Let’s call it an experiment.

A few years back I got the feeling my appetite for what I’ll term ‘modern movies’ was on the wane.

I went searching for an alternative and hit upon the idea of seeing live theater instead. Sparkling dialogue and amusing witticisms delivered by real life actors on stage would be mine for the enjoying.

Only problem is it hasn’t quite turned out that way.

What I got instead was a whole bunch of contemporary ‘issue’ plays. Do you know the type?

With a preference for overly long monologues, characters in these types of get-up are reduced to being little more than mouthpieces for a particular point of view on a so-called ‘hot’ topic currently doing the rounds.

Mix together characters with opposing points of view and whammo – you’ve got yourself 90 minutes of ‘woke’ – style dialogue and what might pass in some quarters as a story.

But entertainment? Not even close. Not in my book. Not in a lot of people’s ‘books’ I would guess.

Over the course of the last two years, I and all the other unlucky souls that have endured this ‘edu-tainment’ have been subjected to dull discourses on gender politics, climate change, the immigration policy debate, mental health, environmental responsibility, all manner of perspective on social justice and social reform, discrimination, and human rights.

And let’s not forget topics and themes related to First Nations people, their struggles and continued search for identity. They’ve managed to weave this divisive chestnut into portions of probably somewhere close to half of these often tedious plays over the time I’ve been a subscriber.

Granted, the Shakespeare plays (updated to include ‘contemporary’ themes and ‘modern sensibilities’ – of course) were always going to be a hard sell for me. But the rest? How else to say it other than it’s not really my idea of a good time to have to sit in a heavy-handed ‘lecture theater’ for two hours, squirming in my seat all the while, while I’m ‘educated’ on all and sundry ‘issues’.

Being a State Government-funded theater company, I understand part of it’s ‘charter’ is going to be shining a light on some of the issues of the day, ‘consciousness raising’ if you will. But this malarkey is too much. Too woke. Too UNLIKE entertainment. Too difficult to plough through.

I’d settle for an old-fashioned murder mystery, thriller or comedy… even a musical, just to break up the unrelenting heaviness of all this… this…I don’t know… ruminating blather? Maybe something like –

Sorry Queensland Theatre. There won’t be a 2024 season renewal from me. If I want to be across all the firestorms and issues of the day – which I believe I am – it’s far easier and cheaper to just switch on ABC radio or television.

With this off my chest it’s time for a stiff lemonade and something I know will entertain me – not try to educate me.

This 1977 masterpiece of a movie should do the trick nicely…

Ready for your HAPPY DAYS hit? Then better click HERE.

In this month’s excerpt from Gary Numan’s 2021 autobiography, we travel back to what would turn out to be a life changing moment. 

For a person that would go on to become known and respected as one of the pioneers of electronic music, the time he first cast eyes on the famed MINIMOOG ANALOG SYNTHESIZER was a moment worth writing about.

The minimoog was manufactured between 1970 – 1981.  It was the first synthesizer sold in retail stores. In 1975 they sold for approx. $2400 (Aust currency) which in today’s money would be approx $13 000 (Aust currency).

“While Paul and Jess were unloading the equipment from the van, I went into the control room with Mike and noticed a synthesizer on a desk in the corner. It was a MiniMoog.

I’d never seen a real synth before, and it was a fascinating machine to look at. Dials and switches from one side to the other.

I was intrigued, so I asked Mike if I could have a go. After Mike had turned it on, the sound that came out of it when I pressed a key was just awesome, in the truest sense of the word.

The room shook and you felt the sound as much as you heard it. I had never experienced anything like it, and I was absolutely blown away.

This was everything I’d been looking for.

The sheer weight of the sound was shocking. It was like a huge bulldozer of noise, a vast wall of sound. It was a sonic assault on the ears. It felt unstoppable, immensely powerful and totally exhilarating.

