By LOU ANTONELLI
Managing Editor
Every small town in America has its own local civic festival. If you happen to be the county seat, you get to host the county fair once a year, but at the very least everybody has some occasion to exhibit local pride.
Clarksville’s Fall Bazaar is this Saturday, if you hadn’t heard. Actually, if you haven’t heard yet, I’m kind of curious whether that rock you live under is igneous, sedimentary or metamorphic (yes, I stayed awake during my high school geology class.)
There are multiple articles in this issue about the various events and opportunities you have to entertain yourselves. In my case, I’ll be one of the seven local authors in the library. I’ll have copies of my award-nominated alternate history for sale, “Another Girl, Another Planet”.
Science fiction and fantasy is a bit of a specialized genre, so when I attend author events at occasions for the general public I don’t have high expectations for sales. It’s different when I attend literary conferences. But stop on by and say howdy!
You could probably surmise that with my literary interests, I have always been a big fan of The Twilight Zone, especially the original series which ran from 1959 to 1964. I’m not old enough to have seen the show during its initial run, but it’s been in syndication ever since.
I recently saw an episode called “The Ring-a-Ding Girl”, and it comes to mind because of the bazaar coming up. You see, the crucial plot point in the story is that a Hollywood celebrity returns to the small town she grew up in, and proceeds to mess up plans for the town’s annual Founders Day Picnic.
Bunny Blake is known at the Ring-a-Ding Girl in Hollywood because of her fondness for that kind of jewelry. As the episode starts, she and her personal assistant are packing for an airline flight across the country.
Bunny mentions that it is the day of the annual Founders Day Picnic in the small town she grew up in. Unlike the stereotypical Hollywood celebrity who has nothing good to say about the “common people” they grew up with, Bunny has only good memories about her hometown, and remembers they even took up a collection to pay for her trip to Hollywood when she kicked off her acting career.
In the next scene, her sister back homes opens the door and finds Bunny has made a surprise visit One of the skills of Rod Serling and The Twilight Zone is that it could tell an engrossing story well enough that you would forget plot inconsistencies. As you watch the episode you forget to remember that Blake was on a jet and not supposed to be going home that day.
Bunny visits a number of people she knew well when she was growing up, and everyone is happy to see her, but then she throws everyone a curve by saying she will put in a personal appearance at the local auditorium – at the same time as the Founders Day Picnic.
Everyone tells her that will quash the picnic, but she firmly – but nicely – sticks to her guns.
As the time for both the picnic and her appearance nears, a violent storm breaks out over the city. Meanwhile, the show cuts to a scene of the pilot in the jet that Bunny and her assistant are on, telling them there’s rough weather ahead. Then we see the two women. The assistant is worried, but Bunny seems unconcerned.
Back at the house, “Bunny” is talking to her sister and nephew and getting ready to go to the auditorium, there’s a commotion as emergency vehicles rush by the house. The sister and nephew rush to the window, and they don’t notice Bunny doesn’t. Instead, she softly tells them goodbye and then steps outside into the pouring rain, and with a look of resignation on her face, disappears.
A minute later a local policeman calls and tells the sister a jet crashed in the storm and onto the city park, but almost no one was killed on the ground. They had gone over to the auditorium to see Bunny.
Then he says he found Bunny’s corpse in the wreckage, despite the fact many people had seen her in the city just a short while earlier.
There’s a traditional superstition that if you are very close to your own death, you soul may leave your body early. If you see that “double” – in German it’s called a doppelganger – it’s a very bad sign, because it means your death is imminent.
By then end of the episode we realize that once on the jet Bunny Blake was doomed, and it was her doppelganger that appeared in the city and in a last gesture of kindness, arranged so that the fewest number of people would die at the picnic grounds when the jet fell out of the sky.
One of the things the Twilight Zone did so well, thanks to Rod Serling, was to accurately reflect America. Anyone who lives or grew up in a small town knows how important an event like the Founders Day Picnic would be. (If you ever want to see a touching depiction of a small town America that was already gone by 1960, see the episode “Walking Distance”.)
The Twilight Zone always had a twist in its plot. In this case, one twist is that Bunny Blake is a fairly level-headed celebrity who still has the simple touch and remembers growing up in her small town with such fondness.
The key to a successful twist ending is that there are hints along the way, and it doesn’t come completely out of nowhere. By the conclusion of the episode, as “Bunny” disappears in the rain, it all makes sense in its own way.
I’m probably the only person in Clarksville who makes a connection between the Fall Bazaar and The Twilight Zone. But then again, I’m nothing if not original.
Or as Patricia puts it, “You’re just weird.”
