A Little Bit of Dick Van Dyke

We love NPR on Saturdays.  In fact, we will sit in the car even after arriving at our destination if "Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me" is on.  It's our favorite show.  "Car Talk" comes in a distant second.  So they had Dick Van Dyke on the other day. My poor, deprived children had never heard of Dick Van Dyke.  Obviously I had missed a crucial element in their upbringing.  Anxious to correct my parental error, and eager to share a part of my childhood, we you-tubed the Dick Van Dyke show.  Not 5 minutes into the show, I began to wiggle a little uncomfortably.  The mum in the show seemed to act an awful lot like, well, me.  (minus the dress and high heels).  Then standing behind me I heard a giggle.  Well, it wasn't exactly a giggle because it was a man-giggle.  If it were from a girl, it would have been called a giggle, but since the sound was coming from a man, it had a much more manly sound and should, perhaps, be called a chuckle.  The chuckling turned into a full blown laugh combined with the loud revelation (that I was hoping would go unnoticed) that the chuckler's darling wife was exactly like the character played by Mary Tyler Moore.  He wanted to expand the now scientific study by watching more old Nick at Nite reruns that comprised those formative tv watching years.  But I gracefully demured.  After all, too much expose could ruin the mystery.  In my defense, it was a very small comparative study as we only watched the one show in which little Richie was presumably sick because he turned down the chocolate cupcake.  And really, it could have been much worse.  What kind of person would I be if I had grown up watching Redneck Zombies?  Now I need to go dig out some high heels, surely I have some around here somewhere...