For me everything changed in that one moment.” p51

Before we finish off, there’s always time for a song from the…

READ IT HERE

Ok, I haven’t read this book but should that stop me from talking about it? No sireee!

From the author who gave us the 2012 guide HOW TO TALK ABOUT PLACES YOU’VE NEVER BEEN comes this humorous reflection on what it means to read and join in on literary banter.

On the eve of the 22nd anniversary of the September 11 attacks on what was New York’s World Trade Centre, comes this…

It’s a true story that takes place on that fateful day, but a story more specifically about something else – computer passwords: those tiny personal codes that can strain our memory and lead to fist-clenching when we can’t remember them.

One of the world’s largest financial services firms, CANTOR FITZGERALD, occupied the top five floors above where American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower. 658 employees of the company lost their lives that day.

Amidst the chaos, heartbreak and tragedy, Chairman and CEO Howard Lutnick was responsible for ensuring the viability of his company. The biggest threat to that? No-one knew the passwords for hundreds of accounts and files that were needed to get back online in time for the reopening of the bond markets.

CANTOR FITZGERALD did have extensive contingency plans in place, including a requirement that all employees tell their work passwords to four nearby colleagues. But now a large majority of the firm’s 960 New York employees were dead.

Hours after the attacks, more than 30 security experts dispatched from Microsoft arrived at an improvised CANTOR FITZGERALD command centre.

Many of the missing passwords would prove to be relatively secure – the JHx6fT!9 type that the company’s IT department had implored everyone to choose.

To crack those, the Microsoft technicians performed ‘brute force’ attacks, using fast computers to begin with ‘a’, then work through every possible letter and number combination before ending at ‘zzzzzzz’.

But even with the fastest computers, brute-force attacks, working through trillions of combinations, could take days.

Microsoft’s technicians knew that they needed to take advantage of two facts: many people use the same password for multiple accounts and these passwords are typically personalized.

The technicians explained that for their algorithms to work best, they needed large amounts of trivia about the owner of each missing password, the kinds of things that were too specific, too personal and too idiosyncratic for companies to keep on file.

Howard Lutnick soon found himself on the phone calling the spouses, parents and siblings of his former colleagues to console them – and to ask them, ever so gently, whether they knew their loved ones’ passwords.

Most often they did not, which meant Lutnick had to begin working his way through a checklist that had been provided to him by the Microsoft technicians. “What is your wedding anniversary? Tell me again where he went to University? You guys have a dog, don’t you? What’s her name?”

This was all less than 24 hours after the towers had fallen. Families had not accepted their losses. Conversations teetered between crying and agonizing silences. Sometimes it took more than an hour to work through the checklist, but Lutnick made sure that he was never the one to hang up first.

In the end, Microsoft’s technicians got what they needed. CANTOR FITZGERALD was back in operation within two days.

Click HERE to get a HAPPY DAYS hit.

WONDER WOMAN 1984 was the last movie that got me to a cinema. That was three years ago.

These days, the only motivation to see something at the ‘ol bricks ‘n mortar is if a sequel or remake to a film I once liked gets a showing.

So it was a few days back with the release of THE EQUALIZER 3.

How did it rate? So as not to be underdone in the opinion stakes, here’s how I’d score all three in the series…

I live at the end of a dead-end street. It’s name?ARGYLE PLACE.

I like the street and I like the name. And I like the sound the name makes when I tell folk my address.

With it’s connection to the world’s rarest type of pink diamond, ARGYLE has a ring of sophistication, nay even elegance to it.

Well, that’s what I tell myself.

Time now to pull back the curtain on some other standout street names. And STANDOUT I do mean…

Psycho Path is a private road in Traverse City in the U.S. state of Michigan. It was once voted America’s most bizarre street name. Right you are there.

Picture this conversation between a visiting tourist and a Maine local:

“Hi there. Can you tell me which way to the shops?”

“Be happy to friend. Just go UPTHA ROAD.“

“Which road?”

