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| Ron Howard and Al Molinaro on Happy Days. |
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| This is what my campaign posters looked like. |
Let me tell you two dumb stories about my past. The first happened when I was a high school sophomore in Flushing, MI. Near the end of the school year, the principal announced over the P.A. that student elections were approaching and that interested candidates should sign up in the main office. The way it worked was, students were elected at the end of one school year and took office at the beginning of the next. I had no interest in this, but one of my classmates thought it would be funny to suggest loudly that I run for president. Other students found this funny, too, and began chanting my name.
Just like that, I was in politics. I had been challenged directly by my peers. What was I supposed to do? I didn't feel I could back down. Besides, I liked the attention, even though it was negative attention. So I ran for class president. I decided to have some fun with the campaign, canvassing the school with nonsensical posters. One was just a photocopied picture of Simon & Garfunkel with their eyes crossed out and squiggly mouths drawn in, accompanied by the cryptic slogan "VOTE BLEVINS." Never mind which office I was seeking. My lone campaign speech was just a rant that I had cribbed entirely from Bill Murray in The Rutles (1978). ("The scene is here in Flushing! The whole world's eyes are on Flushing!") It was exciting, I'll admit that.
Appealing to the lowest common denominator, I actually won the election. This was not a good thing. The joke had gone too far. My opponents were kids who actually took the election seriously and sincerely wanted to be in student government. I, on the other hand, was an idiot who really didn't want to do much of anything other than watch television. My presidency was a total bust. After mere weeks of dodging student council meetings the next year, I quietly resigned. The silver lining is that the vice president was a really nice, smart, quiet kid who had run unopposed, and my resignation meant that he was now president. Still in all, I felt so guilty about the whole sordid mess that I haven't talked about it to anyone for decades. It established an unfortunate pattern in my life: big promises with no follow-through.
(Technically, though, since my posters and speech were all surreal nonsense, I hadn't actually promised anything. I guess we really do get the government we deserve.)
Flash forward about 10 years. By then, I was a (bad) high school English teacher in a smallish, isolated town in northern Illinois. Apartments being rare in this part of the world, I was living at a motel with a somewhat shady reputation. Next to the motel was a strip mall with an even shadier reputation. It contained a pawn shop, a massage parlor, and some third business I cannot recall. The parlor was the subject of much speculation around town. Indeed, it was one of the few local businesses that stayed open past 11. In the front window, there were sexy female mannequins dressed in lacy lingerie.
Nearly all the clientele, however, accessed the building from the back entrance. On warm nights when there was nothing much to do, I'd climb up to the second story of the motel and watch them come and go in their shiny pickup trucks. I don't think I ever saw even one employee of the massage parlor in the entire year I lived there, just the customers. It honestly did not occur to me until long after I had moved away that I could have gone to the massage parlor myself and learned first-hand what went on inside that building. I consider this a missed opportunity for learning and personal growth in my life.
What do these two stories have in common? Very little, except that this week on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast, my cohost and I are reviewing the December 12, 1978 episode "Richie Gets Framed," which involves both a student election and a massage parlor. How do these elements fit into Happy Days and do they make for a satisfying story? Listen and find out!