Betty White Night

I can't remember the last time I planned to watch Saturday Night Live, a show that's a thing of the past but doesn't know it. Maybe 1979. But I decided that I needed to see Betty White, especially since it was too cold on Saturday evening to take the trouble of going downtown to see the Saw Doctors at Millennium Park, even for free.

Apparently a lot of people felt the same way -- about seeing Betty White, not missing the Saw Doctors -- with the episode reportedly doing well in the ratings. Still, I lost interest after a few sketches, since the talented Ms. White, who has remarkable stamina for 88, couldn't carry an entire show of mediocre material. But for once, SNL was worth a little of my time, if only because my recollection of Betty White goes all the way back to Password and her turn as Sue Ann Nivens.

Lilly, of course, doesn't share those recollections, and wondered what the deal was. But she sometimes watches SNL anyway, and so watched this one too. Eventually I expect she'll see earlier performances by Betty White and recognize her in that "she really looks young" way you sometimes do with actors who have long careers. I thought the same thing a few weeks ago when we -- all of us, during one our sporadic family movie nights -- watched The Poseidon Adventure, starring a relatively young Gene Hackman.

I hadn't seen that movie since I watched it on TV in 1974 and was wondering how it held up. It isn't a great movie or even a very good one in terms of character and dialog and such. But it is Irwin Allen at his one-damn-thing-after-another best and oddly compelling even if you aren't a 13-year-old boy. Everyone else sat still and watched it all the way through, including Ann, who was frightened at times.

In tone the movie is true to its source material, the novel of the same name by Paul Gallico. I might be the only person I know who's actually read the book, which I discovered at an English-language used book store in Osaka during a period when I had a fair amount of time to read but not always enough reading material -- the exact opposite of most periods of my life, in other words.

Missing from the movie are an assortment of sex scenes and a Turkish engineer character who travels upward with the party and some other things, but on the whole it's the same melodrama, and not really worth reading if you have something better to read. In this case, watching the movie is the better choice.