura meets Rob’s parents for the first time and Millie runs in with the vegetables is the one to watch.
Yes, all because of Millie. Sure, Mary Tyler Moore got plenty of laughs for her loopy performance of a nervous new wife on uppers, but it was Ann Morgan Guilbert who got the applause after exiting her frantic scene.
Or take the pen-penultimate episode, where Laura is alone in the house while Rob and Richie join the Helpers on a camping trip. Millie shows up back at the Petrie household and explains, “Going up there it suddenly dawned on me: Where was I going? I mean, I hate camping and I hate fishing and I can just about tolerate the kids and I’m not that wild about Jerry.”
Her shrugging honesty is in stark contrast to the sophisticated Petries with their perfect marriage and ideal home – a contrast that is further underscored when Millie matter-of-factly tells her best friend how she got in their locked home, Laura goes rigid with shocked indignation, demanding “You have a key to this house?!”
Of course she does, Laura – you and Rob are her best friends. Lighten up already! Sheesh!
It makes sense the writers would give the Petries average, middle-class neighbors – the show would have become a little predictable and stale if everyone on the show is witty and urbane. Still in an exchange like that about the house key, suddenly Laura comes off as a cold snotty bitch, like the character Moore played in
real liOrdinary People.Many fans of classic TV and just as many writers have said how he’d love to have been – or at least been friends with – Rob Petrie – great job, beautiful wife, Eichler-inspired home, for Christ sake.
Not me, brother! Me, I’d be next door with the Helpers. Sure, Jerry’s an obnoxious ass, the kids are brats, the house is probably a mess, there’s always a lot of yelling, and let’s face it, Millie isn’t exactly a swimsuit model…but somehow it’s just more comfortable over there.
…Oh who am I kidding – after ten minutes amid that chaos, I’ll be back over at the Petries’ place with the rest of you wannabes.
Anyway, now that I’ve now that I’ve seen the entire run of The Dick Van Dyke Show in order, I can cross that off my bucket list and move on to more important things.
Like watching every episode, in order, of its spinoff, Rhoda.
Oh man – that Nancy Walker and her zingers, right?! That’s my girl!
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¡Es Más Cheaper Que Una Flu Shot En Riteaid!
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A Disturbing New Trend At Thrift Stores! Or At One Thrift Store, Anyway!
FOR YEARS NOW, you and I have been frustrated and annoyed by this:
The abhorrent practice thrift stores have adopted of tossing a preposterous hodgepodge of various small toys into bags, stapling said bags shut, and pricing each monstrous mishmash outrageously. And then if all you want is, say, the Sandworm/Beetlejuice-as-Snake-Charmer toy from the 1990 Burger King Kids Club meal to finally complete your set, you have to wander around the store endlessly with the bag and then, when no one’s looking, lean into a rack of clothes with it, tear the damn thing open, make sure you grab the right one and let the rest of the contents fall to the floor – and then you’ve got to sneak it into your pocket without Socorro (who’s always eyeing you suspiciously over her half-glasses from the front register like you’re some kind of thief) seeing what you’re doing.
Or if you’re a real jackass, you actually pay the $4.99 for the whole bag. And then what are you going to do with a dog-slobbered tennis ball, a half-pound of loose Legos with either food or human waste caked into the bottoms of a third of them, five small generic My Little Pony knockoffs, a couple of chewed-on Nerf darts, thirteen checkers (from two different sets yet), three absurd, unswallowable Fisher-Price Little People, a few soap-scum encrusted bath toys (with filthy bathwater still sloshing around in them), a bent View-Master reel, a bald Barbie head, five miniature Troll dolls with matted, knotted hair, a Yoda Pez dispenser, Woody’s cowboy hat, a ratty, nicotine-stained Beanie Baby cat (that somehow escaped the fate of being sent to the glass case up front and priced $19.95), a handful of plastic dinosaurs and whatever this worthless thing is?
Thrift stores have been bagging up little toys for years, so we’re used to it by now. And really, despite our complaining – yours and mine – despite our complaining, who can really blame them? Sure, it would make sense in a perfect world to just dump all these little toys in a big bin, allow us root around and charge us a quarter a piece for whichever ones we want, but we don’t live in a perfect world.