“UPTHA ROAD“

“You mean this one?”

“Yup”

Finding it – in Southern California – is the easy part. Pronouncing it? Yeah right.

Everyone knows that RED RUM is MURDER spelt backwards. Right? So why name a street after that most famous scene from the 1980 movie THE SHINING?

Well, maybe the movie is actually NOT the inspiration for this street name.

Seeing is believing. Where? Delaware – Ohio, U.S

And I know Victoria in Australia has a Tennis Court – and not the racquet kind.

 SHADES OF DEATH ROAD is a two-lane rural road, 10.8 km in length in New Jersey, U.S. It featured in an episode of the second season of the 2013 television series HAUNTED HIGHWAY. Now you know.

Does anyone else remember the television series I DREAM OF JEANIE, which ran for five seasons from 1965 – 1970?

Didn’t think so.

Good thing I do.

When a road prefers to stay anonymous. Definitely ‘under the radar’. Meaning actually very ‘above the radar’.

‘Ninth Avenue’ is so… oh, I don’t know… plain? How could it possibly standout from all the other 9th Avenues around the country?

I know! Let’s add a cute little half, up the unique factor and bring some smiles to people’s faces.

From earlier this week…

READ IT HERE

Everything begins with an idea.

Could a short story written almost 100 years ago have been the inspiration for the birth of the internet?

Maybe not. But it’s fun to think it might have.

THE CEREBRAL LIBRARY was a short story published in the May 1931 edition of the science fiction magazine AMAZING STORIES (1926 – present).

It’s author, David Keller (1880 – 1966) was a practicing psychiatrist.

He wrote fiction as a hobby, until his wife encouraged him to try profiting from it. He went on to publish more than a dozen novels and over 60 short stories.

THE CEREBRAL LIBRARY begins with an advertisement placed in the NEW YORK TIMES classifieds.

Thousands of out-of-work bachelors of arts (tee hee) applied; five hundred were hired. They go to work for a mysterious Elon Musk-like billionaire who is devising “a new plan of universal knowledge.”

In a remote manor in Pennsylvania, shut off from the rest of the world, each man sets about reading three hundred books a year, after which the books are burned to heat the manor.

At the end of five years, the 500 employees, having collectively read three-quarters of a million books, were each to receive fifty thousand dollars.

The twist is that when one by one they go to an office in New York City to pick up their paychecks, they encounter a surgeon.

After sedating them, the surgeon removes their brains and sticks them in glass jars. The literature and knowledge-filled brains are then shipped back to the spooky manor in Pennsylvania.

There, the billionaire mad scientist goes about wiring the jars together, then connecting the jumble of wires to an electrical apparatus, a radio, and a typewriter. He dubs the resulting contraption THE CEREBRAL LIBRARY.

“Now, suppose I want to know all there is to know about toadstools?” he says, demonstrating his invention. “I spell out the word on this little typewriter in the middle of the table,” and then, abracadabra, the radio croaks out “a thousand word synopsis of the knowledge of the world on toadstools.”

Now flash-forward 92 years and what do we have?

IT’S OFFICIAL!

SCENIC WRITER’S SHACK will report live from the DEF LEPPARD – MOTLEY CRUE Brisbane concert in November.

Excitement? Oh yeah. Below, a little taste…

Click HERE to backwards time-travel to HAPPY DAYS.

My first taste of comedienne Don Rickles (1926 -2017) was seeing him play an old army buddy of Max’s in a two-part episode of GET SMART (1965 -1969) called THE LITTLE BLACK BOOK.

He was funny and there was something about his face I liked.

Fast forward forty-five years and yesterday I finished reading a 2022 Don Rickles biography THE MERCHANT OF VENOM.

The book charts his rise up the stand-up comedy ranks and his break-through into tv and film roles.

He appeared in over twenty movies – including those above – before branching into voice work, later in his career.

