Jim Nabors – "The Impossible Dream" (1966)

To be willing to march into Hell

For a heavenly cause!

[NOTE: If you somehow neglected to read the last 2 or 3 lines, you’re probably asking yourself “Why in the hell is 2 or 3 lines writing about author Ira Levin and No Time for Sergeants today?”  Click here to read that previous post, which will explain how I came to write this one.]

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By the way, Ira Levin was a playwright as well as a novelist.  His first produced play was titled No Time for Sergeants, which was based on the 1954 novel of the same name about a hillbilly who was drafted into the Air Force.

The play – which starred Andy Griffith and also featured Don Knotts (who would pair up with Griffith on the long-running CBS series, The Andy Griffith Show) – opened on Broadway in 1955, and ran for almost two years.  

Griffith, Knotts, and most of the rest of Broadway cast also appeared in the No Time for Sergeants movie that Warner Brothers released on May 29, 1958 – which just so happened to be the day before my 6th birthday.

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I vividly remember seeing that movie in a downtown theatre in my hometown of Joplin, Missouri – it may have been the first movie I ever saw in a theatre.  

I’m sure it took a few months for the movie to make its way from the bigger American cities to Joplin, but I doubt that it took as long as a year.

So why did my parents (or, more likely, my mother) take a six-year-old to see a movie – especially a movie that wasn’t a kids’ movie?  That’s a very good question. 

My parents were very frugal, and we went to very few movies.  After all, TV was free, which the movies certainly were not.  

The next-oldest movie I remember seeing in a theatre was The Absent-Minded Professor, which wasn’t released until 1961.  I wouldn’t swear on a stack of Bibles that I went three years between trips to the movie theatre – I might have seen one or two others that I’ve forgotten – but it wouldn’t surprise me.

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The No Time for Sergeants movie inspired not one, but two television series.

One of those series was also called No Time for Sergeants.  It debuted on ABC in the fall of 1964, but was canceled after one season due to poor ratings.  (The show was scheduled opposite – what else? – The Andy Griffith Show, which was extremely popular.) 

The other series – a spinoff of that selfsame Andy Griffith Show that also debuted in 1964 – was Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C., which was one of the very worst network sitcoms that ever aired.  (Naturally, Gomer Pyle was consistently among the most-watched television shows of its era.)

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I don’t remember ever watching the No Time for Sergeants TV show.  That was either because my parents like The Andy Griffith Show better, or because No Time for Sergeants wasn’t carried by either of Joplin’s two TV stations.  

One of those stations was an affiliate of CBS, which was the dominant network in the sixties.  The other station aired a mix of ABC and NBC programs.  (That’s why I couldn’t watch the first season of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. – that station chose to air Wagon Train, which was the ABC series in the same time slot.)

 

Joplin finally got a third TV station in 1968, when I was in high school.  That station broadcast on UHF channel 16.  Older TV sets received only channels 2 through 13, but my parents gave me a snazzy little RCA black-and-white portable TV for Christmas about that time, so I could watch channels 14 through 83 as well.

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Gomer Pyle was originally a supporting character on The Andy Griffith Show.  He became so popular that the show’s producers created a new series starring Pyle as an unbelievably naive Marine recruit.  (I’m using “naive” in place of “stupid” – which is more accurate – because at least two of my children and their spouses have prohibited their small children from using the word “stupid.”  Every time I visit one of their homes and my grandchildren hear me use “stupid” in conversation, they get very upset.)

Jim Nabors portrayed Pyle as a high-voiced simpleton who spoke mostly in annoying catchphrases – like “Gol-l-l-l-y!” and “Shazam!” and “Surprise, surprise, surprise!”

But Pyle regularly broke out into song in a deep baritone voice.  (Nabors showed that voice off in his regular guest appearances on The Carol Burnett Show and in his eponymous variety show that CBS aired for two seasons after Nabors walked away from Gomer Pyle.)

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In an episode of season four of Gomer Pyle, Private Pyle sang “The Impossible Dream” at a fundraising concert in Washington, DC:

Click here to watch Jim Nabors (as Gomer Pyle) singing “The Impossible Dream” – the signature song from the 1965 Broadway musical, The Man of La Mancha – with the Marine Band.

