Rainy Day and The Good Old Days That Weren't

Rainy Day turned on the television a while ago to watch something while she ate her breakfast, reruns of The Twilight Zone. Now, Rainy Day is old enough to remember watching them the first time they aired, and she remembers a lot of the stories, so she settled down with her bowl of cereal and enjoyed Cliff Robertson leading his little wagon train to California. Only, of course, Cliff took a slight detour into The Twilight Zone.

Rainy Day enjoys a lot of the old TV shows – The Twilight Zone, M*A*S*H, the old Law & Order, and even some of the not-so-old CSI:Miami. Rainy Day admits, the last show is primarily for those few scenes when they are in the Everglades, and, oh, all right, Eric Delco is pretty easy on her eyes;-) And, of course, she loves NCIS – at least the parts where Dr. 'Ducky' Mallard stars. Rainy Day thinks David McCallum is the hottest actor on TV, and has held that opinion since his days as Illya Kuryakin.

Perhaps Rainy Day is getting old, and prefers living in the good old days that weren't?  She mentioned 'the good old days' to her Auntie Marie several years ago, and got quite a lecture about how the 'good old days' really weren't all that good. There were no antibiotics, children died or were crippled by diseases that today we hardly know about; cleanliness was not a way of life, death came early, was painful and smelly. Smallpox, polio, whooping cough...the list goes on and on.  The Surgeon didn't wash his hands or his equipment between patients, and was probably also the barber and or undertaker. Talk about one-stop shopping!

Enter a store to buy some pickles, and you would be pointed to the correct barrel. With your dirty hands (no sani wipes then) you'd reach into the barrel to pick out your pickle, then eat. Your dirty hands would follow a host of other and dirtier hands reaching in to the same barrel. Hands that had not been washed since morning, if then.

The towns and general stores of the Old West movies were nothing like what really existed. TV cleaned them. Actors wear antiperspirant, so we never see the sweat stains on the hero's shirt. (Fortunately, we still don't have smellevision;-) Actors also have proper dentists, so we don't see our hero with dirty, crooked, broken, or missing teeth. Mr. Grocer always fetches and hands Mrs. Shopper whatever she needs, thereby keeping the pickle barrel clean of any germs but his and he used a long handled fork. When people were shot, they dropped, they did not stagger back, collapse and jerk and take five minutes of prime time in which to die. And when they were shot, and died, it was messy, and smelly as muscles and sphincters relaxed, and that is never, ever shown.

So, no, Rainy Day is not waxing nostalgic for the good old days that never existed as such, she is waxing nostalgic for her youth, and all those hot men that used to be on the screens, both large and small, and the dreams she had of maybe, someday, meeting one. Of course, she still drools over many of today's hot young actors, but she is older and wiser and knows that she will never meet them, and even if she did, what could they possibly talk about?