March 2009 Archives

My earliest memories of the Laverne and Shirley television show are overshadowed by the disdain my mother held for it. She felt that this show portrayed the era of Milwaukee in the 1950s in a cloying, condescending manner, and that the cast were insulting caricatures of the people -- the women in particular -- from that era.

Because of this I rarely watched the show, and my few memories of Laverne and Shirley mostly involve the show's theme song. I rarely saw the full one-plus-minute opening to that show because someone summarily changed the channel or turned the TV off as soon as the show started.

I felt like I was hearing something forbidden, then, when a Tampa radio station (in what it described as a bold programming move) played the Laverne and Shirley theme song on the radio. Playing television music on the radio seemed mildly revolutionary to me, my impressions likely influenced by the way the DJ presented it. I imagined this was a new frontier of for radio programming, and from then on through the 1980s I kept an eye out for television theme songs on the radio. I had a notion that the words " Schlemeel, schlimazel" had ushered in a golden age of television show theme songs and had revived interest in theme songs for Hawaii Five-0 and the contemporaneous Rockford Files.

Without researching the pop culture trends of television show theme music I suspect that my notions about this "golden age" are bunk, influenced by the former influence of radio station airplay and the artificial prestige it generated.

This is a nice phrase of somewhat obscure origins. Like most people, the only place I have ever heard this phrase used was in the song "Don't Cry For Me Argentina," with lyrics by Tim Rice and music by Andrew Lloyd Webber.

You won't believe me
All you will see is a girl you once knew
Although she's dressed up to the nines
At sixes and sevens with you

Despite of its connection to Evita Perón I still think of being "at sixes and sevens" as a youngster's dilemma, in which a child learning to count reaches six for the first time and then tries to count to seven only to find that both hands are open. I know, of course, that this scenario has nothing to do with the actual meaning of the phrase but somehow I can't shake it.

I also imagine this phrase might pass through a love-letter, but that's probably just wishful thinking that a bluestocking would direct such eloquent phrases at me.