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 Waaah! I've Got Nothing To Write About. By Tom Danehy AS I'VE STATED in the past, if indeed one's IQ is in inverse proportion to the amount of television he watches, then I'm whatever's below a moron. An imbecile, I believe. However, I don't want you to think that since I write about sports and watch a lot of TV that I just watch sports on TV. Oh no, I watch everything: good dramas, like Law & Order; bad comedies, like Married, With Children reruns; news, history, biographies, test patterns.
I occasionally get wrapped up in a novela, a Spanish-language soap opera. They're cool, because they're so much more dramatic, plus they have the wonderful feature of actually coming to a conclusion after several months on the air. Imagine All My Children wrapping up all the loose ends and going off the air. Please. Then Susan Lucci would only have a one-year losing streak. I've been watching Dos Mujeres, Un Camino on Univision this summer. It stars Erik Estrada, who first became famous as part of the gay motorcycle cop tandem on CHiPS. At least I think they were gay. Oh well, it doesn't matter. Anyway, Estrada plays Juan Daniel, a 40-ish, long-haul 18-wheel truck driver (un trailero) caught between two women. It's like Ricki Lake, only it's in Spanish instead of ebonics. He used to be married to the harpy Ana Maria, whose dyed-blonde hair makes her look like RuPaul, although not nearly as attractive. Plus, she's got Sandra Bernhard's lips, Leon Spinks' eyes, and Dennis Rodman's eye makeup. Juan Daniel is divorced from Ana Maria and married to Tania, who looks like she's about 14 years old, with way too much makeup and Leonid Brezhnev's eyebrows. I guess he used to cruise around elementary schools with a bag of candy. "Hey little girl, you want a ride in my truck?" Actually, he met her at a truck stop where she was a runaway. She stowed away in his trailer, eating the fruit he was hauling around Mexico. They got married (waiting for the wedding night to consummate things, as it should be). Plus, she probably had to wait for the onset of puberty. The show has a great subplot about a guy named Medusa who died in a car wreck, but really didn't die and is now a drug lord because of his amnesia. He doesn't remember that he used to be a good guy. A rich good guy who could buy and sell drug lords out of his pocket change. Then there's Ray (pronounced "Rie," rhymes with lie), a blond cop whose parents were killed by Medusa. His friend got bitten by a snake that was meant for Ray. Chela (yet another blonde woman--they make Mexico City look like a suburb of Stockholm) happened to be there and obligingly sucked on the dude's leg, swallowing some of the poisonous venom and threatening the life of her unborn baby, who is the product of Chela's having been raped by the brother of the dead guy who's not really dead. This is good stuff. Unfortunately, it all came to an end last week. Now, what do I do until late September when prime-time comes back to life? Of course, the answer is videos. But therein lies the rub. My video store died. We'd been together for more than a decade, and now I'm alone. It hurts so much. Choosing a video store is a very personal decision. Oh sure, we all have Blockbuster cards, but those are only for late Friday nights, and then only so you can go in and marvel at all the copies of Donnie Brasco they had. No, I want my video store to be more local, more friendly, less...blue. I live in a subdivision that will soon be part of someplace. Right now, we're blissfully noplace, just unincorporated Pima County. Soon we'll be either Tucson, or (God forbid!) Marana, or (God forbid, but to a lesser degree) the Village of Casas Adobes. I used to go to Zip's. It started at a small location on Orange Grove and Thornydale, which is now a Famous Sam's. Then it moved a few doors away, to the spot that is now the Marana Police Department substation. Finally, they moved to the Ina-Thornydale area. You know that line about if God were going to give the world an enema, Ina-Thornydale is where He'd stick the hose? I think he already did. You can see them ream marks. The authorities say it's a new bridge over the Cañada Del Oro, but I know better. Anyway, I went to Zip's for years and years. Customers would go in and give their five-digit card number to rent videos. Mine was #878. I had been there so long, they gave me two-for-one every time I rented something. More importantly, I got to know the people who worked there. It was more than just a business transaction. There was Sheila, the rodeo fan, and Dave, the raver who was on Jenny Jones one time with his justifiably appalled mother. There was Bruce, the frustrated musician, and Sheri, who used to give me Mel Gibson posters for my wife and regale me with tales of guys who would return X-rated videos with "foreign substances" on them. I felt like I was in a Billy Joel song. Unfortunately, that area is so nasty and so congested, they started losing business. It's like Yogi Berra used to say, "Nobody goes there any more; it's too crowded." Zip's went under a couple of months ago. I joined this new place on Ina and La Cholla. I even talked to a kid who's home from Stanford for the summer. Nice kid, but then he told me he was attending Stanford to major in English! Arrrggghhh!! The other day, I was going to the video store when this guy backs up his car and almost hits me. Naturally, I screamed at him in that colorful way I have, and it turned out to be Alan Kath, the traffic guy, just wanting to say hi.
Embarrassed, I told Alan I'd mention it in my column. I'll bet
you, like I, can't wait for football season to start.
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It's rough during the summer because everything on prime-time
is a rerun. I've seen it already. There's no real sports programming.
Well, there's 