With A Song In My Head

Have I mentioned before that I tend to, more often than not, wake up with a song, or a fragment of song, running around in my head? Sometimes annoying, sometimes not. Yesterday it was "Old Grey Mare" (mildly annoying), the day before that it was "Simple Gifts" (you know..."It's a gift to be simple, It's a gift to be free...") (not annoying), the day before that it was just the phrase "I want to know...have you ever seen the rain....coming down on a sunny day" repeated over and over and over (exceedingly annoying...and I apologize for any ear-worms I may be inserting).

This morning though it was the theme song from "St. Elsewhere." Which is totally understandable as I was given Season One as part of my Mother's Day present and watched an episode while biking last night. And there are some things that really strike me about it.

I loved "St. Elsewhere" when it was on and may be one of the three people alive who weren't annoyed by the way the series ended. I thought the ending was fabulous. And the show seemed very new and modern (at least to me) when it was first running. Not so much anymore.

I do wonder if this is where pede-conferencing got started. The show constantly had sections where the camera would follow say, Dr. Westphal and Nurse Rosenthal as they walked down the hall discussing a case of hives (on a patient you never saw and who would never be mentioned again). The camera follows Dr. Westphal as he breaks away from that conversation and may linger for a moment so you can catch a couple of lines of a conversation going on in the hallway, then follows Westphal through a door. As Westphal starts upstairs he passes Dr. Morrison coming down and they exchange greetings and the camera switches over to Morrison who goes back out the doors Westphal entered and heads down the hall, passing another conversation at which the camera may stop, letting Morrison disappear down the hall. You get the idea. I think this was all pretty new...I may be wrong, I'm not the biggest tv watcher in the world. Now it just seems like standard procedure.

Another striking thing about it...it's a very quiet show. Little music, quiet conversations...even dramatic confrontations are pretty low-key. I know things will get more dramatic as time goes on. Suicide! Rape! Murder! But in the beginning, at least, it's like watching a show set in a library.

And finally...everyone smokes. Heck, last night's episode had a patient smoking in bed! Of course, he was a bank bomber and generally nasty guy, but his mother also smoked and she seemed a decent sort. It looks sort of shocking to today's eyes.