He graduated from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in 1948 (the class of ’49 included Grace Kelly) and had his sights set on pursuing a career as a serious dramatic actor. His real talents, however, would take him in another direction.

Rickles lived the grinding-it-out comedian’s lonely travelling life for a decade before his star started to rise.

By the summer of 1967 however, he had become one of the most popular comedians in the United States.

In that year, Don Rickles signed a four-year deal for $1 000 000 ($10 million in today’s money) to appear nightly at the SAHARA HOTEL (& casino) in Las Vegas.

He became a regular on THE TONIGHT SHOW -appearing over 100 times during the Johnny Carson era (1962 – 1992).

On one such appearance, fellow guest Frank Sinatra told this story about Rickles, which appears in the book –

In 1972 he finally got his own prime-time show.

Four years later he played the title role in 37 episodes of a Navy-themed sit-com called C.P.O SHARKEY (C.P.O stands for Chief Petty officer).

Rickles himself had served as a Seaman 1st Class in the United States Navy onboard the USS Cyrene, as an eighteen year old fresh out of high school.

In his later years, he turned to voice work in movies. This included the character of Mr POTATO HEAD in all four TOY STORY movies.

Don Rickles belongs to that old guard of showbiz and Hollywood. A bygone era from long ago.

He will be remembered – by so many, including myself – as one of the great comics of the 20th century.

In 2007, filmmaker John Landis (THE BLUES BROTHERS – BEVERLY HILLS COP 3 – Michael Jackson’s THRILLER video) made a documentary on Don Rickles entitled MR WARMTH. It is available on various streaming platforms.

Rickles lent his name to a number of products throughout his career, including this brand of floor carpet in 1987 –

Calling all HAPPY DAYS fans. You owe it to yourself to click HERE

SCENIC WRITER’S SHACK recently spent 9 days in Korea. By ‘Korea’, naturally you can take that to mean ‘South Korea’.

The ‘other’ Korea, the evil twin if you will, is, well… not really on your regular person’s travel itinerary. Not any regular person I know of anyway.

Being force fed other people’s holiday pics and travel stories can be one of life’s more wearying things to do. I say that from experience. Mercifully, SWS gives you just the highlights. Promise. No, really.

There we were, stopped at a red-light intersection in the city of Changwon minding our own when next minute, bounding across the zebra crossing in front of us was a local gangster gagster riding high on his bright green pogo stick.

He wasn’t bouncing just a mere foot off the ground like the chump in the video below. This guy was springing to some serious height. Funny ‘stand-up’ indeed.

My D grade (ok, ‘F’ grade) amateur pics of this truly epic but now disused and gathering dust movie set in the city of Masan don’t in any way do it justice for how grand and historically legit it is in person.

Covering an area in excess the size of a football stadium, the super savvy architecture and design – including arches, sloped roofs and intricate carved wood engravings – all minutely accurate for the time period – was breathtaking to see up close.

So many Korean drama series and movies have been filmed there since 2010 including –

Does anyone watch AUSTRALIAN STORY on Monday nights on the ABC?

Didn’t think so.

This program specializes in weekly half-hour human interest docos centred on ordinary and sometimes not so ordinary people.

Guess what? I found the Korean version. It’s a show called SCREENING HUMANITY (English translation) It has a very similar format and content.

This particular ‘story’ featured a divorced father caring for his 25-year-old autistic and mildly intellectually handicapped daughter – whose ambition is to one day be a newsreader.

So touching. So heartwarming. And so enjoyable to watch.

I found a hundred dollars!

I’m gonna say that again, ’cause it feels so good to relive the memory – I found a hundred dollars!

There we were, traipsing around some footbridge tourist park I’ve now forgotten the name of when not one but two mustard-yellow 50 000 Korean Won bank notes, innocently lying abandoned on the ground, drifted magically into my unbelieving view.

Last time something like that happened I was 10 years old.

$20 found on a wet footpath on the way to school one morning would be pretty close to $100 in today’s money.

