I Dream Of Brooklyn

Last Sunday's episode of HBO "Girls" had everyone confused.  It was a dreamlike episode, unfolding surreally.  We saw Hannah as we never had before.  She wasn't eating Cool Whip out of the container in her small Brooklyn apartment, complaining about her horrible love life.  Instead, she spent two days with a handsome doctor, barbecuing steaks on the patio of his brownstone and taking a sauna in his giant bathroom.  The episode was like a fantasy of what Hannah's life could be in the future if she stopped struggling and earning $40 a day at "Grumpy's Cafe" and instead lived the lavish lifestyle of a doctor's wife in an expensive Brooklyn brownstone.  Hannah was awake, but she was dreaming.

Not too long ago, I had an actual nighttime dream about Brooklyn.  I dreamed that it was an early Saturday morning, and I called up my best childhood friend, Ania, and told her that there was nothing I wanted more in this world than to go to her condo in Brooklyn really early in the morning and hang out together.  The desire in the dream was so strong.

From the time I was 8 until 18, Ania and I were inseparable.  We spent almost every single day together.  She lived on the corner across from my street, so I would call her up and we'd meet outside and hang out all day.  She was always just a phone call away.

The next day after the dream, I e-mailed Ania and asked, "Can we set a date to get together? Like at your house?"  She wrote back, pleased.  "You want to come to Brooklyn? I'd love that."  So we set a date for breakfast.

On the scheduled Saturday morning, my family set out for Brooklyn to have breakfast with Ania's family.  Her husband cooked eggs with salsa and Mexican cheese.  Ania made vodka breakfast cocktails.  My daughter and her son took turns riding his scooter back and forth on the hardwood floors while the rest of us sat on stools and talked all morning.

Last spring, Ania said that she'd often come home from work to find the HBO "Girls" film crew sitting on the front steps of her condo.  They were filming the second season in her neighborhood right in front of her house.  And now Hannah and I were both fantasizing about alternate lives.  Hannah imagined what it would be like to have the material things and lifestyle the doctor had. I fantasized about what it would be like if I could revisit my childhood -- the constant daily steadiness with Ania, playing Connect Four on her front steps at 9:00 in the morning when no one else in our neighborhood was outdoors yet.  This is the fantasy of my alternate life.

But Hannah doesn't really want to go into the future and be settled yet. She'd lose her edge, her writer's restlessness and her need to, in her words, "Feel it all."  I don't really want to go back to my childhood, all that uncertainty and second-guessing.  I finally feel secure with a fierce sense of responsibility.  But sometimes, it's nice to dream with the background setting of a really nice condo or brownstone in Brooklyn.

Why I'm Old School

Recently, I had a flashback.  It happened while teaching my daughter to play backgammon.  As I explained the mechanics of the game, I suddenly flashed back to my nine-year-old self learning to play with my best friend, Ania, whose dad taught us after giving her a set for her seventh birthday.  She had been so disappointed to find a little brown suitcase after the wrapping paper came off, but we learned the game, and we were forever hooked.  Ania's aunt and uncle had a blue leather backgammon set with blue swirl and white chips. As soon as I saw it, I told Ania that when I grew up, I was going to get one just like it.

We played constantly, and didn't even play competitively.  Half the time, we never knocked each other's chips off the board, even when they were left single and vulnerable.  It was so relaxing to just move the pieces, hear and feel the sound of the dice rolling in the cup, and just talk about other things while our hands focused on moving our chips, closer and closer to home. 

I prefer old school games to computer ones or X-Box.  At Chuck E. Cheese's, I go straight to the skeeball and would have no trouble staying there the entire time.  The constant movement of my right arm tossing the ball, getting better and better with each throw, having to get the gentle tug of my arm just right to get the ball into those little circles at the top.  Maybe they are 1,000 points, but I don't even know because I don't play to get tickets, I like to stand there and think of other things while my arm tosses the ball as second nature. 

This love of the tangible is similar to people saying they love the feel of a book and smell of its pages rather than using the Kindle.  Or those who have said the sound of the grooves of a vinyl album and its wear and tear transports them back to the first time they heard the songs. But more than the tangible, for me it's that zoned-out relaxed feeling that I love when I play backgammon.  I can't imagine getting  that feeling while staring at bright lights on a laptop version of the game.  Being zoned out, then having my laptop freeze or crash, forcing me back into reality.  That can't happen while I'm playing the board game.