Because besides you and me, who shops at thrift stores? That’s right – poor people. And what do poor people all seem to have too many of? Right again – poor children. And poor children are notoriously sticky-fingered when it comes to toys. They’d think nothing of taking these toys – playing with them, openly, right there in the store!, and then taking them home with them – without paying for them! Oh, and don’t give me any nonsense about the innocence of babes – the youngest ones are the most crooked of all! Plus you just know they can’t possibly appreciate a 2001 Diva Starz “Talk-Diva” McDonald’s Happy Meal toy on the same level as would, say, a middle-aged man who collects such things. (I don’t, but I know my, what, six readers!)
My point is, just as we’ve all made peace with the stupid custom of thrift stores amassing a couple dozen little toys and selling them in bulk, they figure since they’ve got us trained there, they’ll try to get us to accept it in other areas of our lives, or, rather, in their stores. To wit:
No, your eyes do not deceive you! At my local Salvation Army, they’re now gathering dissimilar coffee mugs, lashing them together with cheap packing tape, and trying to get us to buy them in lots!
Does that above grouping make any sense to anyone, anywhere? A yellow mug that reads “Fat Daddy,” a blue mug with two godawful 3-D owls on that would disgust even those idiot owl collectors, and an Area 51 pencil cup that’s not even a mug?!
And then they have the nerve to charge us $2.95 for all three, and if there’s someone who would specifically want all three of these things – and I doubt there is, but if there is – I don’t want to meet him!
Now look at this grouping!
Renoir’s Dance at Bougival and…
Dr. Teddy Bear!
Or these two:
Awful minimalist cartoon drawings of food by someone who has no artistic talent whatsoever but still evidently carved art a career as a graphic artist…and the Union Jack!
What’s next – Different articles of clothing all tied together in a Chickahominy knot, and if we want any of them, we have to buy the whole wad? I sincerely hope not.
The day Salvation Army makes me buy eight random pairs of boxers, boxer briefs, briefs, and bikinis when all I want is that one 2Xist Sculpted Lifting MaXimizer thong is the day that the lost & found box in the men’s locker room at the gym starts getting all my used underwear business again.
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¡Es Más Cheaper Que Xanax!
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Surety Regular Absorbency Pads! Now Available at Goodwill!
I‘LL ADMIT up front that this particular Overpriced Goodwill Item of the Week might be a stretch. I can’t definitively say that these are priced too high because I was just a boy when Mother would send me to the store to buy them for her; this was of course years ago – I don’t remember how much they were going for then and I can’t imagine they’d cost the same today.
Asking Donna, my wife, is equally useless because she buys hers by the bale from a livestock husbandry supplier. (Then once a month she, the kids and I have a sort of Family Home Evening where we sit around the living room, and with templates I fashioned using leftover linoleum from our kitchen remodel, trim them down to the right size while discussing current events. The surplus I save for eBay packing.)
So I could be wrong on this, I don’t know.
I’ll leave it up to my, what?, six readers: Is $3.99 a fair price for a package of 22 regular absorbency pads that were donated to a thrift store?
Things to consider:
• The per-pad cost ends up being just over 18¢.
• They have that patented Instabsorb Layer™ for quick absorption.
• These pads feature Omni-Odor Guard™ – handy!
• Though each weathered package is dingy, scuffed and faded, and was sharing space on a shelf with a handful of pointy tent stakes, I didn’t see any tears so you probably won’t be bringing home bedbugs. (And take my word on this one: you don’t want bedbugs “up in there.”)
Hell, if it turns out this is a good price, I might swing back there and pick up a package or two. It’s Donna’s birthday next week.
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¡Es Más Cheaper Que Dialysis!
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National Thrift Store Throw-These-Things-Out Week: April 16-20!
ABOUT A DECADE AGO, I started noticing a disturbing trend around the holidays. You’re smart; you probably did too.