That surreal feeling of stumbling upon lost treasure so unexpectantly was – on both occasions – completely and utterly MIND- JANGLING, in the nicest possible way.

While in Seoul – the nation’s capital – we witnessed something extraordinary.

A malfunctioning robot was ‘arrested’ by local security at a shopping mall.

Normally tasked with food deliveries, the blundering bot had strayed off it’s course and attempted to enter a public rest room.

With finger-pistols drawn, local security (ok, me) sprang into action and the ‘situation’ was quickly brought under control.

As a book lover, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.

These 3-story high book-stack behemoths were part of the eye-popping display at the public library in STARFIELD COEX MALL in the Gangnam district of Soul.

Not one but four gi-normous book stacks completed the marvel.

Our daughter Lia, who might be described as someone who regards books as a little on the ‘meh’ side of life, had to force a smile in this photo.

I on the other hand took a good 24 hours to recover from the endorphin rush.

Probably in all likelihood more like 48 hours.

When I say ‘freakshow’ I mean that in the nicest, most interesting way, of course.

What I loved about walking Soul’s cobblestone, neon-lit streets after dark was the crazy-blender mix of people, styles and… for want of a better word… ‘motives’ on display.

Make-up encrusted K-Pop flash mobs, human ‘Tokyo style’ dolls, 70-year-old woman pushing 18th century carts overflowing with misc goods and chattels, foreign tourists from every nation, street vendors selling anything you can sell and somehow, inching their way centimetre by centimetre through this human throng numbering in their tens of thousands, along the narrowest of narrow streets, motorbikes and cars.

It doesn’t get much more interesting, except maybe below –

Filmed in downtown Busan, Korea’s number 2 city, four hours’ drive north of Seoul.

Actor John Wayne did it back in ’68, but I reckon Korea does it better now.

I refer of course to the ultra- spruce dark-olive green beret.

Korea has two years (18 – 21 months, actually) national military service for all males once they turn 18.

The uniform’s pretty cool.

Once you hit Seoul (the majority of our visit was spent in rural Korea) the train stations are literally peppered with these upright, robust and lean looking 18-year-olds decked out in their snaz fatigues, all checking their mobile phones en-route to… well, wherever they’re going.

With their look and swagger plus sheer numbers, they OWN those trains. And in a good way too.

Reminds me of back in the day when me and my suit ‘n tie private school mates used to think we OWNED the 3:18pm Ipswich line train from Brunswick Street station in the afternoons.

Now those WERE the days.

See this billboard?

Looks tiny here but it took up space the size of a truck. I spied this thing of beauty on the subway one day, then had to ask my wife what it was about.

HYUNDAI (sponsor of the Brisbane Broncos via their affiliate KIA) is not just the world’s third largest car manufacturer. No sireee.

For the touching story behind this stray HYUNDAI dog, click HERE.

They’re also into shipbuilding, bullet train production, escalators and lot’s of other hard-hat style thingys to do with steel.

Now I know. And, putting the irritation factor of a boring info dump aside, now so do you.

Funny, amazeballs Korea, I love you and will visit you again in another two years.

For happy days of another kind, travel HERE.

Last week SCENIC WRITER’S SHACK spent three days in SINGAPORE – enroute to South Korea.

Here’s 10 (mostly) yummy takeaways…

I discovered, courtesy of the in-flight entertainment offered by Singapore Airlines, the movie CREED 3 is a near scene-by-scene remake of ROCKY 5. Is that an exaggeration? Yes, but only just.

Unlike in Australia where inflation has grown wings and gnashing teeth, upwardly mobile prices appear to still be in check in Singapore.

One of the perks of people-watching – especially if you count yourself a reader – is clocking up your daily word-count scanning t-shirt slogans. These are three t-shirts I saw on actual humans while walking the streets of Singapore.