Backgammon is zen to me, which is defined as "absorption or a meditative state."  While playing backgammon, you're cleaning out your mind because you are focusing on moving the pieces on the board, your thoughts have emptied.  You have redirected your focus.

After I taught my daughter backgammon, we immediately turned on my laptop.  We didn't do it to play a virtual board game or for social networking or FarmVille.  We did it so we could do a Google search in hopes of finding a blue leather, blue and white swirl chip backgammon set.

The Green-Eyed Monster At Christmastime (and I don't mean The Grinch!)

I know, the Grinch has red eyes, but you know what I mean.  I'm talking about being jealous of others during that time of year when you really should be counting your blessings, but hey, we're all human, right?  Maybe you feel jealous when you hear how others are planning these huge family celebrations and yours is always small because most of your family has moved away.  Or maybe you know your friend's husband has gotten her a diamond necklace and you're only getting a gold one. Either way, people's lives are not always what they seem, and I have a story which seeks to illustrate this:

Marie remembers spending much of her childhood alone, looking out from the glass of her grandmother's sliding doors, wishing she had just one friend to play with.  In second grade, she was consumed by frightening phobias that something terrible would happen to her.  When her class made a "Wish Board," and wrote down things like "I wish that chocolate grew on trees," Marie simply wrote, "I wish I had no worries."  In fourth grade, Marie took a few sick days from school and returned to find her entire class had decided they didn't want to be friends with her anymore.  She often escaped these lonely times by locking herself in her bedroom, singing along to her records.  She began high school struggling to overcome the recent losses of both a grandparent and a parent which prompted her to escape the memories of her hometown and move to Boston to enroll in music college to fulfill her childhood dreams of becoming a singer. Instead, she suffered vocal damage and was told by a specialist that she'd never be able to sing the way she wanted to because of chronic allergies that caused hoarseness.  She gave up her dreams of singing and eventually moved back to her hometown.

Linda recalls a childhood filled with love as the youngest member of a family of six which included live-in grandparents.  When she was eight, she learned how to ride a bicycle and rode around her neighborhood meeting tons of friends.  She looks back fondly on summers filled with neighborhood kids all playing together till it grew dark and the mosquitoes came out.  She was a gifted student who played piano at weekly assemblies in her grade school auditorium.  She won the fifth grade school spelling bee and had a huge birthday party that year at a rollerskating rink.  Her party even included the boys.  High school was a free and easy time of little responsibilities.  She and her best friend often spent weekends taking the subway into the city to go record-shopping and getting kicked out of magazine stores for making too much noise by laughing so hard.  She moved to Boston to attend music college, and although she didn't land the glamorous job she'd hoped for, she did become a retail buyer in a record store where she dealt directly with record label reps and often saw famous people, some of them her childhood idols, shopping at the store right beside her!  She enjoyed being surrounded by music all day for many years before moving from Boston to New York City.

Given the choice to trade lives with Marie or Linda, I'm sure you'd trade lives with Linda, although if you did, you'd have to take Marie's life too because Marie and Linda are actually the same music student -- me!  I got this idea from the self-help book, "Finding Your Own North Star," by Martha Beck.  You remember her.  She's the Oprah protege who SHOULD have had her own talk show!  She wrote two versions of the same person's life in a section called "Be the hero of your autobiography -- not the victim."  Growing up, whenever I was jealous of someone, my mom always asked me, "But do you really want to trade lives with her?  Think about everything you know about her.  If you really want to be someone else, you have to take on their entire life, not just the parts you're jealous of."  So just remember this holiday season, as you eye your friend's jewelry or her big, close-knit family, that you're only getting PART of her story.

Staten Island And Sandy

When I was a kid, every so often, a TV character mentioned my hometown, Staten Island.  Lucy and Ethel had ridden the Staten Island Ferry to see if they'd get seasick in preparation for Ricky's European Ship Tour.  On an "All In The Family" episode, we all cheered in my house when Archie Bunker mentioned the words "Staten Island."   More recently, there was the MTV show "I'm A Staten Island Girl," and of course Staten Island is the setting for many of the episodes of "Big Ang." Now I fear that Staten Island will forever only be remembered for the devastating events of Monday night's Hurricane Sandy.

