A random stranger from Meridian, MS sent me a couple of bucks via Pay Pal. Thanks much and Happy Turkey Day to you and your family!

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Whatever Heather. I learned to read at two in large part because of old school Sunny Days Sesame Street.

I know I’m not a parent, which means I only get half a vote but I think the over thinking, over worrying that everything is not is de regueur safe, safe safe is really friggen dangerous.

From the NYTimes by Virginia Heffernan

Sunny days! The earliest episodes of “Sesame Street” are available on digital video! Break out some Keebler products, fire up the DVD player and prepare for the exquisite pleasure-pain of top-shelf nostalgia.

Just don’t bring the children. According to an earnest warning on Volumes 1 and 2, “Sesame Street: Old School” is adults-only: “These early ‘Sesame Street’ episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child.”

Say what? At a recent all-ages home screening, a hush fell over the room. “What did they do to us?” asked one Gen-X mother of two, finally. The show rolled, and the sweet trauma came flooding back. What they did to us was hard-core. Man, was that scene rough. The masonry on the dingy brownstone at 123 Sesame Street, where the closeted Ernie and Bert shared a dismal basement apartment, was deteriorating. Cookie Monster was on a fast track to diabetes. Oscar’s depression was untreated. Prozacky Elmo didn’t exist.

Nothing in the children’s entertainment of today, candy-colored animation hopped up on computer tricks, can prepare young or old for this frightening glimpse of simpler times. Back then — as on the very first episode, which aired on PBS Nov. 10, 1969 — a pretty, lonely girl like Sally might find herself befriended by an older male stranger who held her hand and took her home. Granted, Gordon just wanted Sally to meet his wife and have some milk and cookies, but . . . well, he could have wanted anything. As it was, he fed her milk and cookies. The milk looks dangerously whole.

Live-action cows also charge the 1969 screen — cows eating common grass, not grain improved with hormones. Cows are milked by plain old farmers, who use their unsanitary hands and fill one bucket at a time. Elsewhere, two brothers risk concussion while whaling on each other with allergenic feather pillows. Overweight layabouts, lacking touch-screen iPods and headphones, jockey for airtime with their deafening transistor radios. And one of those radios plays a late-’60s news report — something about a “senior American official” and “two billion in credit over the next five years” — that conjures a bleak economic climate, with war debt and stagflation in the offing.

The old “Sesame Street” is not for the faint of heart, and certainly not for softies born since 1998, when the chipper “Elmo’s World” started. Anyone who considers bull markets normal, extracurricular activities sacrosanct and New York a tidy, governable place — well, the original “Sesame Street” might hurt your feelings.

I asked Carol-Lynn Parente, the executive producer of “Sesame Street,” how exactly the first episodes were unsuitable for toddlers in 2007. She told me about Alistair Cookie and the parody “Monsterpiece Theater.” Alistair Cookie, played by Cookie Monster, used to appear with a pipe, which he later gobbled. According to Parente, “That modeled the wrong behavior” — smoking, eating pipes — “so we reshot those scenes without the pipe, and then we dropped the parody altogether.”

Which brought Parente to a feature of “Sesame Street” that had not been reconstructed: the chronically mood-disordered Oscar the Grouch. On the first episode, Oscar seems irredeemably miserable — hypersensitive, sarcastic, misanthropic. (Bert, too, is described as grouchy; none of the characters, in fact, is especially sunshiney except maybe Ernie, who also seems slow.) “We might not be able to create a character like Oscar now,” she said.

Snuffleupagus is visible only to Big Bird; since 1985, all the characters can see him, as Big Bird’s old protestations that he was not hallucinating came to seem a little creepy, not to mention somewhat strained. As for Cookie Monster, he can be seen in the old-school episodes in his former inglorious incarnation: a blue, googly-eyed cookievore with a signature gobble (“om nom nom nom”). Originally designed by Jim Henson for use in commercials for General Foods International and Frito-Lay, Cookie Monster was never a righteous figure. His controversial conversion to a more diverse diet wouldn’t come until 2005, and in the early seasons he comes across a Child’s First Addict.

The biggest surprise of the early episodes is the rural — agrarian, even — sequences. Episode 1 spends a stoned time warp in the company of backlighted cows, while they mill around and chew cud. This pastoral scene rolls to an industrial voiceover explaining dairy farms, and the sleepy chords of Joe Raposo’s aimless masterpiece, “Hey Cow, I See You Now.” Chewing the grass so green/Making the milk/Waiting for milking time/Waiting for giving time/Mmmmm.

Oh, what’s that? Right, the trance of early “Sesame Street” and its country-time sequences. In spite of the show’s devotion to its “target child,” the “4-year-old inner-city black youngster” (as The New York Times explained in 1979), the first episodes join kids cavorting in amber waves of grain — black children, mostly, who must be pressed into service as the face of America’s farms uniquely on “Sesame Street.”

In East Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant in 1978, 95 percent of households with kids ages 2 to 5 watched “Sesame Street.” The figure was even higher in Washington. Nationwide, though, the number wasn’t much lower, and was largely determined by the whims of the PBS affiliates: 80 percent in houses with young children. The so-called inner city became anywhere that “Sesame Street” played, because the Children’s Television Workshop declared the inner city not a grim sociological reality but a full-color fantasy — an eccentric scene, framed by a box and far removed from real farmland and city streets alike.

The concept of the “inner city” — or “slums,” as The Times bluntly put it in its first review of “Sesame Street” — was therefore transformed into a kind of Xanadu on the show: a bright, no-clouds, clear-air place where people bopped around with monsters and didn’t worry too much about money, cleanliness or projecting false cheer. The Upper West Side, hardly a burned-out ghetto, was said to be the model.

People on “Sesame Street” had limited possibilities and fixed identities, and (the best part) you weren’t expected to change much. The harshness of existence was a given, and no one was proposing that numbers and letters would lead you “out” of your inner city to Elysian suburbs. Instead, “Sesame Street” suggested that learning might merely make our days more bearable, more interesting, funnier. It encouraged us, above all, to be nice to our neighbors and to cultivate the safer pleasures that take the edge off — taking baths, eating cookies, reading. Don’t tell the kids.

Points of Entry

Caveat teletor: Volumes 1 and 2 of “Sesame Street: Old School” are available on DVD, which you can sample and buy on Sesameworkshop.org. With a few episodes, extras and celebrity appearances by the likes of Richard Pryor and Lou Rawls, “Old School” sounds harmless enough. But are you ready to mainline this much ’70s nostalgia?

The Way Old: YouTube is great for performance art. If 1969 is not far back enough for you, how’s 1935? The Oscar-winning short film “How to Sleep,” by the Algonquin Round-Tabler Robert Benchley, can be found here in sumptuous black-and-white; search for his name and the film’s title on YouTube.

Come of Age: Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick, the men of “My So-Called Life” and “thirtysomething,” have at last introduced their online-only young-adult series, “Quarterlife.” It started Nov. 11 on MySpaceTV.com, and it marks the first time a network-quality series — a long indie film, really — has been produced directly for the Internet. If the old times unnerve you, welcome to the new times.

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I am such a sap.

Just finished watching one of my favorite movies Educating Rita. It came out in 1983 and I’m guessing that I saw it for the first time on cable or Beta (yes. we had a beta. if you don’t know what beta was, go fuck yourself) in 1984, 85.

It’s a Pygmalion story of a 30ish working class woman (played by an adorably feisty Julie Walters (Mrs. Weasley in the HP flicks) who decides to go back to school and is tutored in English Literature by a bored alcoholic failure in the 1st degree professor played by Michael Caine.

They have a teacher/student relationship, but they love each other. It isn’t sexual. . . or is it? He asks her to go to Australia with him toward the end and she says deftly avoids it.

Why am I a sap? Because I always cry at the last scene. She is waiting for him at the airport gate (pre pre pre pre 9/11 days) and he shows up late because he wanted to see her test results that he has picked up and brought with him. She’s passed. With distinction. They hug. No kissing. And then he gets on the plane and she walks away. . . even though they love and respect each other.

I tear up every time. Even with the terrible 80’s synthesizer soundtrack.

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For those of you that read my mother’s comments on the last post, I’s got some s’plainen’ to-do.

First, for my friends that know me. . .  you can see my tendency to forget to give context when telling an anecdote is clearly a genetic trait.