The ‘Just a Girl’ fashion piece was spotted on a girl btw, as opposed to the one above. Don’t know why that needed clarifying, but SWS has always had a soft spot for authenticity so maybe that’s it. I really don’t know.

Humidity, thy name is Singapore. Brisbane born and bred, I got my ‘hummer’ license a long time ago. And two years (2010/2011) sweating it out in the Torres Straits added my Captain’s stripes.

But nothing and I mean nothing – could have prepared me for humidity on this scale. Sink or swim? We literally swam in the lather of our own perspiration for three days and nights.

Can you believe the lowest temperature ever recorded in Singapore – back in 1934 – was a balmy nineteen degrees? Really.

Spruce architecture and stylin’ buildings? Yep, Singapore does that pretty well.

The piece of magnificence with the cruise ship built on top pictured below?

We got to eye-ball that one up-close. A thing of improbable beauty like that you should have to pay for the privilege. Might even rent a room in it one year. Now THAT you would have to pay for. A heap.

Yeah, they go. Even faster than the ones I remember in Tokyo twenty years back. Then again, that WAS twenty years ago. Sort of like comparing internet speed from the early 2000’s with the ‘ol blue cord plug-in to now, I guess. Something you wouldn’t do. Ordinarily. I guess.

Staging this picture of my 13-year-old daughter Lia cost me, by my own estimate, roughly two kilograms in sweat. The other-worldly reverse-sinkhole effect was the goal here. It was the goal of 60 other people who lined up that steamy morning as well.

The super-heated waiting transformed every suffering soul in the que to a liquid state by the time they’d reached the front. We got the shot we came for. We got it and we earnt it!

You can’t tell from this picture – taken from the website of the hotel we stayed in – because they’re using the ‘ol smoke and mirrors trick (with heavy emphasis on the mirrors part) to make this broom-cupboard-sized-gym appear 100 times larger than it actually was, but trust me… it was built for the likes of Antman. A skinny Antman at that.

So squished and micro was this place I had to breath in every time another person who was in there with me would do a barbell curl – just to make room.

I love my retro, and the hotel foyer carpeted stairs delivered in spades. Nothing like licorice–all–sorts design to bring those 70’s memories flooding back.

I remember my mother returning from a trip to Singapore in the 1970’s. She mentioned how they had licorice-flavoured chewing gum.

This ‘meat shake’ at Burger King (Hungry Jacks in Australia) easily tops that in the weird food stakes. No offence Singapore but the cartoon guy with the letter ‘S’ on his t-shirt is me running a mile.

Yep, they’ve got one of these. And we went. And I want to thank the place for briefly renewing my love of a music band I used to like love adore back in the 2000’s.

Everyone at the park that day – for some reason – was treated to a selection of songs by the CRYSTAL METHOD over the grounds loud speakers.

Thank you Universal Studios Singapore!

For a country of less than six million people, Singapore packs a punch. And a lot of sparkle.

They were three happy days in Singapore. But wait… there’s more HERE.

To coincide with this coming Monday’s ‘JUNETEENTH’ public holiday in the United States – commemorating the emancipation of enslaved African Americans – comes this classic letter written in 1865 by Jourdon Anderson (1825 – 1907).

After 32 long years in the service of his master, Jourdon Anderson and his wife, Amanda, escaped a life of slavery when Union Army soldiers freed them from the plantation on which they had been working so tirelessly. They moved to Ohio where Jourdon found paid work with which to support his growing family, and didn’t look back.

A year later, shortly after the end of the Civil War, Jourdon received a desperate letter from Patrick Henry Anderson, the man who used to ‘own’ him, in which he was asked to return to work on the plantation and rescue his ailing business.

Jourdon’s reply to the person who enslaved his family is a blazing triumph that deserves no less than a fist-pumping standing ovation. Here we go…

Sir: I got your letter, and was glad to find that you had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can.

I have often felt uneasy about you. Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living.