On Monday night, many people had to be evacuated from their homes because their homes were by the water, and the tides were expected to overtake and destroy their homes, in some instances even lifting them right off of the foundation.  Our house is not located in that "Zone A" area, so after losing our power Monday afternoon, we sat in our living room that evening with the portable radio on, playing round after round of Crazy 8's cards, sitting on what we felt was the safest corner of the couch, away from the windows, trying to ignore the howling wind and rattling tree branches, my husband and I exchanging worried glances as my daughter blissfully ignored the storm yet wore her helmet.  We knew that there were probably only two dangerous trees in our yard, one is actually our neighbor's tree.  When we went to sleep that night, I slept in my daughter's bedroom on her floor, because I knew her room was safely far away from both of those trees.  My husband braved the master bedroom because he calculated that the tree was more likely to fall into the corner of his music room rather than into our bedroom, so he would most likely be okay.

Tuesday morning, we woke up and were grateful that none of our trees had fallen down.  We spent the next five days and four nights without electricity and heat, each night getting colder than the next.  We moved to the rooms where the temperature didn't go below 60 degrees, and eventually I shared a bed with my daughter just to keep her warm with my body heat.  With no refrigerator, I kept her juice boxes outside to keep them cold along with the bottles of Carnation Instant Breakfast I'd gotten her since she couldn't have her hard boiled eggs in the morning. I always thought that if I ever lost electricity for more than a few days, the hardest part would be not being able to watch TV, and even though I was eating cans of tuna every morning to keep my protein up, that wasn't the hardest part. The hardest part for me, definitely, was feeling cold all the time. We were able to warm up for part of the day at my mom's boyfriend's house.  We also charged our cell phones there and my daughter's portable DVD player so she could watch a half hour of her kid's shows before bed each night. But we didn't want to sleep there because he already had his daughter and his two grandsons staying with him, since their house also didn't have power, so we didn't want to impose unless we absolutely had to, so we stuck it out in our rapidly-dropping 60 degree house.

On Friday morning, we went to Stop and Shop.  We couldn't drive around much because there were two-hour long lines at the only two gas stations that still had power on Staten Island.  At Stop and Shop, every one looked like they hadn't been warm or had power for four days also.  The women came in with ponytails, wearing layers of clothes, stocking their shopping carts with more batteries and with foods that didn't have to be refrigerated.  As I shopped, I overheard one of the Stop and Shop employees telling someone that every day, more and more people who had lost their homes and were currently living in evacuation centers were coming in to shop.  That snapped some sense into me.  Sure, we were cold and eating tuna fish, and the adults drinking unrefrigerated milk (which I never realized was okay to do as long as it didn't smell sour and was not beyond the expiration date!), but these people had lost their homes! Not to mention the stories we heard on the radio of people who had lost their lives!  I thought of my friend's dad, who thankfully survived the storm, but had to be rescued because the water was up to his chest in his house!  I thought of how my daughter's godfather was coming to Staten Island from Pennsylvania with clothes, batteries, gas, food, and supplies for those who needed them, as his own brother and cousin were now without homes also.  My husband took the picture I've used for this blog of the street where we used to hang out with dear friends of ours who have since moved to England.  If they had stayed, they would have been evacuated and come back to find sailboats in their front yard and peeking into the windows of their house.  These are stories of people who have really suffered during the storm.

Our power did come back on Saturday, the day after I went to Stop and Shop.  We were very thankful, and we continue to pray for those less fortunate.  Staten Island will never be the same.  There is more help to give and more of the word to spread.  Yet someday, I hope Staten Island will once again be remembered as the quirky borough which is part of New York City but doesn't seem to be.  The one mentioned by Lucy and Archie Bunker and in True Life episodes of MTV.  Not as the borough which was devastated by Hurricane Sandy.

Grandma, We Hardly Knew You

My grandmother was born in the beginning of October and died at the end of October, a few weeks after her 95th birthday.  That's why I've decided to remember her in an October blog.

The last time I saw her was at my cousin's wedding.  She had just turned 90 and had flown from Florida with my cousin, the bride-to-be, who was now her primary caretaker.  At this wedding, I saw a sassy side of her I'd never seen before. Every time someone would come to greet her, she greeted them back with zingers.  To her grandniece she said, "Wow, your husband put on a lot of weight."  I asked another of my cousins about this, and she laughed about it, saying, "She's always been like this. Every time she sees me, she still asks me why I only had one child." My mom endured zinger after zinger, most of them questions about my mom's ex-husband whom she married after my father (who was my grandmother's youngest son) passed away.  My mom didn't seem rattled by her zingers at all. When I asked her about it, she said, "I'm used to it. When you were a kid, she often told me I should wash your father's hair for him."   I figured that now that I was an adult, there would probably be zingers for me too. I braced myself for zingers directed at me, but they never came.

