Last Friday was graduation day at Daughter’s middle school. They didn’t call it that. It was a “Completion Ceremony.” The teachers said wonderful words of encouragement and the principal congratulated them on the challenges they had met and wished them well, and then the interminable procession began. Hot auditorium, spicy with BO. If there’s one thing I will remember from this school it’s the BO that attended any group event in the auditorium. I know that’s unfair. The school was so much more. It did so much more. It strived. It tried. It dealt with so many different situations every day. But every event in the auditorium seemed to include 10 percent of fathers who had worn the same shirt for a week. It was the sort of BO that has accumulated, in layers, and is activated to new pungenticity by fresh BO.

Part of the shock you experience is watching the kids you remember from grade school, former playmates, now orbiting a nucleus of a different social atom, suddenly appearing as remarkably tall people. My daughter is not tall; she has her parent’s dimensions. Some of her friends look like they could go to a Halloween party dressed up as a utility pole. The names bring back memories, of course; you remember when that person was the best friend ever, united in fealty to the Cute and the Pink, giggly sleepovers, dress-up, Spongebob marathons. The relationship over the years makes you think of those animations of galaxies that come close, swirl together, then get pulled apart by other forces. It just happens. It just happened. Best friends forever turns into nodding acquaintances in the hallway, with the remnant memory of grade school driving you apart instead of holding you together.

If they go to the same high school, they’ll drift even farther apart.

And then they’ll have a great wonderful emotional conversation at the 20th reunion.

Last Friday was graduation day at Daughter’s middle school. They didn’t call it that. It was a “Completion Ceremony.” The teachers said wonderful words of encouragement and the principal congratulated them on the challenges they had met and wished them well, and then the interminable procession began. Hot auditorium, spicy with BO. If there’s one thing I will remember from this school it’s the BO that attended any group event in the auditorium. I know that’s unfair. The school was so much more. It did so much more. It strived. It tried. It dealt with so many different situations every day. But every event in the auditorium seemed to include 10 percent of fathers who had worn the same shirt for a week. It was the sort of BO that has accumulated, in layers, and is activated to new pungenticity by fresh BO.

Part of the shock you experience is watching the kids you remember from grade school, former playmates, now orbiting a nucleus of a different social atom, suddenly appearing as remarkably tall people. My daughter is not tall; she has her parent’s dimensions. Some of her friends look like they could go to a Halloween party dressed up as a utility pole. The names bring back memories, of course; you remember when that person was the best friend ever, united in fealty to the Cute and the Pink, giggly sleepovers, dress-up, Spongebob marathons. The relationship over the years makes you think of those animations of galaxies that come close, swirl together, then get pulled apart by other forces. It just happens. It just happened. Best friends forever turns into nodding acquaintances in the hallway, with the remnant memory of grade school driving you apart instead of holding you together.

If they go to the same high school, they’ll drift even farther apart.

And then they’ll have a great wonderful emotional conversation at the 20th reunion.

Saturday: rain. Cool. Worms.

Wife: he’s eating a geranium stem, I think. Is that okay for dogs?

Me: (gets out iPad, googles.) No, it’s toxic.

Wife removes stem. I ask where she got them. “From Natalie’s graduation flower.”

Me: That was a carnation. (Googles.) Annnd that’s toxic. They’re all toxic. I don’t know how dogs survived.

Wife: how toxic?

Me: (reading) Symptoms include diarrhea. That narrows it down.

At this point I wasn’t worried. Earlier in the day I was informed that the pup’s stool contained wriggling creatures, which got my attention: off to the vet with a bag of stink, and after they subjected it to the careful analysis we got $17 worth of pills to blast out the tapeworms.. Even though he got the anti-flea stuff. Jasper never had much in the way of anti-flea goop, but this little guy gets worms right out of the chute. Perhaps from his travels along the byways of the South; I still like to imagine he was found trotting down a road somewhere, rescued and brought North.

En route to Target: Daughter was mad at the worms for being in him. No fair to a puppy.

There is no fair in nature. There is only eating, surviving, and reproducing. Fair is something we invented to give meaning to a feral world. Morality sets us apart. Without higher consciousness the universe is nothing but worms in an infinite gut.

(pause)

I’m going to buy black nail polish.

And so she did. We ran into Linda the Product Demonstrator, who was giving samples of a new meal-assembly kit. “I have no intention of buying this, but I want something to eat,” I said. Always meant for someone else who’s standing nearby chewing on a sample. HE SAID WHAT WE ALL BELIEVE. Later at Cub, the next stop, I saw the short lady who always gives out samples of cold, mealy bratwurst skewered with pretzel sticks. “She’s going to be giving out cold, mealy bratwurst on pretzel sticks” I whispered to daughter. We passed by.

