While people all across the country were delving into volunteer projects, hammering nails into Habitat for Humanity houses, or watching inaugural festivities in Washington, I am ashamed to say I didn’t do one iota of community service today. I’m not going to beat myself up over it. I’ve done more volunteer work in the past 20 years than the nuns I know, so it all evens out. I know I could have easily driven some cans of food over to one of the several canned food drives I knew about, or at the very least read the “I Have a Dream” speech in its entirety, but I didn’t. It was my first refusal to follow instructions from my new president, so I’m probably not going to get that communications job in the Obama White House now.
Instead, my family and I drove up to Hutchinson Island so my husband and my mother-in-law could reminisce about the winters they spent in a motor home park at Nettles Island, which as it turns out, is not anything like it was in 1978, the last time they spent any time there. My husband used to drive his red dune buggy across the street to the hotel and the beach, which is now a busy road that we could barely turn our real car onto without getting swiped.
But it was a fun memory-filled day and we stopped at a nice place for lunch, drank a bunch of margaritas and then came home and spent two hours listening to TV theme songs on my husband’s iPod.
His iPod is magical and he can find things on UTube and Web sites on there that I swear I can’t find on my desktop computer. We were sitting watching an old Andy Griffith show and he whipped out his iPod and started playing these old TV theme songs and I started to try to see how fast I could guess which show they were from.
I surprised even myself with how well I remembered all the words to Branded (Branded! Marked with the coward’s shame. What do you do when you’re branded and you don’t have a name? Wherever you go for the rest of your life, you must proooooooove – you’re a man!)
After dozens of theme songs, and a couple of lightning-round medleys that were extremely tough, my husband concluded that the best TV show theme songs were from 1965 to 1970. After 1970, there were those few stand-outs like Mary Tyler Moore (“Who can turn the world on with her smile? Who can take a nothing day and suddenly make it all seem worthwhile? Well, it’s you girl and you should know it!”) but for the most part, the theme songs were forgettable and certainly not hummable. For example, you can hum I Dream of Jeannie right now, but as much as you watch ER, can you bleat out a recognizable riff? I rest my case.
We even found some video of the beginnings of some of my favorite shows from when I was growing up. Mannix was a macho as ever, with his long sideburns and his plaid sports coat. Bobby Sherman looks like he’s about 11-years-old in the opening credits to Here Come the Brides. (Why did I write him all those fan letters? Was he even old enough to read them?) The Man from U.N.C.L.E. footage brought back years of my internal debate over who I would rather marry, the strong silent Illya Kuryakin or the smooth, sexy Napoleon Solo.
Who knew I would end up with neither of them, but a guy who can sweep me off my feet with an iPod and dazzle me by saying, “OK, here’s one you’ll never get!” and then give me a high five when I yell out, “Lost . . . Lost! – – Lost in SPACE!!!”