Growing up, I hardly ever saw my grandmother smile. If she spoke to me at all, it was either "hello," "what was that?" (because she was hard of hearing) or "goodbye," along with a "pray for me."  I also remember her being obsessed by things.  At first it was her false teeth, then years later, the floaters in her eyes. If she did talk about something other than false teeth or floaters, it was likely to be something odd. Like the time when Jack Cafferty (now a CNN news analyst, back then a New York City's Live at 5 News anchor) came onto the TV, and she suddenly exclaimed, "That is a good-looking man!"  Jack Cafferty? You'd think Tom Selleck had just appeared on the screen!

The only thing I can remember us doing together was play cards. She taught me a great card game with a lot of steps called "King's Corners." She and my grandfather used to stay at our house for one week every Christmas vacation.  During one of those visits, my mom had to go to work, and I wanted to make pancakes. I was probably about 12. I called my mom's work, and she wasn't at her desk, so her co-worker asked me if there was something she could help me with.  I told her, "Well, how do I make pancakes?"  She told me a few things, and I hung up the phone.  As soon as I hung up, my grandmother exclaimed, "Why didn't you just ask me?"  I was surprised at her expression and that she seemed upset.  "I know how to make pancakes!"  she said huffily. She had never reprimanded me for anything in my life except for not asking her how to make pancakes! It was funny, but the thought  never crossed my mind that I could just ask my grandmother how to do it. 

The fact that I didn't think she could handle something as easy as making pancakes is strange considering that when she was growing up, her family of five siblings all agreed that she was the most gifted academically. Her biggest disappointment in life was that her family didn't have enough money to send her to college because it was the Depression. Only her oldest sister got to go.  But she made the best of it and became a legal secretary. She was a champion stenographer who also entered typing contests and won medals. She was such a fast typist that she had to type on a special Underwood typewriter. Otherwise the keys would jam up because she typed so fast.

After she married, she became a stay-at-home mom to my uncle and my father.  It was World War II, and she and my grandfather had going away parties at their house for their friends going off to war almost every week. Since my grandfather had the two young boys to take care of,  he was the last to go. My uncle remembers there being singalongs at the player piano and karaoke before there was a name for it. My grandmother was considered very funny and an excellent hostess. But all that changed about nine years later, when she gave birth to her last child, my aunt, and suffered a severe form of postpartum depression. She wasn't able to take care of either her new baby or her two sons, so she endured "treatments" given in the basement of a questionable doctor and was never the same after that. But it did save her from going the way of Sylvia Plath.

For my grandmother's 90th birthday party, I asked my cousin what I should get her, and she said a brain teaser/logic problems book.  You know, the ones that hardly anyone can do much less would want to do unless they were being forced to? She said little during the party except that she didn't know what all the fuss was about. At one point, a guest said, "I try to never argue with anyone during the day because, you know, one night, you may go to sleep and not wake up in the morning."  "Oh," my grandmother said looking him up and down. "I wish that would happen to me!" 

During the last decade of my grandmother's life, my cousins, who sometimes took turns taking care of her, had a lot of stories to tell. The funniest story was when she stayed with my cousin and his wife who lived in New Jersey. Every morning,  my cousin went into the room where she was staying and noticed that the cable channel was always set from the night before on the same number, a certain adult channel. When they asked her about it, she answered, "I don't know.  I watched this show. There was a woman who had a pink apparatus." When my cousin told us this story in front of my grandmother, all she had to say about the channel was, "I was intrigued by it."

When she moved back to Florida for good, there were various medical personnel who came to evaluate her to help her get the care she needed. She never gave them an easy time.  One funny story is the time a man came to the house and had to ask her several questions as he filled out a questionnaire.  At one point he asked her how much she weighed to which she snapped, "Weigh? How much do I weigh? Well, how much do YOU weigh?"

Her mind stayed intact until only a couple of years before she died. I didn't see her during those couple of years, but I was told her personality had made a dramatic change for the second time in her life, but this time it was for the better. Suddenly, she was cheery all the time.  My cousin said she just sat around watching TV and laughing all day.  Her favorite movie was "Napoleon Dynamite," and she watched it constantly!

Come to think of it, there was one period of time that I actually saw my grandmother happy. It was when I was a teenager, after my grandmother's daughter's baby was born, and my grandmother moved in with them for three years to care for my new cousin while my aunt returned to work full-time. Whenever we visited them, she smiled and simply beamed over that baby.  She took really good care of her and truly thrived while doing so.

My uncle probably knew my grandmother better than anyone else in the world.  When I asked him about her recently, he told me: "People thought she was aloof and distant, but that wasn't the mother I knew."  Again, I say -- Grandma, we hardly knew you.


Post Script:  I have to give the photo credit to my cousin Dawn who found this picture in her stash.  Both of us were shocked that there was actually a photograph in existence of our grandmother and grandfather kissing!

The Woman Who SHOULD Have Had Her Own Talk Show

Believe it or not, Oprah's incredibly successful talk show was not the first of its kind.  That credit goes to Phil Donahue whose TV show had its heyday in the 70's.  He was the first TV show host to explore the deeply personal, emotional, sometimes cringeworthy topics that really moved both his guests' and audience's souls.  Donahue really cared about his guests who would bravely come onto the air and pour their hearts out.  He treated them with compassion and with the same respect he'd give to a guest who came into his home.  I'm willing to bet that every guest on his show could rest assured that once the cameras rolled, they would be discussing the topics they had actually been invited on the show to discuss. This is not the case for many guests invited onto the show of another famous Phil -- Dr. Phil.

Many people saw the recent Dina Lohan interview (Dina is Lindsay's mom). Apparently, she is yet another guest in a long list of guests who did the Dr. Phil show under false pretenses.  She thought she was invited onto his show to talk about the plight of abused women and how they can be helped.  Instead, she was greeted by Dr. Phil's surprise guest, none other than Michael Lohan, Dina's ex-husband and former abuser!  She got so nervous when she found out he was on the show that she couldn't continue with her platform and instead began behaving erratically.  She told Dr. Phil that he was yet another member of the media out to destroy her to which he angrily responded:  "I am not the media.  I've been a trained professional for the past thirty-four years.  I know how to interview people!"  But what he does obviously know how to do better than interview people is how to gain incredibly high ratings for his show's producers and advertisers.

I was a faithful viewer of the Dr. Phil show for years. But it all went downhill when I tuned into a show where his guest was a stage parent who had gone on the show under the guise of getting exposure for her talented singer daughter.  Instead, she was reamed out for pushing her child into a career in show business rather than letting her daughter be a kid.  The woman looked completely baffled and hoodwinked as to why he was doing this.  I felt bad for her.  I pictured the producers interviewing her and acting excited about her daughter's talent and telling her how Dr. Phil's show would expose her daughter to millions of potential fans, maybe even get her daughter a record deal right on the spot. Then she goes on Dr. Phil and gets humiliated on TV for being a bad parent!

I finally lost all hope in Dr. Phil's credibility as a therapist on a later program when he interviewed an older woman/younger man couple.  He all but called her a crazy psycho simply for dating a man about twenty-five years younger than she was.  He said she needed psychological help.   I don't know if it was due to the fact that this woman in her fifties was around Dr. Phil's age yet preferred men in their twenties, but his criticism of her was way out of proportion to the situation. I doubted he'd have the same advice for his daughter-in-law's former boss, Playboy magazine mogul, Hugh Hefner, who routinely dates women SIXTY years younger than he is!

So I'm not surprised at all that he has now done this to Dina Lohan.  Dina Lohan makes her own mistakes, it's true.  She's not an innocent, yet I did find it refreshing when she made him squirm in his seat as he denied that she was put onto his show just so he could manipulate her the way the media does, purely for ratings.

Another of Oprah's proteges, Dr. Oz, is one step above Dr. Phil because he mostly does an informative show about health which forces more focus on facts rather than psychological opinions.  However, I did experience an all-time low one afternoon while viewing the Dr. Oz show.  His topic was women and weight loss.  He humiliated his women-only audience by making it mandatory for them to sit in his audience wearing short, skin-tight exercise tops that exposed their large bellies.  His lack of sensitivity by doing this to these women made this show one of the most disgusting things I've ever seen.  This episode easily could have been done without the visuals.  One of the women given the microphone in the audience had a flat belly, but she also was trying to lose weight. She had no trouble speaking to Dr. Oz about her problems with weight loss without breaking down in tears as nearly all of the women with the large bellies had done during their turns at the mike.

The one former protege of Oprah's who should have had a successful TV show is Martha Beck. She wrote the brilliant books entitled "Finding Your North Star" and "Expecting Adam," the latter being about her son with Down's Syndrome.   In her "North Star" book she shows the readers how to create a step-by-step plan to both find and succeed at the work they really want to do.  She believes in being true to your authentic self and in doing the work you would do even if you weren't getting paid. Oprah gave one day a week of the Oprah show to Beck just as she had done with Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz to create interest and to pave the way for their own "Harpo" Network shows.  I was surprised when a "Martha Beck Show" did not appear on the air the same way the Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz shows had. But knowing what I know now, there is NO way a Martha Beck show would have survived if she had been forced to participate in the dirty ratings tactics that both Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz participate in.  I'm not criticizing Oprah, just her offspring.  Martha Beck would never have allowed people to be humiliated on her show. This is a genuine, kind woman with a clean soul.  She is there to help people, not hurt people.  What is wrong with our media and society if they are about the bottom dollar without having concern for ruining people's lives?  Martha Beck would have never agreed to that.  So she remains a woman without a show.  But I'm sure she sleeps better at night knowing she hasn't had to humiliate or dupe anyone during the day.

Why Sci-Fi Should Be Called Psy-Fi

Earlier this month, NASA successfully landed a rover named "Curiosity" onto the surface of Mars, the Red Planet in our solar system. This project was developed to see if there is now or ever was life on Mars. Ray Bradbury would be proud!  He is my favorite short story writer who passed away in June at the ripe old age of 91, only two months before Curiosity landed. In fact, Curiosity might not have been landed at all if it weren't for Ray Bradbury!  Many scientists were inspired to explore Mars solely due to their reading of Ray Bradbury's 1950 novel, "The Martian Chronicles." That man had some mind.  His writing predicted many events.  His 1953 novel entitled "Fahrenheit 451" predicted how television would take over our lives with giant screens taking up space on every single wall in people's living rooms.  In my case, I'm glad that TV has taken over because I feel it helps me escape from the stress of my everyday, realistic, life.  Science Fiction TV, particularly "The Twilight Zone," is a place I can go to when I want to get away for an hour or so.  That's why I think "Sci-Fi" should be called "PSY-fi!"

Watching these episodes where people are constantly faced with problems of gloom and doom help me get my anxiety out.  As I watch, I feel anxious for these characters, yet I know it's a totally different world from my own, and even as I experience their dilemmas as they do, I'm still not in danger of coming to any harm. My favorite "Twilight Zone" episode, "The Midnight Sun," is a perfect example.  Two women are dealing with their apartment building getting hotter and hotter, there is a water shortage, and people are evacuating, heading north where it's a bit cooler because scientists say that the Earth has moved out of its orbit and is moving closer to the sun.  But by the end, it's suddenly really dark, and the mercury on the thermometer has dropped so low that the numbers are nearly unreadable.  It has gotten frightfully cold.  Turns out the woman was dreaming, and she was only hot because she had a fever.  The twist is that the Earth is not moving closer to the sun, it is actually moving farther away!

However, it's not always anxiety I need to release when I feel stressed, sometimes I just want to imagine a more pleasant world than my own.  One of the happier "Twilight Zone" episodes is from the 1980's remake of the series.  An episode called "The World Next Door" is about one of my favorite science fiction topics: parallel worlds.  Actor George Wendt (best known as Norm from "Cheers") stars in this one as a character named Barney who is a failure as an inventor.  He has a basement workshop, and when his wife orders him to clean it up and get rid of his mess of inventions, he destroys a bookshelf and discovers a door that leads straight into another house's wine cellar. A woman's voice from the top of the stairs calls "Barney" to come up and rejoin the party, except that the woman is referring to the "Barney" who lives in the house with the wine cellar.  He is a successful inventor famous for inventing something having to do with the fuel system for cars. Yet since they are identical Barneys each living in a parallel world, it is no problem when instead it is the failed inventor Barney who decides to go upstairs and join the party.

Turns out wealthy "Barney" is not happy either.  He wants to live a simple life, so the two Barneys switch places.  Failed inventor, Barney, brings one of his flopped inventions to this new life where here it is a success, and famous "Barney" has cleaned up the basement and is set to live a normal life with failure Barney's now-contented wife! Don't we all wish sometimes that we could escape to a parallel world where things are almost the same as our real lives but we've made improvements in the areas we see fit?

I think all of us have things we rely on to escape from our chores and the hustle and bustle of our busy lives. Mine is good Sci-Fi TV, because, hey, if on certain days, I find myself struggling to figure out a way to pay the bills, at least I can reassure myself that the world most definitely is not moving farther away from the sun!