Classic TV

Remembering Sherwood Schwartz: An homage to Gilligan and The Brady's

The cast of "Gilligan's Island"
The into to "The Brady Bunch"

Sherwood Schwartz passed away this week. For those of you outside the baby boomer bubble, Schwartz was the person who produced the iconic '60s television shows The Brady Bunch and Gilligan’s Island.

I heard an interview Schwartz did with NPR from a few years ago. In it, he told the story of how television executives were concerned viewers would not get how the castaways ended up on Gilligan’s Island (I always wondered why some of the passengers packed three months of wardrobe for a 3-hour tour, but I digress).

His solution was to tell the story in the show’s opening song. Harry Belafonte and calypso were very popular in those days and Schwartz wrote a very memorable theme song for Gilligan’s Island that I can still sing word for word to this day.

I never miss Modern Family, but I couldn’t hum the music they use to open the show.

The interview got me thinking about today’s televisions shows. Were their opening theme songs as memorable? I never miss Modern Family, but I couldn’t hum the music they use to open the show. Does the C.S.I. franchise, which uses songs from The Who, and Hawaii 5-O, which kept its roots by using the original theme, count?

So what changed? Are TV themes less relevant today, or have I turned into an old curmudgeon who waxes nostalgically starting sentences with “Back in my day…” and “Kids today have no sense of…”?

My guess is a little of both. There are fewer “shared experiences” today. One person is in the living room watching American Pickers while another is in the bedroom watching Dancing with the Stars. We didn’t have that many choices (or number of TV’s) back then, so we watched shows like Gilligan’s Island together.

Still, I wouldn’t mind sitting on the couch with my Ovaltine and humming along with a TV show telling anyone who will listen to my "back in the day" stories one more time.

How many words in The Brady Bunch theme song do you know? Sing along......

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More Foraging

Free 'food forest' in East Austin expands with thousands of new plants

Angelina Alanis at Festival Beach Food Forest

Photo courtesy of KVUE

Angelina Alanis gives a tour of the garden, which is open to anyone.

In East Austin, there is an edible forest garden called Festival Beach Food Forest where anyone can walk around and harvest free produce, nuts, medicinal plant leaves and herbs. And over the summer, it grew to several times its size.

The forest has fig trees, peach trees, grapevines, asparagus and more that's not in season right now. You can grab passionfruit and plants like yaupon holly, with leaves that can make a caffeinated tea, rosemary and lemon balm.

"[Lemon balm] is part of the mint family," said Angelina Alanis, communication and partnership coordinator for Festival Beach Food Forest. "It has a lemony taste but it's good for a nervous stomach. I'm prone to anxiety so I always grab a hunk."

The food forest is located right next to Interstate 35 and Lady Bird Lake on 29 Waller St., near a part of town that's known for being a food desert, lacking grocery stores.

"There's as much as a 20-year life expectancy difference between parts of East and West Austin, and a lot of that comes down to food access, health care access and also access to nature."

Alanis said for the past nine years, the volunteer-based grassroots project been helping with the issue and just recently expanded in the summer from two-thirds of an acre of city parkland to over 3.5 acres.

"We're going to have hundreds of new trees," said Alanis. "We've already planted 150 new trees in the area and then thousands of plants on the ground."

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They also plan to add a community kitchen and a pavilion to do things like cooking classes or informational sessions.

Read the full story at KVUE.com.

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