Wednesday, November 16, 2005

It's not what you say

Back in the mid-60s, when I was in my early teens and my sister Paula was approaching her adolescence, we would spent idle hours in the summer playing our own "home version" of the many game shows that were on TV. Our mutual favorite at the time was You Don't Say with Tom Kennedy. I can still hear the tag line "It's not what you say, it's what you don't say".
I can picture the summer morning that Paula and I were out on the front porch playing You Don't Say. She stumped me one round and declared the answer to be Rita Shaw. Well, I had never heard of Ms. Shaw and Paula, who hated to lose worse than any of her uber-competitive siblings, got all indignant that she was indeed real and that Paula had seen her name in some TV show credits. Well, that was not good enough for me, and I took great pleasure in mocking my poor sister over a made-up name. I got tremendous mileage out of that error of my sister's. I used "Oh yeah, just like Rita Shaw" as a winning counter-argument against her for a number of years.
Well, sometime in the last 10 years, I was watching a Dick Van Dyke show, and lo and behold, there in the credits was Reta Shaw! 30 years later, my sister was vindicated.
I called Paula that weekend and she was quite magnanimous. As hard as I had tried, I left no permanent scars on her psyche.

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