Repasts and Reviews

[captainsblog]

The Nurse Jackie icon is there for both of those, or at least some of each.

Last night, the email finally came with my second, lab-tested, more accurate PCR result. They told me on the spot that the rapid one was negative, and the confirming email when I got home from the test was captioned NEGRAPID.PDF, so, nothing suspenseful there. But last night's header only said who it was from, the pdf was password-protected, and I started worrying again.... until I got it open, and...



So the bullet was once and truly dodged. I did hear back from one couple who was planning to go into that office later this week, who are caregiving for an elderly relative and who  I think wisely decided to do the whole thing remotely.  I also discovered that this second test was the one which Canada requires to cross their border, with preregistration and proof of vaccination. Unfortunately, they only accept a result obtained within 72 hours of crossing, and this one showed up about 80 hours after the test.  So unless I'm going over in a TARDIS, it's still NO SWISS CHALET FOR YOU! until further notice.

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I could swear I've done a Labor Day post or two about this before, but for the life of me I can't find one.

Oops, I just did:

Both as a parent and as a parented, we didn't do much on this day because, dum-dum-DUMMMMMM!, school started back up the next day or maybe the day after that.  So my strongest memory of the holiday, going back to the late 60s and even with check-ins years later, was of spending the day with a horrible actor and his millions of "kids" while he begged for money.



This was Jerry Lewis's other connection to my childhood. In the early 70s, he got into the franchise business and promised investors a popcorn money-printing machine by tying his name to what were usually two or three screen miniplexes fit into corners or outparcels of strip plazas.  East Meadow got one, at the time our second cinema and the only one with, wow, two different screens in  it!  I can't remember if he came for the grand opening, but his hand/footprints and autograph were in the concrete outside the auditoriums.  The concept lasted less than a decade there, it turning into an indie duplex run by the legendary Uniondale Mini Cinema people for a few years.  Today, there's no evidence of it at all, as a dollar store now sits where Jerry once clipped the ties pocketbook of some shlub.

Others held out longer; I remember seeing The Natural, not in the Buffalo where it was filmed, but at a Jerry Lewis up in Niagara Falls that was still there in 1984.  Some years before that, both Jerry and his cinema venture company wound up in Bankruptcy Court; this piece reviews why it didn't work and how, even years later, Jerry's annual telethon appearances still angered those who lost not just their ties but their shirts to him.

My fondest memories of Late But Not Dead Jerry were from Letterman appearances in the 90s, where Dave would goad him into doing bits from his goofy heyyyy layyyydee period and Jerry would try to come off as a serious actor. Yet those memories will never overtake in quantity the ones spent inside, on this day, watching his most famous schtick for year after year.



Yeah, that one. Click the link for more of the depressing details. The 20-plus hour marathon was gone by last decade, and then Jerry's connection to the show, the show, and finally Jerry all perished in that order over the rest of the 20teens.  Somehow, Kevin Hart has brought at least some of it back as an online event.  But not until next month.    I guess nobody wants to work on Labor Day anymore.

Except us bloggers.

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Moving on:  our latest binge, connected to Jacks in the icon, is a seven-episode series from 2020 that HBO released and then canceled, titled Run. Merritt Wever, Jackie's idolizing assistant Zoey who we adored in her role (and pretty much named the cat after), stars in it, along with Domhnall Gleeson, and Fleabag's Phoebe Waller-Bridge is behind the camera as a producer and briefly in front of it as a taxdermist. The premise is simple- literally, it turns out, an elevator pitch, about fulfilling a pledge they made to each other fifteen years before as just broken up college students:

 If either of them ever sent a message reading “RUN,” and the other responded with the same within 24 hours, they’d drop everything else in their lives to meet at New York City’s Grand Central Station, hop on the first cross-country train leaving after 5 p.m. and spend one no-holds-barred week together.

We do not learn all of that right away. It's even easy to forget who first texted RUN to whom, in part because we weren't quite sure if texting was quite a Thing or not in 2004. It also started off in its first few minutes annoying the shite out of me, because I do know that Amtrak trains do not use Grand Central Station for any of its trains; except for brief detours during construction projects, they have all been run (heh) out of the city's much less photogenic Penn Station since at least 1991. And Annoying Passenger Across the Seats who's going to Pittsburgh where this train stops? Not from New York City it doesn't; that line runs through here and straight to Cleveland from here.

So reality is out the train window before we even get rolling. Don't worry, though, because all kinds of truth are soon to follow. These two are not re-enacting Harry and Sally, or Sleepless and Seattle. By the end of the fifth episode, where we got off last night, it's become far more of a caper-slash-heist series, but in its own way that makes it more interesting.  We're going to binge our way out of it all this afternoon, and then perhaps either try out Akwafina as Nora in Queens, or Steve MartinShort plus Selena as nuevo Three Amigos in some Hulu thing called Only Murders in the Building.

I hope all of these characters make it to the end of their episodes, so that they'll Never Walk Alone;)

ETA: Excusssssseeee Meeeeee! The Steve MartinShort bit is excellent; we watched the first two episodes tonight, and then we'll pick up with the third pre-pre-released one and then the weekly installments starting tomorrow night.

And Run ended ambigiously but well. Maybe someday these two will reappear on a different platorm to resolve all the loose ends caused by the cancellation.

Comments

Wow

[dauntless_heart]

I haven't thought about Jerry's telethon in awhile--but of course everyone watched it on Labor Day weekend every year as long as it existed. I remember sitting down a few times when I was a teen because some guest I wanted to see was performing.