November Fool's Day

Hey, look! Your shoe's untied.... Hahaha! I made ya look! November Fools!
I'll never forget the time my mother baked a thin piece of cloth into my pancake on April Fools Day. She must have poured batter on the griddle, then quickly cut the cloth to the exact size, laid it in the batter and poured more batter on top. However she did it, it worked. I sat there sawing and poking away at my pancake with knife and fork for about 30 seconds before I realized something was amiss. We had a good laugh and I managed to slurp some syrup off the plate before she replaced the fake pancake with a real one.
Speaking of mothers, Jane Wyatt - Mrs. Anderson on TV's "Father Knows Best" - died on October 20th. Billy Gray, who played her son on the series, publicly apologized in the 80's for, "the dialogue, the situations, the characters - they were all totally false. The show did everybody a disservice. The girls were always trained to use their feminine wiles, to pretend to be helpless to attract men. The show contributed to a lot of the problems between men and women that we see today....I think we were all well motivated, but what we did was run a hoax."
I know that many people grew up in harsh and unloving environments, but some of us actually were fortunate enough to grow up in households like the Anderson's or the Cleaver's, or the Nelson's. It's too bad that so many celebrities weren't so fortunate in their real lives. Lauren Chapin, who played the youngest Anderson daughter, is one of those. According to IMDB, "After "Father Knows Best" ended in 1960, young Lauren's life crumbled. Her father, William, had molested her. Her mother, Marguerite, was an alcoholic. At age 16, she married Gerald Jones, an auto mechanic and had the first of 8 miscarriages at age 17. She divorced at age 18 and got hooked on heroin by her new boy friend, who also pushed her into prostitution."
Wow. That's harsh.
I need to get going on putting together my 1962 calendar for next year. The days match up with 2007 so it will be chronologically accurate and I'd rather look at 1962-era ads than dogs or mountains.
Happy November! Hey, look! Your pants are unzipped!