Three Hour Tour

I am very obsessive about watching TV. I can’t like a show without methodically watching every episode of it in as short a time period as possible, and have watched and embarrassingly large number of TV series in their entirety in an embarrassingly short period of time.* Also, if someone talks and I miss something that was said in an episode, it doesn’t count and I have to watch it over. Sometimes I think I have TV OCD.

The very first TV series that I fell in obsessive-compulsive love with was Gilligan’s Island, when I was in sixth grade. I would wake up at 7:00 am on weekends and in the summer because that’s when it aired, and on school days I would set the VCR to record it so I could watch it as soon as I got back. I found a list of all the episodes online, which I printed out and carefully checked off as I saw each one. Some I had seen three or four times while others were still missing, but this was before you could buy a DVD of an entire season so I had no choice but to keep watching faithfully every day, hoping that eventually the syndication gods would smile upon me and show me one of the elusive missing episodes.

I liked the show overall, but what I was really in love with was the Professor. Handsome, intelligent, socially inept, he was the prototype for every boy I would ever have a crush on or date.** I used to lay awake at night and imagine various scenarios in which the Professor found out about me and my undying love for him, and came and rescued me from my miserable middle school existence, at which point we eloped and lived happily ever after making electronics out of coconuts on an island. I am fairly certain that I wrote him multiple letters to this effect.

So when I found out that the surviving cast members of Gilligan’s Island were going to have a Three Hour Reunion Cruise on the Potomac River, a mere hour away from my house, I was beside myself with excitement. The cruise was a fundraiser for something or other, so the tickets weren’t cheap. I begged my parents to take me, and swore up and down that I would never ask for another present as long as I lived if they bought me a ticket. And because I was as relentless about begging for a ticket as I was about watching every episode of the show, they eventually gave in and bought tickets for me and my mom for my birthday/Christmas/Chanukah present for the year.

After a several month wait that was even more interminable than the weeks proceeding Christmas, the day of the cruise was upon us. I was kind of embarrassed when we got on the boat and I turned out to be the only person under 40 on board, but it ended up working out to my advantage because I stood out and got more attention from the actors as a result. I don’t remember most of the details of the evening, except that Bob Denver and Dawn Wells both gave me autographs and called me sweet, and Tina Louise was a real bitch.

When the climactic moment finally came for me to meet Russell Johnson, I froze. I was completely petrified with unrequited love, and unable to form so much as a single word of my feelings for him and elaborate plan for our island life together. Fortunately my indomitable mother was nearby, and she had no qualms about thrusting me directly in front him. Unfortunately, she also told him all the mortifying details of my unbridled pre-teen passion. Despite this humiliation, or perhaps because of it, he thanked me for my devotion and actually leaned over and kissed me on the cheek! It was the single most thrilling moment of my life so far.

The epilogue is that six years later, when I was a freshman in college, my mom found out about a website where you can pay to have various quasi-celebrities call your loved ones and read a pre-scripted message to them. Russell Johnson was an option, so she paid to have him call me on my birthday and say that he remembered our kiss back in 1998. I ended up missing the call so he left a voicemail, and about halfway through, when he got to the part where he was supposed to say “I remember you from the cast reunion cruise on the Potomac...” he broke from the script and said, “Hey, I do remember you! You were such a sweet little girl, and it was just wonderful to meet you. I hope you have a fantastic birthday and a great life!” It’s probably as close as I’ll ever come to eloping to an island with him, so I’ll take it.


* Gilligan’s Island (98 episodes plus 3 movies, 6th grade)
MASH (251 episodes plus1 movie, 8th grade)
Sliders (88 episodes, first in 7th grade as they came out, then again junior year of college)
Arrested Development (53 episodes, sophomore year)
Scrubs (181 episodes, as they came out and then all at once sophomore spring)
Friends (236 episodes, first as they came out and then all at once the summer between sophomore and junior year of college)
Futurama (97 episodes plus 4 movies, junior year and now ongoing with the new episodes)
Flight of the Conchords (22 episodes, spring semester junior year)
Stargate: SG-1 (214 episodes plus 3 movies, spring semester senior year)
Stargate: Atlantis (100 episodes, summer after graduating college – while I was at TFA Institute no less!)
Freaks and Geeks (18 episodes, spring break my first year teaching)
Star Trek: The Original Series (79 episodes, summer between first and second years of teaching)
Star Trek: The Next Generation (178 episodes, summer between first and second years of teaching)
Firefly (14 episodes plus 1 movie, summer between first and second years of teaching)
Dexter (48 episodes, fall of my second year of teaching and now ongoing)
House (132 episodes, fall of my second year of teaching and now ongoing)
Extras (13 episodes, spring of my second year of teaching)
Life (10 episodes, spring of my second year of teaching)
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (58 episodes, last month)
The Office, 30 Rock, The Big Bang Theory, Community, Modern Family, Louie (126, 80, 63, 25, 24 and 10 episodes respectively, watched as they are released at the painfully slow rate of one a week).

**Handsome part not necessarily included with all models.