Numerous retailers – I’ve seen this everywhere from Target to J.C. Pennys, Kohls to Walmart, and then eventually closeout places like Ross and Big Lots – began offering a particular type of item which apparently carried the caché of class and sophistication yet was mass-marketed in stores’ last-minute holiday gift sections alongside shelves of shrink-wrapped samplers of cheese, sausage and jam, the perennial Chia Pets and strange, oversized Scrabble- and Oreo-themed ceramic mugs with packets of gourmet hot chocolate and/or sundae “fixin’s.” Whew! That was one torturously long sentence but it had to be said!
Of course what I’m referring to are those decorative bottles of olive oil and/or vinegar packed with artfully arranged peas, lemon slices, beans, onions and of course peppers – whole or sliced.
Curiously, the gift-buying public embraced these things. Each year, at Christmas, more and more recipients added them to their kitchen counters. Oh, perhaps you didn’t have a high-end granite or marble counter top, maybe you were living in some crappy one-bedroom apartment in Mar Vista with a chipped and scratched Formica counter, but put one of these babies next to your George Foreman Grill and suddenly you’re a gourmet chef and your kitchen belongs in “Martha Stewart Living.”
After half a dozen years of wiping the dust off these vessels that were supposed to be decorative as well as consumable, their owners started realizing that they’re never actually going to use something that’s sat out on their counter for so long and is starting to show its age – the ring of peperoncini strips just starting to disintegrate adding to that layer of sediment and mystery twigs, leaves and other flotsam at the bottom.
Thus began the steady exodus of these glass jugs from folks’ homes which continues to this day. Since these full bottles were still arguably decorative, since the layered vegetables are still mostly intact, because the classy red wax seal at the top has never been broken and the contents are completely unused and since it had been received as a gift, few have felt comfortable doing what they should be doing: throwing them the hell out. In the trash!
And so they started appearing on the shelves of our nations’ thrift stores. Disturbing? Oh, my, yes.
Even more disturbing, more frightening is the realization that when thrift stores receive these as donations, they don’t refuse them or throw them out, either! The thrifts put them on the shelves despite the fact that they wouldn’t (or in some cases couldn’t legally) offer other donated food items.
There these things sit, and each month, more and more and more appear…and nobody buys them. Not only are they up to a decade (or more) old, in addition to their contents beginning a slow deterioration towards cloudy amorphousness like a jar of unopened pork tidbits recovered from the wreck of the Andrea Doria, on top of all that, most of these bottles of vinegar and olive oil are products of China!
If that’s not enough of a reason to throw them out, nothing is! I don’t know about you, but since that whole baby formula debacle in China a few years ago, I haven’t exactly felt all that comfortable feeding my baby China-grown olives and jalapeños suspended in garlic-infused vinegar. Attention Child Protective Services: Don’t worry, only nourishing American-made vinegar goes in our little Blythe’s Evenflo.
So while this does of course function as one of our delightfully informative “Overpriced Goodwill Item of the Week” posts…
…Goodwill is not alone in their poor judgment here. Like you, I’m finding these in every thrift store I go to.
See, these glass receptacles of flavored cooking fluids aren’t likely to be purchased on the secondary market by anyone – not even by the irritating Etsy and Retro-vation set. You can’t “repurpose” bottles of rancid olive oil into something jackasses in thick-framed nerd glasses and Betty Page bangs will embrace. These aren’t old vinyl LPs, brother!
Plus there’s no reason to stockpile this crap for thirty years in the hope that hipsters of the future will pay high prices for them to create a vintage 2010s kitchen in 2050 – these low-grade vegetables marinated in what amounts to Chinese formaldehyde will be nothing but discolored mush by then. Mush I tell you!
That’s why I’ve taken it upon myself to declare this week National Thrift Store Throw These Things The Hell Out Week.
And so I’m trusting that all my, what?, six regulars will help make this a reality, even if you personally have to go into every Goodwill, every Salvation Army, every little-old-lady-run church thrift store within a few hundred miles of your house, and heave these demon bottles off the shelves and down onto the floor yourself, in a coast-to-coast explosion of broken glass, capers, garlic cloves and extra-slippery Grade 有unrefined olive oil! Also, my attorney has immediately cautioned me to tell you to not under any circumstances do what I just wrote!
