Empty Nesters
Sunday, September 23rd, 2012
Empty Nest was a sitcom that did a magnificent job of eluding me all through its seven-year run. And the fact that it has never been released on DVD doesn’t help either. But as the consummate sitcom fan, I am well aware of the series, which was a spin-off from The Golden Girls. And thus, when I had the opportunity to meet a pair of members from the cast, I opted to go with a photo of the show to get jointly signed. The star of the show, Richard Mulligan, passed away in 2000, five years after the show ended, so sadly I will never get him to sign my photo. I had actually met Kristy McNichol, who played one of Mulligans two daughters Barbara Weston, in 2007. Read the rest of this entry »
I got to sleep in on the morning of Friday, July 20, 2012, and that felt nice. The convention was underway and we’d had a pretty late night the night before and this one would be even later. So I didn’t bother with Chuck McCann’s morning “Let’s Have Fun Presentation”, nor Silent Cinema, nor the ITJ breakfast (considering I wasn’t invited), and not even ‘breakfast on your own.’ I just slept in. Then at 10am I meandered down to the Grand Council meeting. As has been standard, there has not been any ‘business’ discussed, so the meeting was just restricted to the two convention bids. I was involved with the first. 
OK, it was either those lead-in lyrics or “Watchoo talkin’ ’bout?” as the title of this posting – and that one’s been done to death. But still it never fails to make me smile a bit, because Diff’rent Strokes was one of the earliest prime time sitcoms that really captured me. I won’t even bother to wax philosophical about what it taught the Gen X’ers about race relations, drugs, pedophilia, smoking, kids in wheelchairs, kidnapping, and epilepsy during some of its ‘very special episodes’ that it was famous for – because somehow through all the seriousness it never failed to make me laugh and feel right at home in the Drummond residence.