Click below to buy the song from Amazon:

Destroy All Monsters – "Nobody Knows" (1979)

Where I come from

Nobody knows

I like to win at trivia competitions as much as the next guy.  It’s a great way to impress babes, of course – “Did you really know which two bordering New England states are the only states in the U.S. that elect their governors to two-year terms instead of four-year terms?  That’s sooooo hot!”  

(Here’s another clue for you all)

And winning a certificate worth 30% off your bar tab is nothing to sneeze at.

But what keeps me coming back to play trivia week after week are the zen moments when an obscure  answer to a seemingly impossible query seems to materialize in your mind out of thin air.

It’s almost an out-of-body experience when the trivia-meister reads a question that sparks nothing in the way of a possible response.  You gape at your teammates, but you don’t really see or hear them – your brain slows to a crawl, like a computer that has no available RAM because you have a hundred tabs open and a bunch of apps running in the background. 

But at the last moment, the correct answer is inexplicably but undeniably there.  “Where I come from, nobody knows,” that answer sings to you as you scribble it down on the answer slip and run it up to the host.

Mirabile dictu!  (And how!)

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I enjoyed one such zen moment recently, when we were asked to answer the following question:

Katherine Ross starred in this 1975 movie that was set in a fictional Connecticut suburb, while the 2004 remake of that movie featured Nicole Kidman. 

Most of the teams playing that night were able to come up with the correct answer: The Stepford Wives.  (I had no idea the movie had a sequel, so I was no help.)

Katherine Ross

The zen moment came when the host read the bonus question:

What was the name of the author of the best-selling book that those movies were based on?

The Stepford Wives novel was published in 1972.  That was a l-o-n-g time ago, boys and girls.  

I was familiar with the basic plot of the book, but I never read it – nor did I see either movie version.  But for some reason, I was pretty sure that the author’s first name had only three letters – e.g., Ian, or Ari, or something similar.

I also had a feeling that the author had a Jewish last name.  

Although I never read the book, I certainly would have seen the book at the library or in bookstores back in the day.  I had a vague memory that the book’s cover was white, with the title and author’s name in large black letters.

Unfortunately, knowing what the book looked like or correctly identifying the ethnicity of the author wasn’t enough to win us any points.  We had to provide the actual name of that author.

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Earlier that night, I had a minor zen moment when answering a question that asked us to provide three two-word answers – the first word of each answer began with “B” and the second word began with “A.”

The first two questions – one was about a famous traitor (Benedict Arnold) and the other was about a famous “Massh*le” (Ben Affleck) – weren’t all that hard.

King of the Massh*les

But the third one – “What two-word phrase became popular as a result of its repeated usage by a New York Morning Telegraph reporter in the 1920s?” – had us stumped at first.

As we brainstormed, one of my teammates offered “bad apple” as a possible answer.

I suddenly had a flash of inspiration, and wrote down “Big Apple” on the answer slip.  There was no doubt in my mind about that answer, and I was correct. 

I don’t think anyone on my team would have pulled “Big Apple” if I hadn’t come up with it.  But I would never have thought of that answer if my teammate hadn’t thrown out “bad apple” as a possible answer.

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The author of The Stepford Wives is, of course, Ira Levin.  (Levin also penned Rosemary’s Baby and The Boys from Brazil, both of which were adapted into movies that did well at the box office.  I didn’t read either of those books either.) 

I can’t explain why his name sudden popped into my head any more than I can explain quantum physics or Thomas Pynchon’s novels.

But it did . . . which meant we were awarded two bonus points . . . which came in very handy considering that we finished in first place that night by exactly one point.

While finishing in first place is always very satisfying, what was much more satisfying for me was somehow coming up with Ira Levin’s name – forty-odd years after I last thought about it (assuming I ever really “thought about” it).

“God works in mysterious ways,” the saying goes.

And so does the brain of 2 or 3 lines.

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My original post about “Nobody Knows” by Destroy All Monsters appeared on April 8, 2016.

“Nobody Knows” was the 1000th record to be featured on 2 or 3 lines post, so it’s kind of a big deal to me.

As is the fact that my post featured an interview with Destroy All Monsters’ frontwoman, the inimitable Niagara – the ne plus ultra of punk-rock femme fatales:

Click here to read that post, which includes a link you can click on to hear “Nobody Knows.”

Click here to buy that record from Amazon: