Danger Penny Robinson!
Okay, I have to admit how I got here. There’s a visualizer program for iTunes called “Collage.” Unlike the normal goofy-graphics pseudo-hallucinogenic light shows that most visualizers provide (sort of a Spencer Gifts for the computer screen), this one goes off and Googles images that fit the title, artist, and album playing. So, very often, you get pictures from videos, or singles sleeves, album covers, routine stuff like that. Tonight Collage seemed to go a little overboard, as it brought us pictures of dolls for Mary Chapin Carpenter’s “Party Doll” album, as well as some inexplicably ugly dogs and a picture of someone from the ’50s who was clearly not MCC. Some other weird stuff followed, as well, and an Elvis Costello song baffled it entirely. Then we hit “This is How It Goes” by Aimee Mann, from “Lost In Space.” That brought up an image of a trading card with June Lockhart in a space helmet and the caption, “Where is Penny?” Which led me to ask the same question.
And all I can say is: Angela Cartwright is alive and well and running a website and a boutique. Don’t believe me? Go see for yourself. And here’s what really blew my mind: “[She] has completed writing a fantasy novel with Bill Mumy soon to be published.”
Angela, I burned for you when I was 7. And I wouldn’t listen to anyone who said that Veronica was the hot Cartwright. I think time has shown I was right. (Except of course that in 1967, we didn’t say girls were “hot.” In fact, the best thing you could be then was “cool,” which was a bit of hipster slang that my parents tried to forbid me from saying, presumably because it was one step away from turning me into a 7-year-old Maynard G. Krebs. They finally had to give up when Hot Wheels cars came out a year later, with the slogan, “Hot Wheels! They’re cool!” Once I could point out that they even said “cool” on TV, they gave it up. “Heck” and “crap” were still issues, however. Which may be the reason I now curse like a dockworker. )
But I think Angela would understand, right?