A Penny for My Thoughts

Of late, I’ve been thinking a lot about my favorite decade: the 1970s. It had so much to offer and was not only colorful but a talent-rich environment with cabinet possibilities aplenty. Consider this: Mr. Green Jeans for Secretary of Agriculture; Officer Joe Bolton for Attorney General; and Captain Jack McCarthy for Secretary of Defense. If you didn’t grow up in the New York City metro area, the latter pair, I suspect, might be unfamiliar to you. But take my word for it, these were respected men of good character and ability with gravitas to spare.

Speaking of character, the bad kind now, I’d like to Bragg here for a moment. Thank God, a jury of his peers found Daniel Penny, a good Samaritan, innocent of all charges. If you ride the subway in these parts on a regular basis, you’ve no doubt encountered mentally ill individuals panhandling and often times ranting and raving. It’s a sad situation, but it is what it is. On occasion, their outbursts assume a higher meaning—a more deadly one—with potential violence a real concern. Threatening to kill people shouldn’t be taken lightly, especially when the one doing the threatening is out of his or her head and the place is cramped quarters in an underground tunnel.

And now for something completely different: A Christmas Carol. In my YouTube recommendations this past week were two animated versions of the Charles Dickens’ classic, which I’d never seen before. While I feel Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol is timeless, it is a musical. These well-made English productions from the 1960s and 1970s were sans songs, somber throughout, and rather abbreviated retellings of the tale. One, in fact, featured the voice of Alastair Sim as Ebeneezer Scrooge. He, of course, starred in A Christmas Carol—the 1951 movie that many consider the yardstick for which all others—before and after—are measured. My yardstick is Scrooge, a musical, starring Albert Finney, which I first saw in Radio City Music Hall at Christmastime 1970. Its depictions of the Ghost of Jacob Marley, the Ghost of Christmas Present, and Bob Cratchit are—in my opinion—the best of the lot.

The Ghost of Christmas Past is the most diversely portrayed. In one of the animations that I recently watched, this particular apparition was a pulsating female figure that appeared to have multiple faces—what someone who was three sheets to the wind, plastered, crocked might see. Of course, Joel Grey’s Ghost of Christmas Past in the Patrick Stewart version—a 1999 TV movie—takes the cake for bizarreness. Before its time, I suppose.

When all is said and done, I’d just like to say to one and all of all political persuasions and fans of different best ghosts and Christmas Carols, “God bless us all, everyone.”