Me too, I start wearing skirts or sundresses as soon as it’s 80 degrees. I hate t-shirts and shorts, they make me look short and wide. in fact, I hate jeans, too, and only wear them when I have to go out of the house somewhere. I was born in the wrong era.
Anyway - TV shows/movies often feature the parents attending an elementary school play. I look at the kids up there on the stage and just have to marvel at the imaginative, amusing, impressive costumes they are wearing, that look like they came from a professional costume rental company. Fruits, vegetables, stars and moons and planets, angels, Christmas creches, pilgrims and Indians - all of them button-cute in those beautiful costumes (and no kid suffers from stage fright).
Yes, the pink boxes are ubiquitous here, I thought they were everywhere. Even the bakery departments in the larger grocery stores give you your merchandise in a pink box, and for the items that you pick yourself out of bins, like Danishes and bagels, there is usually a large supply of folded-flat pink boxes that you have to set up yourself.
From my experience in L.A. butcher shops, of which there are many, usually cater to an ethnic group, e.g. carnicerias to the Latino population, and kosher butchers to Jewish people, and so on. I would assume it’s similar in most large cities, where you get a variety of ethnic groups with particular niche needs/tastes in meat, which cannot be provided by the supermarkets.
I do know it’s old-fashioned, but we have an answering machine. We figured out we could buy an answering machine, and after three months of not paying for voicemail, we would have our money back. We’ve had it for 2 1/2 years. So, 27 months of not paying $7.50/month … we’re a little more than $200 ahead. Yes, I really am that cheap. We’re rare, but we do exist.
I have an answering machine. I dread coming home and seeing blinking messages, though. If it isn’t someone trying to sell me something, it’s inevitably bad news. (cause there are ‘situations’ in progress with half my family).
Sweatpants are OK, but I prefer leggings (in a color that coordinates with my cat) and a longish top over them. Or flannel pajama bottoms and a coordinating t-shirt, for just around the house, not to be viewed by the public.
I’ve recently been re-watching the Sopranos, and I have been struck with what a good job they do of portraying sloblike normal life. Tony slouches around in his bathrobe half the time, and the kids leave a hell of a mess.
However, I’ve never kept a bunch of guns and money stashed above the ceiling panels. I suspect this is uncommon.
That never happens now but it sure did here (in Sydney) just before we got television in 1956. I remember being held on my father’s shoulders to watch some grainy, poor quality black and white broadcast. People were six to seven deep so I was fortunate in being able to see anything.
The same thing happened just before colour television was introduced.
At any rate, it’s still more work than not blurring out obviously identifiable brand names… especially when it’s obvious what the brand is and the producers look like dicks (IMHO) for going to so much trouble to blur it out.
Here’s a sitcom staple that I’m curious if anybody’s ever had to do:
Have you ever had to pretend that a friend is married to someone they aren’t/is the boss at work/some other odd confusing situation/ when their parents are visiting?
No, but I have had to pretend to be gay because I told someone I wasn’t interested in them because they were the wrong gender and then they set me up with someone of my preferred gender, but my son was interested in her daughter so I had to go along with the whole charade. Okay, not really, that was a “Frasier.” One of my faves, but again, this is something I’ve never seen either.
I know this is a classic example of sitcom nonsense, but now that I think about it I think maybe it is realistic. Especially for the time period.
My mother, who was in high school during the original run of The Brady Bunch, was one of EIGHT kids and grew up in a three bedroom house. My grandfather was a farmer, not an architect, but even though Mike designed the house himself it’s not like that’s a free pass to do whatever you want. He still had to pay for the land and the construction, and a bigger house presumably would have cost more. Keep in mind that once he remarried Mike became the sole breadwinner for a family of eight people. A seven bedroom mansion would have been ridiculous, and I think even a five bedroom house would have been rather extravagant for the time.
I do think he could have included at least a tiny maid’s room for Alice, though. It’s not like he didn’t know she’d be living there, she had already been the Brady family maid for years before to Mike’s remarriage.
Not exactly, but on several occasions I was (mostly unwittingly) a beard for a classmate of mine in library school. I have a minor anecdote about a visit from his parents, although I never even met them.
I don’t think I was ever in this friend’s apartment more than twice and not for very long either time, but I did sit on his couch. His parents came to visit not long afterward. His mother, who apparently missed her true calling as a crime scene investigator, spotted one of my very long, blondish hairs on a cushion. She picked it up and said “Oh, was a GIIIRL here?” My friend said yes and added that I was just a friend, but he said his mother seemed determined to read more into it than that. “Is she NIIICE? Does she go to school with you?” Probably wishful thinking on her part more than anything else. My friend was pretty obviously gay by American standards, but wasn’t exactly out to his parents. His parents were poor Catholic immigrants and for both cultural and religious reasons were apparently holding out hope that their son would eventually develop an interest in girls.
I have a book, TV Sets: Fantasy Blueprints of Classic TV Homes by Mark Bennett. The author tried to come up with coherent blueprints for a whole bunch of sticom homes (including Lost in Space and the Flintsones. It claims that the Brady house had 2 and 1/2 baths; Mike & Carol’s master bath, the Jack-and-Jill bath the kids shared, and a half-bath on the 1st floor next to Alice’s room (which means she had to go throught he kids’ rooms or master suit in order to bathe. Also aparently the Cunninghams’ 2nd story was located directly over their backyard.
Regarding the Brady house, do we know that he built the house after marrying Carol? Perhaps he already had it and had Greg in one room with Peter and Bobby in the other room, and then had to put all three in one room once Carol and the girls arrived.
