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I spent Easter weekend at Sister-san's house. Sister-san has a nifty satellite TV thingie-dingie that brings in a lot more channels than the wee rabbit ears at Sensational Acres, so I spent a good portion of the weekend glaze-eyed in front of the tube.
One of the favorite channels in that household is the Game Show Network. The GSN rebroadcasts old game shows from the last 30 years or so for our post-modern enjoyment. You can find "Let's Make a Deal," "Match Game," "The Newlywed Game," "$64,000 Pyramid," "Family Feud" (with a turtlenecked Richard Dawson tongue-kissing every female contestant, regardless of age or willingness), "Hollywood Squares" and just about every other game show you can think of. It's a hoot seeing the 70s fashions on parade, answering "timely" trivia questions from the Carter administration, ogling the invariably ugly newlyweds on their own special show and watching Monty Hall make ooh-inspiring deals with costumed contestants for $1,000 microwaves and $6,000 sports cars.
Ah, nostalgia. I remember watching "Match Game" when I was probably around 10 years old. Are you other 30-somethings with me on this? The show's host reads a phrase or short anecdote in which a word has been left out, which he articulates by saying "BLANK" where there's a blank to be filled in. The panel of 6 celebrities (which always included Charles Nelson Riley, who was "out" before out was in) writes down how they'd fill in the blank, and the contestants get points for matching their answers. I thought the show was hilarious; those people sure found funny ways to fill in those blanks. What I was too young to realize was that the BLANK was always strategically placed to lend itself to as much innuendo as possible. Watching the reruns through my current lens of maturity and sophistication, I'm amazed at the things that were almost said on live TV.
[Speaking of which: a "Newlywed" aside: A friend of Sister-san's claims to have seen a "Newlywed Game" in which the young groom was asked to predict his wife's answer to the question "Where's the most exotic place you've made whoopie?" (In the modest, pre-nudity-on-prime-time 70s, they didn't even say "make love" out loud. How long ago was that?) Misunderstanding the thrust of the question, as it were, the man described what they'd done rather than where they'd done it. Since the show was filmed live before a studio audience, his racy reply apparently made it into the broadcast. Whether this is urban legend or not, I'm not quite sure, but that friend swears he saw it on TV.]
One of the entertaining moments this weekend came during a rerun of "$64,000 Pyramid," which if it were in production today would probably be "$64K [pyramid-shaped icon]." As you may recall, in this game one player tries to get another to guess what category of people, places or things he's talking about by naming examples. For instance, if I gave as examples "sunscreen, plane tickets, suitcase, passport," my partner would, hopefully, guess that the category was "things you take on vacation." So we were watching the show, and the category was "things that are broad." The clue-giver said things like "a football player's shoulders, a fat lady's hips," and the first thing his partner blurted was "things that are bulging."
Given the amount of food traditionally consumed whenever two or more members of my family get together, that just struck me funny. So of course no matter where I went for the rest of the weekend, I saw things that were bulging. And so did everyone who saw me, I'm sure. Chocolate pie, anyone?