I want to know particularly what the good chance is you propose to give me. I am doing tolerably well here. I get twenty-five dollars a month, with victuals and clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy,—the folks call her Mrs. Anderson,—and the children—Milly, Jane, and Grundy—go to school and are learning well.

Now if you will write and say what wages you will give me, I will be better able to decide whether it would be to my advantage to move back again.

As to my freedom, which you say I can have, there is nothing to be gained on that score, as I got my free papers in 1864 from the Provost-Marshal-General of the Department of Nashville.

Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you were disposed to treat us justly and kindly; and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future.

I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years. At twenty-five dollars a month for me, and two dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars.

Add to this the interest for the time our wages have been kept back, and deduct what you paid for our clothing, and three doctor’s visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to.

Please send the money by Adams’s Express, in care of V. Winters, Esq., Dayton, Ohio. If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past, we can have little faith in your promises in the future.

We trust the good Maker has opened your eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers, in making us toil for you for generations without recompense.

Here I draw my wages every Saturday night; but in Tennessee there was never any pay-day for the negroes any more than for the horses and cows. Surely there will be a day of reckoning for those who defraud the laborer of his hire.

You will also please state if there has been any schools opened for the colored children in your neighborhood. The great desire of my life now is to give my children an education, and have them form virtuous habits.

P.S.—Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.

From your old servant,

Jourdon Anderson.

On a different note, if you’d like to visit HAPPY DAYS click HERE.

It’s no secret I’m a fully-blown fan of the 1970’s TV series HAPPY DAYS. Well… the first five seasons anyway.

And as far as tv mums go, back when I was growing up (still doing that, btw!), the big three were always Mrs Brady (Florence Henderson 1934 – 2016) in THE BRADY BUNCH, Mrs Robinson (June Lockhart 1925 -) in LOST IN SPACE and Mrs Cunningham (Marion Ross 1928 -) in HAPPY DAYS.

It was a no-brainer that when Marion Ross released her autobiography titled MY DAYS: HAPPY AND OTHERWISE in 2018, I would go out and buy a copy. It just took me five years to get around to it.

Her story is of a child who ‘knew’ she was destined one day to become a star actress (she received her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame back in 2001) but didn’t end up fulfilling that ambition until later in life.

Her original dream was to become a theatre actress on Broadway. While still at school she managed to secure the services of a number of drama coaches – “all rather eccentric little old ladies” – and audition and appear in a number of plays.

After winning her first acting award – an ashtray (which she says she still has to this day) she was hooked.

Following her senior year, she enrolled at San Diego State University where she studied drama and acting for the next four years. This was the later half of the 1940’s.

She continued auditioning for roles and discovered she was good at accents. Enduring lean times and years of struggle, she continued accumulating many small, walk-on roles in films and doing live theatre.

Eventually landing a contract with PARAMOUNT PICTURES, this led to gaining the part of Patty, the best friend of the main character in the 1953 film FOREVER FEMALE.

More character parts followed –

but she would have to wait another 20 years for the breakout role that would put her in millions of living rooms around the world every night.

One of the more interesting anecdotes in the book – and there are many – involves the amazing series of connections, coincidences, and right-place-right-time serendipitous twists that led Ross from appearing as a featured extra in the 1970 movie AIRPORT to her role as Mrs Cunningham four years later in HAPPY DAYS (1974 – 1984).

HAPPY DAYS ran for 11 seasons for a total of 255 episodes and is the body of work Marion Ross is best remembered for.

Ross cites her all-time favourite episode as the third season ‘DANCE CONTEST’ in which she begins ballroom dancing lessons with Fonzie without her husband Howard’s knowledge.

I have always loved this episode as well.

Post HAPPY DAYS, Marion Ross secured recurring roles on these television series –

as well as regular voice over work on these animated series –

Marion Ross officially retired from acting in 2021. Her autobiography is a warm and confiding look back at her life and career.

To check out the site HAPPY DAYS: THE FIRST FIVE SEASONS click HERE