taffy and buffy

Terry has one of his usual wonderiffic posts, today about the intersection between What's My Line? and taffy. As someone who spent several summer weeks of my own in Gatlinburg, watching through big display windows as the taffy was pulled and giant machines did what giant machines do... I could relate. Even though it makes my teeth hurt just thinking about it.

I was always more of a candy apple girl, myself, but then, that was just because I was told it would rot out my teeth and so had to be an unqualified good. Plus, caramel.

The thing I remember most about childhood trips to Gatlinburg are:

almost killing a guy with an adult-size go kart, which I was allowed to drive because of my height even though I had to guess which pedal was for the gas and which the brake (sadly, my memory of the guess wasn't what it should have been);

the street vendors with those vaguely Muppetish monkey puppets -- you know, the puppets had velcro paws and feet and the vendors looped them around their necks and waists and put a hand inside to work the mouth and torso and said cute things to you in monkey voices? I thought those were way cool and yet, I find myself now thinking of the ultimate sadness of an adult having that job. This post is for all those street vendors of monkeys who probably shot themselves in the head in a chalet in the Tennessee mountains;

and the haunted houses. Gatlinburg was home of the permanent haunted house, about a half dozen of them, and at least one was actually pretty damn worth the ten bucks. I'm thinking it may be the Mysterious Mansion -- still in operation. However, it's important to note that pretty damn cool at that time meant I was allowed to get my picture taken behind a cardboard cut-out of a busty vampire staker and screamed really, really loud at least twice.

Which brings me to the strange intersection this post is about: two of my favorite episodes of Buffy are the "What's My Line?" eps. The title ref comes in a Buffy line: "Well, then you know it's a whole week of What's My Line, only... I don't get to play."*

Despite that, I'm going to steal the monologue from the episode "Lie to Me" to close this post instead, because it might be my ultimate, favorite, would-win-in-a-death-match Buffy dialogue:

Giles: "Yes, it's terribly simple. The good guys are always stalwart and true, the bad guys are easily distinguished by their pointy horns or black hats, and, uh, we always defeat them and save the day. No one ever dies, and everybody lives happily ever after."

*Note: Before you begin to worry, I did have to go look this stuff up.