Second, my mother has always been incredibly supportive of me. This has been aided by the fact that I earned a high GPA in High School, graduated Undergrad in four years rather than the seven or never plan, went on to earn two Masters degrees, mostly paid her back money that I have borrowed, and never got knocked up or arrested. One of my old jokes about my mother– (which I have probably already used here. Sue me. You try writing one of these things for a few years and come up with new material every flippen day. It’s hard.) One of my old jokes is, if I told my mother I was thinking of becoming a prostitute, she would say, “Well, you go out there and be the best little crack whore that you can be.”

Third. What she going on about?

Alright. I think I have already talked about this (see above comment regarding recycled material).

I loved The Pink Panther movies as a kid and I adored the slap stick genius of Peter Sellers. I would pay homage to his comedy genius by painting on a fake mustache, putting on my mother’s trench coat and my father’s hat, pop into a closet and then spring out saying one of the lines from the movie in the best bad French accent my 11 year old self could do.

If I had been born ten years later they would have put me on medication.

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Al Im’d me.

Al: What are you doing for lunch?
Me: Listening to you bitch about something.
Al: I hate being so predictable.

A bit after 12:30 we were walking down Victoria Street toward Westminster making our way to a pub we like that is tucked in a quiet street near St. James Park. A couple of older ladies crossed our path. They looked as if they had robbed Queen Elizabeth’s closet and haberdashery.

“I say,” I said to Al in my bluest of blue blood accents, “do you know the way to Buckingham Palace?”

“Do you know who my Father is?” Al replied in an equally put on accent.

“I wonder if they are picking up an OBE?”

“Dunno. She is home.” Al walks through St. James Park to work so he sees if the Standard is being flown.

We turned down a street by St. James Park station and we saw another woman wearing an Ascoty hat.

“Yeah, there is definitely something going on.”

Bells were ringing. Happy church bells.

We ordered our food and our pints and went upstairs. Another couple was sitting in the chairs we normally like to sit in.

‘You know,” Al whispered, “those seats are much more comfortable than these.”

“Yes.”

“Let’s kill them.”

“Sure. Then we can stuff them up the floo.”

“I wouldn’t bother. We can stack them up behind the bar. No one will notice until we are long gone.”

“I think if we’re going to kill someone, we should give some thought of how we are going to dispose of the bodies.”

“Details.”

The bells were still ringing.

We bitched.

“You know what we should do?” Al said. “You should take out a life insurance policy on me—“

“And then I kill you?”

Al glared at me. “No. Then I fake my death and we split the money.”

“Your family will love that. I’m practically a stranger and I get your money?”

“You’re right. We’ll have to kill them first. There will be more money that way. And I don’t want to share my inheritance with Fiona so she has to go as well.”

“Such a loving family.”

Hey, I would say this to their face. I could just wait. They’re Scottish. It won’t be too much longer.”

“Then we fake your death?”

“Exactly.”

When we left the pub the bells were still ringing.

“It sounds like a wedding.”

“That’s what it is!” Al said. “It’s their Diamond wedding. Sixty years.”

I immediately knew who the they was. “Sixty years. I can’t imagine.”

“I know. If I were the Queen I would have killed The Duke of Edinburgh years ago. She could do it. She can’t be prosecuted.”

“I’m starting to worry about you.”

“You’re just starting to worry about me?”

“You have been talking a lot about killing people.”

“I would do it by injecting insulin under the fingernails. That’s how my mother said she was going to kill my father. And she’s a doctor so she would know.”

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It’s three in the afternoon and it is dark and rainy and windy and cold outside. I’m still in my dressing gown watching TV while I surf the Internet for Thanksgiving recipies. Lazy girl I am. Stu is away for a few days for work.

I need to go to the store soon since it closes at ridiculous o’clock on Sunday but I’m warm and it looks cold out there.

I wish Stuart was here being a sloth with me.

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I have a thing for watching birds. They make me laugh. Those big obnoxious crows that you see on the common and parks are one of my favorites. I also love magpies. There are a couple hopping along the gutters of the house opposite us right now. They are lifting up leaves, looking for something to eat. I suppose I am a freak for liking them.

I guess I just like birds.

I used to have a pet canary that I called Chicken because when she fluffed up her feathers she looked like a little chick. When I would set up her cage over a dish of water for her bath she would ignore it until I was out of the room. Only when she thought she was alone would she splash and tweet. If she caught me looking around the corner she would hop back on her perch and glare until I ducked back behind the wall.