So I guess I’m left to appeal directly to the people taking donations at these secondhand stores: For the love of God, good cooking, uncluttered counter tops and non-tacky kitchen décor, please, thrift stores of America – throw these things the hell out as they come in! And throw out the ones your store already has now!
And while you’re at it, throw out these absurd amalgams of popcorn, rice and dried beans…
…and the bath oils…
…all the bath oils!
And get rid of the artisan spice blends in economy quantities…
…and the bottled sugar, cinnamon and syrups…
…Away with the dried pasta…
…and for the love of Christ, whatever unholy thing this is…? Burn it!
Get rid of it all!
Thank you.
Well, I think I’ve done my part here for thrift store shoppers and employees alike. And what better way to reward myself for a job well done than by finally cracking open that old store stock jar of Koogle I scored on eBay a few weeks ago and treating myself to a true epicurean delight – a taste sensation I last enjoyed before Kraft discontinued making it back when I was in kindergarten. Like you, I’ve been dreaming about it ever since.
And between you and me, I’m not even going to bother with bread. A rare treat like this should be enjoyed straight from the jar by spoon or finger so that no other conflicting tastes might taint its delicate flavor.
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什麼是良好的只有99美分商店: Nature’s Turn Pickles!
As regular readers of this blog know, I’m always on the lookout for a good, traditional pickle.
You know the kind – good and dilly and garlicky. Tangy – and not without some snap! The kind you’d expect to find on the plate next to your corned beef sandwich at your favorite Jewish delicatessen (in my case Feldman’s On Reseda).
So imagine my surprise when I was at my local 99¢ Only Store some weeks ago and I came across these babies:
Hm, thought I, aloud, worrying the other shoppers, Hm, these so-called “Nature’s Turn All Natural Pickle Spears” are all natural, and they’re from a brand I can trust – Nature’s Turn – not a brand I’ve ever heard of before, but it sounds like a brand I can trust, right? I mean, just that name alone and the slightly awkward logo – a sprouting lima bean (?) – seems trustworthy. And there’s chunks of garlic and seeds and stuff that looks like dill weed at the bottom of the jar – just like you see in those expensive brands in your grocer’s refrigerated deli case.
So I decided sure, I’m game, I’ll gamble 99¢ only on a jar of pickles – why not? What could possibly go wrong?
“Feldman’s On Reseda”…?
I got them home, open them up, fish around in the jar with two fingers (knowing me, probably without washing my hands!) and pull out a pickle spear – and I proceeded to eat it. And then I dove right in with my filthy digits and pulled out another – and I ate that one, too. And another! And another after that! And my father’s father before him! What?!
The point is, these things are great! They’ve all the dillness, all the garlicosity of your higher-priced refrigerated, deli-case and/or Feldman’s On Reseda pickles – without the higher-priced part! Or the refrigerated part! And as the label says there’s no corn syrup in these pickles! As regular readers of this blog know, I’m always on the lookout for a corn syrup-free pickle! …”Feldman’s?”
Right then and there – right then and there, brother, I decided I would declare Nature’s Turn All Natural Pickle Spears this week’s
item!
Ah, but then! Then I read on the back of the label: PRODUCT OF CHINA.
Oh no. Oh no no no no no. I’m so sorry – but despite how delicious they are, I can’t in good conscience endorse these pickles as this week’s What’s Bueno at the 99¢ Only Store item. There’s just no way.
No.
They are however this week’s 什麼是良好的只有99美分商店 item.
Mazel tov!
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Snickers Peanut Butter Eggs! The Inevitable Update!
So, yes, as I alluded to the other day, Monday did find me back at my local 99¢ Only Store!
And I was right! My precious Snickers Peanut Butter Eggs were marked down!
So I did what you’d have done. I bought eighty.
(Look, I didn’t want to go crazy because there’s a very real possibility they may be marked down even further in the days, weeks and months ahead. That’s when I’ll stock up.)
Ted Parsnips
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