People say that doing crossword puzzles and sudoku and whatnot help improve the quality of your grey matter. With that in mind, don’t judge me.
My game is Back to Bacon: Redux. Whenever I want to look up anyone or anything involving a movie or tv show, I go to the imdb.com and try to get to that person or thing by starting with something that’s linked on the home page.
So tonight I’m reading a child stars People special and see an article about Jenny Lewis, who was in The Wizard with Fred Savage. I’m looking at this picture of her, thinking “damn, that chick looks really familiar” and then think that she’s the chick from The Goonies (the non-Martha Plimpton one).
Long story short, CB was sitting here and we were talking through the connections. If the new Indiana Jones was still in the top five box office flicks, I could get to The Goonies by going to that then Harrison Ford/Temple of Doom/Short Round/Goonies. If Love Guru was still up there it would be Mike Myers/Goldmember/Fred Savage/Wizard. I got to it by going through Step Brothers/Will Ferrell/Elf/Jon Favreau/Rudy/Sean Astin/Goonies.
The Sean Astin connection mention naturally had me spouting “you know that he’s Patty Duke and John Astin’s son, right?”
And he said, I kid you not, “Who’s Patty Duke?”
And then I keeled over and died.
Mind you, I did a lot of babysitting in the late 80s and early 90s and watched a LOT of Nick at Nite after the kids were in bed and I was waiting for the parents to get home. I can sing the Patty Duke theme song on command. But that aside, didn’t everybody watch her as Helen Keller in school? Who doesn’t know who Patty Duke is?
I said, “She’s like Donna Reed.”
He said, “Who’s Donna Reed?”
And then I died again, rolled over in my grave, and exploded.
I’ll spare you the discussion we had about John Astin.
Granted, he didn’t grow up in the states, but he knows so much more than I do about American history (and just about everything else) that I can’t imagine him not knowing about these icons of television history.
I’m not sure how I ended up married to a man that doesn’t know that cousins can be two of a kind.