Three's Company from Memory

It's 1983, and John Ritter is still alive, and Don Knotts is still alive, and Suzanne Somers is still carbon-based. There's this other thing people do called reading, but I've never tried it. There will be time for that later, I tell myself. For now, the entirety of my sentimental education is derived from sitcoms. These are enough.

It's 1983, as I've said, and so Somers's Chrissy has already been replaced by Terri the nurse. Somers had overestimated her value to the program, and stormed off the set when her demand for a raise was rejected, right onto the set of the fully paid advertisement for some balm or unguent that has served as her habitat ever since. So the intro, the Terri-intro, features a whimsical tour by golf cart of the San Diego Zoo, rather than that primitive intro they used to have where they weren't even at the zoo, or Disneyland, or anywhere. Mr. Furley and Larry are at the zoo too, but by now Larry has been thoroughly marginalized, which is good, because he was always repulsive, not like Jack Tripper, who has a poster of the Beatles in his bedroom, one I'd like to own myself. Already at the zoo Mr. Furley sees something that makes his exophthalmia appear even worse than it ordinarily is, probably Terri's cleavage. Janet is a non-entity, sexually speaking.

Anyway the situation that gives life to the comedy stems from Jack's claim to be gay, a claim he has made only in order to circumvent the building superintendent's refusal to let a heterosexual man live with two women as his roommates. Norman Fell's Mr. Roper, who had been married to a hideous harpy, was the one to establish this initial situation, but Knotts's Furley took over for him with great gusto. Furley himself confesses a taste for co-eds, whatever those are, but insists that rules are rules.

So it's 1983, and the trip to the zoo is over, and Jack has a hot date that, if he is lucky, will culminate in necking. This time he cannot avoid Furley's panoptic exophthalmia, so rather than breaking off his date he invents for himself an identical twin: he pretends to be his own identical twin, though non-identical, at least, with respect to sexual orientation. Furley asks the 'twin' where he is from. Texas. Furley asks him what his name is. Jack panics. Austin, he says. Ah-hahh, says Furley. Austin from Texas. He likes the sound of it. Jack puts on a cowboy hat and makes a great spectacle.

*

It's 2008, and I'm at the Berlin Opera watching Le nozze di Figaro. I think back to all the zany scenarios I mastered early on, all that opera buffa, and am grateful for the education I've received.