Cold Medicine

     The Beverly Hillbillies. Yes, thinking of bits from the comic pages in my last post got me to remembering scenes from old television shows. Whenever I hear the phrase cure for the common cold, I am immediately reminded of an episode of the Beverly Hillbillies. In the episode, one of the characters complained of having a cold, and Granny said she would fix up a batch of her

remedy! Well, Mr. Drysdale, the family's banker, heard Granny, and he thought this was his ticket to getting rich. If he could get Granny to share the remedy with him, he could sell it and become wealthy enough to retire. The world has long been looking for the cure for the common cold! Mr. Drysdale spent the entire episode trying to cajole from Granny her recipe for the remedy, and she spent the time resisting. I don't remember why she wouldn't tell him except that she was perhaps thinking it was no big deal and Mr. Drysdale was always being so obnoxious with his get rich quick schemes, and they had to stretch it out to a half hour anyway.

      The climax of the episode was of course Granny finally agreeing to tell Mr. Drysdale her magic ingredients. What she then shared with him sounded much like the recipe for chicken soup followed with the instructions to “eat the soup, and in a week or ten days, the cold will be gone.” The punchline here is that a week or ten days is how long colds usually last anyway, and in the end Mr. Drysdale was still not rich.

       Why did this amuse me enough to remember all these years? The stars were aligned, I guess, for me to be receptive at that point in time to the set up and the punchline and to appreciate Granny's cure for the common cold. Forever after, if someone has a cold, I tell them I have a cure – and the cure takes a week to ten days. It won't make me rich, but sometimes they smile, and that's worth something, don't you think?

20200430 55 Cold Medicine