Marie Wilson

            Sunday morning was the first time in eighteen days that I didn’t make a video recording of my daily song rehearsal. It was nice for a change to be able to dance free of the microphone. Also not having to fiddle with the camera and not having to make sure I looked okay in front of it was less time consuming.

            I worked on writing my latest Food Bank Adventure.

            I washed another section of my kitchen floor between the table and the filing cabinet. One more session will have that passage clean and then I will probably be tossing out the dryer that’s stacked above the cabinet, as well as the stand that it’s sitting on.

            I had a salami, cheese and lettuce sandwich for lunch.

            I skipped my afternoon exercises and a bike ride so I could finish my Food Bank Adventure. I got it done in the early evening.

            I deleted the Suspicion TV series folder but still couldn’t upload to my hard drive the video that I'd shot on Saturday. I want to have at least seven gigs free afterwards but I would only have six and so I’ll have to wait until I get rid of some more files.

            I felt it was too hot to use the stove to cook dinner and so I just had crackers and pepperoni with a beer while watching the last of the Take A Good Look game shows starring Ernie Kovacs that I’d downloaded.

            The first one was from November 19, 1959 and the panellists were Cesar Romero, Marie Wilson and Guido Ponzini who was really Pat Harrington Jr. but did not slip out of character once. He is introduced as a famous Italian golf pro.

            The first guest is an attractive young woman. The first clue shows an exhausted couple that has just won a dance marathon. The host holds up the man’s hand in victory and it comes off as the contestant collapses on the floor.

Marie is given the first question. She says, “Oh, I know what it is!” Then she says, “No it couldn’t be that!"

Cesar Romero guesses that the guest won some sort of a prize.

The second clue has Ernie doing a laundry machine commercial advertizing a machine that is not complicated with electricity and push buttons. The machine has no moving parts at all. He demonstrates by throwing a shirt into the machine and inside a miniature woman cleans it in a washtub.

Cesar guesses that her achievement relates to water, that she did something underwater and that she stayed underwater longer than anyone else.  Cesar Romero is consistently good at this game. This is someone who reads the paper and remembers what he reads.

She is Jane Baldasare, who set two underwater endurance records. She remained underwater for sixty two hours and she swam 22.5 kilometres underwater. Later she tried twice to cross the English channel underwater and failed. Her husband at the time was Fred Baldasare. Many years after their divorce he went back and succeeded in the crossing.

The second guest is an older man.

The first clue shows Ernie as a concert pianist and he's really playing. He begins with a few classical chords but then starts playing “Merrily We Roll Along". When he turns his head however the entire audience has left.

Guido guesses the man got his name in the papers in the last five months.

The second clue just has Ernie open a box marked “Top Secret” several times and each time it opens there are the sounds of birds.

Cesar guesses that sound has something to do with the man’s achievement and that he invented something.

Marie asks, “If I did what you did would I get on the front pages?” He answers, "Oohh yes!"

The third clue consists of Peggy Connelly coming out carrying a bird house with a sign on it that reads “Forced to vacate".

Guido guesses that the sound the man invented has to do with birds.

Cesar asks, “What was this ‘Forced to vacate'"? Ernie says, “That refers to this show. It was a note from ABC that wasn't supposed to be there."

Marie asks the old man, “You're cute, are you with anybody?" I'm assuming that Marie, like Pat, was participating in character. She is famous for the lead role in the radio and TV shows “My Friend Irma" and the character is famously ditzy. Anybody that can play such a fluffy headed character is probably very intelligent.

The guest is Otto Stanky who shooed the starlings out of Mount Vernon. Ernie brings out Stanky's took box and he unlocks it. It contains a cap and some metal things that he bangs together to make a loud clanging noise.

The third guest is Mike Todd Jr., who has invented aromatic movies called “Smellovision".

The first clue is set in the early 20^th Century. Ernie is looking at one of those crank operated moving picture viewers showing "Beatrice on the Beach". Peggy Connelly is dancing while wearing one of those full body swimming suits of the era and blowing kisses. Suddenly a woman’s hand reaches up and pulls Ernie's head into the viewer. It was too expensive to mass produce and audience members complained that the smells did not reach every person at the same time.

