"at the drop of a hat, you'll buy anything"

 

        There's an episode of the 1960s situation-comedy That Girl - it's in the fourth season - where Ann goes to a dentist who uses hypnosis before filling a cavity.  The patient is hypnotized so they won't feel any pain.  Instead of novacaine, I guess....

While Ann is sitting in the chair looking like she's asleep due to being hypnotized, the dentist's office phone rings, he answers, and we hear a one-sided conversation with his wife.

She bought something and he asks, "How much?"

A pause while she tells him an amount of money.

He gets a little upset and raises his voice, saying sternly into the receiver, "At the drop of a hat you'll buy anything!"

        In the chair, Ann is smiling, faintly, and nodding.

        So from then on during the episode each time someone drops a hat in Ann's presence, she looks around urgently for something to buy.

(The first time she does it, there's spooky music playing in the background.  It sounds like the music in one of Alfred Hitchcock's films - Vertigo, I think.)

I always remembered this episode, even before TV Land, or You Tube, or DVDs.

I loved everything about that show.

I discovered "That Girl" during summertime - after fourth grade, or fifth grade, or maybe 3rd grade.

I turned on the TV in anticipation of watching Bewitched, which was the first television series I discovered on my own that featured grown-ups and wasn't a cartoon.  Bewitched was to start at 11:30 a.m., and turning on the set early to make sure and not miss the beginning, I saw "That Girl" playing.  

        My new routine became, turn on TV right before 11:00 and watch both.

The TV at our house was a big black-and-white piece of furniture that stood on four legs, on the floor in the living room.

        When Ted Turner started colorizing old movies, back in the '80s, I was opposed to that, because it was changing a work of art.  However, recently on You Tube I saw some Bewitched episodes from the first three seasons (which were in black-and-white) that have now been colorized.

        They look gorgeous.  I have to admit it.

        The principle still stands, though.  Woody Allen's 1979 movie Manhattan was shot in black-and-white, and it's gorgeous.  I would not want anyone to colorize that.

Perhaps my taste makes an exception for "Bewitched," for some unknown reason.

"the Bewitched exception"

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