“Migosh that’s what she has,” daughter whispered.

“I know these things.”

I looked for the French Toast Batter, and they didn’t have any. Kicked myself for not looking at Target. Off to Lunds, which has it for 70 cents more. Didn’t see it. Waved over a guy from dairy.

“Crystal Farms French Toast Batter,” I said. I could tell from his face my suspicions were correct. It had been cancelled. We walked over to where it should be. He said there had been one left.

It was gone.

“I really don’t think they gave it a chance,” he said.

“You were so specific,” daughter said later. “‘Crystal Farms French Toast Batter.’” But he knows these shelves intimately. He would know his stock.

When I got home I sent an email to the company to express my dismay.

OH TO HELL WITH THIS DAY. RAIN AND WORMS.

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Last week we did the first Gildersleeve movie, a bright little piece that brought a radio show to life. There were many examples of shows that turned into movies; it made sense to leverage the properties as best as they could, and people liked to see what they’d been listening to. Or did they? Was it like seeing a movie made from a favorite book - you saw it one way, the movie insisted it was something else, and you grudgingly accepted the changes for the duration of the movie. Unlike books, radio could reestablish whatever you thought the next week. Movies faded but the radio shows were continually renewed.

It worked better for some shows than others - Lum and Abner movies let the characters stretch out, and showed they could carry more than 13 minutes at a time. “Duffy’s Tavern” failed to make the jump to TV; Bob and Ray likewise foundered. But if there was ever a show that had no trouble making it to the big screen, it was a show that had no stars at all . . . just a presence.

This guy.

The Whistler had no name, no story, no role in the action. He narrated the tales with an acerbic amusement. Unlike the “Inner Sanctum” narrator, he didn’t revel in grotesquely or bad jokes; unlike “The Midnight Traveller” he didn’t seem like a creepy guy on the train who wouldn’t shut up. Unlike the narrator of “The Clock” - which was, believe it or not, a clock - he wasn’t entirely uninterested in the events. His voice had a keen appreciation of human folly, and he inhabited the minds of the characters who schemed, murdered, cheated, lied, ran, and otherwise behaved like people who’d made a horrible move and tried to evade the consequences. He was the voice of consequences, telling each story with perfect foreknowledge of its conclusion, commenting on the action with a mocking tone that urged the characters on to justice.

Two details: the theme, inevitably described as Haunting.

And the two-note timpani punctuation that always sealed the deal at the end, as the twist was revealed. The detail the criminal forgot. The double-cross that was really a triple. The train that went off the tracks. The dog that didn’t bark. The stories were tight and lean with plenty of room for the actors to fill out the roles. It was quite popular . . .

. . . except on the east coast, where it didn’t run. The Whistler ran on the West Coast side of the NBC network, and I’m guessing was mostly unheard on the East. (It ran in Chicago for a while.) So the movie would be a curiosity to the New York audience: The Power of the Whistler? Whistlers have power?

Anyway: low-budget studio-produced one-hour noir, a programmer, as they were called. B-movies, although they had the production values of the top-billed number on a double feature. They didn’t have the stars. They had this fellow:

Richard Dix. That was his stage name, even though he must have known people would think: Dick Dicks. There’s a manly fellow. He was a St. Paul lad, and after a stint at the University of Minnesota he went into theater, then movies. Here’s the thing:

He made seven Whistler picture.

In a sense, when people went to see a Whistler pic, after a while they expected it to be a Dick Dix pix. Even though he was never in a Whistler radio play.

Few years after this role, his ticker seized up, and that was that.

The movie has a brief flash of inadvertant documentary:

They don't say where it is, because no one had to be told where it was.

As Dix walks along in the opening scenes, he's trailed by the Whistler . . .

. . . and that's just about all the resemblance between the radio show and the movie. Instead of periodic narration to give the sense of Omniscient Fate, the Whistler just pops in once in the middle to say a few things, reminding you that this is a Whistler pic.

It's a story about a well-meaning young woman who helps a fellow who's lost his memory. The nice gal:

Janice Carter. Hollywood had a million of 'em. When it came to homely character actors, though, they had two million. Like this fellow. Recognize him?

You should, if you're a Star Trek fan. One of the most powerful beings in the universe, and responsible for the Federation / Klingon peace treaty. We knew him as John Abbott.

Work blog around 12:30, Tumblr around noonish or so - see you then!