Cesar asks if it happened in the last three or four months but Todd answers that it hasn’t happened yet.

Marie guesses that he is some famous man’s son and then says, "Oh golly!" because she didn't expect to be right.

There is only one round of questions because the show is wrapping up. Smellovision would be opening around Christmas in Chicago and there would be fifty different smells in the theatre beyond the usual one. Guido says, “My old neighbourhood had sixty smells!”

The smellovision produced by Mike Todd accompanied the 1960 movie, “Scent of Mystery”. The smells revealed certain plot elements to the audience, such as one character being a pipe smoker.

Pat Harrington is most famous for playing the role of Schneider on the show “One Day at a Time". His father Pat Harrington was a Canadian song and dance man who went from Vaudeville to Broadway and starred in some early television sitcoms.

The second thing I watched was a collection of clues from various “Take a Good Look" shows.

The first shows Ernie as a chef trying to make a soufflé while listening to the instructions on a record. The voice says to pour three quarts of milk into the bowl but then says, “Actually two” and so Ernie starts splashing the extra milk out. She then says to put the white of an egg in but he doesn’t have a container for the yolk and so he puts it between the pages of a book. Then she says just the yolk and so he puts the white in his shoe. Then she says, “Add the whole of an egg” and he does but she says “An egg” again and he adds another. She continues to say “An egg” as he keeps adding more, but the record is skipping.

In the second Ernie is painting a fence and he asks his boss whether to go up or down with the brush. The boss pokes his face through a knothole saying sideways as Ernie paints his face.

In the third the Italian Olympic broad jump team is having a big spaghetti lunch before the competition. A beautiful woman says she has a big kiss for the winner. So Ernie serves the other guy a plate of spaghetti but replaces the meatballs with iron shot-put balls, which he swallows and they are sticking out of his stomach. When he does the jump he makes a big hole in the ground.

The fourth features Ernie’s character Percy Dovetonsils the poet. His poem is “Ode to a Clue”: “Hail to thee exciting guest / You did what you did with feverish zest … The panel will guess you, they are students of Zen …” I couldn’t catch the rest because this is a partial download.

The fifth clue has three sequences. Ernie goes through a door while drinking water, then a revolving door doing the same. Finally there is a tube and Peggy Connelly. Peggy crawls in first and Ernie after her but only Ernie emerges at the other end.

In the sixth Ernie is an Italian detective named Luigi hired to stop a woman from being killed at an exhibition of the Mona Lisa. It’s incomplete but the lights go out and Luigi is dead in the woman’s clothes.

In the seventh Ernie is a director named Rock Mississippi telling people about his latest “picsker” entitled “Ben Hur Meets the Wolf Man”. “See the wild elephants, the charge of the hibiscus, see giant clams eat the friendly natives.” Produced by Albert Cheapo. Obviously Rock Mississippi is a parody of Rock Hudson.

In the eighth Ernie is a paperboy and a customer has been complaining that he’s been leaving the paper on the sidewalk. It’s winter and the paper is covered in ice. Ernie throws it and it smashes through the door into the living room.

In the ninth Ernie is a bank teller. A man with a gun comes up with a note saying, “Give me $10,000” Ernie writes a note asking, “How do you want it?’ The robber writes a note saying, “Fives and tens”. He and another teller give him the money and he leaves. Ernie writes a note saying, “He has nice handwriting”.

The tenth takes place in a wild west saloon with a tuba mounted at the end of the bar. Two cowboys have a showdown but Ernie swats the bullets away with his hand. Then he fires into the mouthpiece of the tuba. The bullet goes round and round and then comes out of the music end to kill the other cowboy.

The eleventh features a magicians bowling league. The other magician gets all the pins down but one. He is on track to get a spare but Ernie levitates the pin above the ball.

In the twelfth and last one Ernie appears as a calendar girl dressed differently for each month, starting with December for Christmas. This is incomplete and so it skips through to July where he poses with a giant firecracker. The last one is September and just shows him in a fur coat with a phone. People were laughing but I must have missed something.