I’d love to have an African Grey Parrot someday. It might be dangerous with Stuart around however. He would probably teach it to yell “You’re shit!” or “Shut it!” to visitors.*

*For those that don’t know Stuart, he thinks it’s funny to sometimes randomly insult friends or loved ones. He isn’t serious and we just laugh at him because he is white and lame. He’s like a funny little magpie hopping along.

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I have no idea what to write about, so I am going to talk about the weather.

The real cold weather is here. Frost on the roof. Need your warm coat and scarf. I’m liking it at the moment, but that is easy to say when it is sunny and bright.

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The gentle Nobel Savage tagged me with a fun and slightly disturbing meme. I am going to make this 5 things about booze and bars and me.

1. One of my favourite songs about drinken’ is Willie Nelson singing “I Gotta Get Drunk”. Not sure if he wrote it or not. Here are a few of the lyrics:

Gotta get drunk and I sure do dread it
Cause I know just what I’m gonna do
Start to spend my money
Calling everybody, honey
Wind up singin’ the blues

Spend my whole paycheck on some old wreck
Brother I can name you a few
But I gotta get drunk and I sure do dread it
Cause I know just what I’m gonna do

I gotta get drunk, I can’t stay sober
There’s a lot of good people in town
Who gotta hear me holler
See me spend my dollar
And I wouldn’t think of letting em down
There’s a lot of doctors that tell me
I’d better stop putting it down
But there’s more old drunks
Than there are old doctors
So I guess I’d better have another round. . .

2. The first time I got drunk, I was 18 and had just arrived at Uni. I had drunk a little prior to this, but not really. Never really liked it when it was around at family dinners. Had a few White Russians in High School, the ingredients siphoned off from David’s parents liquor cabinet and my High School graduation I had a few wine coolers, but I didn’t really get drunk.

This was autumn 1988. There was one boy that all the girls noticed because he had long blonde hair and wore Birkenstocks. He was attractive but we all called him Jesus because of the hair. We weren’t being complimentary. This will be important later.

My dorm at Southern Utah University had boys and girls wings and after curfew, you had to leave the areas for the opposite sex.

I was in my friend Darren and his roommate Jason’s room with another girl from my floor. Jason pulled out a bottle of cheap, white rum that wasn’t even good enough to be well booze. We started passing the bottle and I was knocking it back. Just thinking about it makes me want to hurl. We drank so quickly, one moment I was completely sober and the next I was off my tits. Then it was 11 pm. Curfew. We had to leave the room. Except I was not capable of movement. Darren and the girl from my dorm helped me down the hallway. Coming towards me, the longhaired blue-eyed boy who was also off his tits drunk was being helped down the hall by his friends. I took one look at him, giggled to myself and shouted, “Jesus!”

It took me years to live that down.

3. I don’t remember the first bar I went into for sure. I do remember my Dad taking my sisters and I into one when we were in Kingman. I remember him putting salt in his beer. I’m not sure why he did that. At Uni there were only two bars in Cedar City and they were both cowboy bars. We went a couple of times when I had my fake ID and later when I was 21, but for the most part we went to house parties.

I will always have a soft spot for The Midas Touch, which may be the worse pub ever. Stuart and his friends used to go there every Friday night. It is on Golden Square in Soho just down from the youth hostel and the beer is really cheap so it is always packed to the gills with back packers. Stu and I went to a few places on our first date but this was the pub where we had our first kiss. This is the pub where one Saturday afternoon I kicked his ass playing Monopoly and this is the pub where he introduced me to all of his friends within a week of meeting me- which is no small thing. So while it is really a terrible little pub, there is a part of me that will always love it.

4. The group of friends in Vegas that are like The Island of Misfit Toys have a really great New Years Eve party each year. They calculate the odds on who will be the first to vomit that year. Odds are calculated by past performance as well as other intangibles. The year I won, it was shortly after midnight and shots were suggested. Tequila. The stuff on its own stone cold sober sends me from zero to sick.

5. My poison? Red wine but I hate how it turns my teeth red. Beer- Guinness, ambers. A well-shaken dirty vodka martini is a thing of beauty. Scotch for dessert is an occasional indulgence.

I tag whomever would like to do this!

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