You just have no idea.

To my dismay, the box with the gazebo inside arrived on Saturday, three days ahead of schedule. It was due to rain on Sunday, which meant I couldn’t put it off. Opened the box and got to work.

The instructions said I would need 4 - 5 people and it would take 2 - 3 hours. Hah! I’ve put these up myself with minimal help, which is to say some help, but five people?

 
   

Right away, first part, a problem: the screw holes didn’t match up.I solved this by reversing the part, which for some reason wasn’t perfectly symmetrical.

If I've learned one thing about these projects, it's don't force anything to in place if it resists a lot. Because it eventually will give in. Because it's cheap Chinese metal. And then you have to unscrew a screw that's been deformed from top to bottom.

 

The rest of the initial work went fairly well, but then it came time to starting putting the parts you’d put together, together. And here my troubles began.

Look at that. It’s an Escher drawing. What? How? The screw holes didn't match up, there didn’t seem to be any reason why part of the bracket should hang over - WHAT? HOW? There was a number I could call to get assistance but I could only imagine the person trying to walk me through something that involved bending space itself.

Message on my phone; Giant Swede. I had told him before I was havin’ a good ol’-fashioned gazebo raisin’, and he was welcome to come by for a cup of coffee and a cigar. He said he’d be over. At this point I realized I would have an actual engineer help with this.

He looked at the illustration and the part and moved them around in possible combinations and eventually burst out laughing and uttered an oath: this was the stupidest instruction he’d ever seen. But! His relentlessly logical mind and sense of spatial awareness figured it out, and we got the part connected. Got all the parts connected.

What about B-1? I said. It’s just sitting here and I don’t know what it’s for.

Screw that, we’ll get to it. Let’s get the roof frame up.

And so we dispensed with the instructions - oh I know I know - and got the roof up and connected - at which point the necessity of attaching good ol’ B-1 to the roof became obvious, and we had to unscrew everything holding down the roof.

 

But that went quickly. Getting the roof on was the usual nightmare; the fabric is stretched so tight you fear you’ll rip it, and getting the corners around the four poles on the roof - the B-1 part, which was about 1/2 inch longer than it REALLY NEEDED TO BE, was excruciating, but it was done. Nothing more to do but hang the curtains and netting!

This was but one line in the instructions: attach the curtains. It took 40 minutes to figure it all out. But it was done. It was done, and I owed him a dinner. The food box had arrived so I made a tasty Korean pork dish, then pushed a beer his way and clink: teamwork, pal.

Come to think of it I think he’s helped with all five.

It’s a tradition, don’t you know.

 

Probably snow next week.

 

Here's where you ask: there was a magazine called Boot & Shoe Recorder? Yes! And it had shoe-specific comic strips. This is as good as I can get it:

 

Very much in the 20s style, but better than most cartoons. Simple lines, great heads.

Who was he?

More of this delightful little style tomorrow.

The comic itself, well - industry humor.

 

 

 

 

The last of the batch, and the most . . . transgressive!

 

   
 

A new theme. It’s not the TV show theme. Why? I’ve no idea.

   
   
   

Odd how they break out Peavey; never seen that before.

It starts out in church, where Gildy is flirting with a woman in another pew. She’s Matilda, and apparently they have a thing going. Leroy says they’ve been courting for five years, and Marjorie says he expects Uncle Throckmorton will propose this time.

Okay fine, except who’s the audience for the show? People who like The Great Gildersleeve. In 1943 there’s no Matilda. There’s Leila, the Suthun Honey who had the on-again / off-again relationship with the titular character since the early days of the show.

So this is the alternate Gildersleeve Universe, where Vulcan was destroyed.

It also reminds you that this is all Gildersleeve ever does:

 

Doesn't that sound fun? Isn't that why you come here every day? Archetype confounding.

We begin with a legs contest, reminding you that the word "legs" looks and sounds funny the more you say it. That's true of many words, but you start thinking: leg. It's such a short word for a not-insubstantial thing.

He’s a great romantic, but all he wants to do is hold hands, hug, and get the occasional kiss. The most anodyne lecher ever. Well, he ends up engaged - which did happen in the radio show a few times, but always came to naught. Either he got cold feet or was horrified by the prospect of sex.

Anyway. The movie has some of the radio show’s characters: Birdie is still Birdie, played by the same actress. The boy who plays Leroy again - an actual kid, as opposed to the adult with the high voice who played the role on the radio - is much better than before. And there’s this fellow:

That brought the house down.

Anyway. Gildersleeve and Peavey are going to New York for some reasons. Here’s who Gildy shares his compartment with:

This is four years after Oz, so you might think she was on the way down, appearing in a short movie based on a radio character - but no, I don’t think so. She did 25 moves in the Forties; she liked to work. And Gildersleeve was a hit show.

Well, from now on it’s a comedy of misunderstandings, one of those immensely frustrating things that would be solved if someone just spoke up and said something, like NO WE’RE NOT GETTING MARRIED or I AM NOT WHO YOU THINK I AM.

But that would make for a short movie.

Gildy goes to Peavey’s room, and Peavey is giving him instructions on woo-talk (it’s complicated, and never mind) and so of course there’s a window washer who thinks he caught two guys in the act of doing something immoral. Recognize him?

You would if the picture was better. It’s Leonid Kinskey, who played Sascha the bartender in Casablanca. So we have two actors from the greatest American films. Then the room service guy shows up, and even though it’s blurry . . .

I recognized him right away, and wondered how he’d sound.

He sounds exactly like he always did, because this is the actor who played Leroy, the young boy on the radio show. Surely the audience knew it. It's like having someone else play Spock and then Leonard Nimoy comes in playing a doctor and he sounds exactly like Spock. Perhaps it was assumed hte audience would know that was Leroy, and would enjoy being in on the joke.

Uncredited Stocking Salesgirl:

Think hard. No? Okay, here’s a hint: last week. That's all I'll say.

Anyway, it’s like the Lum & Abner movie where they go to The Big City - fish out of water, beloved character in another context. Peavey dresses up in drag, which is utterly ridiculous but hilarious - and it doesn’t matter, because nothing in these movies has any effect on the radio show’s plots.

It ends like the radio shows, though. There’s just something winsome and charming about the way they threw a hammer through the fourth wall.

Anyway, it’s like the Lum & Abner movie where they go to The Big City - fish out of water, beloved character in another context. Peavey dresses up in drag, which is utterly ridiculous but hilarious - and it doesn’t matter, because nothing in these movies has any effect on the radio show’s plots.

It ends like the radio shows, though. There’s just something winsome and charming about the way they threw a hammer through the fourth wall.

 

That was the end of the movies. Four and out.

 

That'll do for today! Don't miss my Monday newspaper column! Just click on the Star. You know: The big green Startribune Star.
 

 

 

 
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