My Prairie Cookbook (22 page)

19.
In the season five episode “The Odyssey,” a vagrant tries to throw Albert off the train and ends up being pushed out by Laura. But the dummy that is actually tossed from the train can be seen sitting upright in the grass as the stuntman rolls down the hill from the spot the dummy landed.

My take:
I could do a whole riff on dummies and stuntmen and actors, but I'm just going to leave this one alone.

20.
In the episode from season one called “Country Girls,” Charles and Caroline don't bother to take the girls to their first day of school after settling down in Walnut Grove. Yet in “Here Come the Brides,” Luke has his father take him to school on his very first day.

My take:
That's because Laura and Mary were very brave and Luke was a big scaredy-cat! And who is Luke anyway? Oh yeah, one of those made-up characters that pops in and then disappears. If I were Luke, I'd be scared too!

21.
Weren't these folks some of the cleanest dirt farmers you ever saw?

My take:
Now really, would anyone have watched if we were all dirty and disheveled? Also, we all would have had really rotten teeth—not pretty!

22.
In the season eight episode “Wave of the Future,” Mrs. Oleson turns Nellie's restaurant into a “Mrs. Sullivan's.” In order to get her out of a bad franchise contract, Charles and Nels open a competing restaurant, which puts her out of business. At the end, Colonel Sanders shows up to offer a deal to Harriet to start a chicken-only franchise, but Colonel Sanders wasn't even
born
yet in the 1880s. (And Kentucky Fried Chicken wasn't founded until 1952.)

My take:
I'm telling you, dramatic license is a very powerful thing. It can cause people to be born nearly a century early! When I got this script I thought, “Huh? Colonel Sanders lived in the 1800s?” Looking back, I see that the Colonel Sanders appearance is ridiculous, but that's what makes it kind of fun too.

Okay, I am going to end this section by addressing one of the most frequently asked questions and one of the most frequently pointed-out bloopers. In the season six episode “May We Make Them Proud,” Albert accidentally sets the blind school on fire, and Mrs. Garvey and Mary's baby are trapped inside. People ask
all the time, “Why did Mrs. Garvey use Mary's baby as a battering ram against the window to try to escape the fire?”

Here's my final word on the subject: There was no Mrs. Garvey. Mary Ingalls never married, so there could never have been a baby. There was no Albert to start the fire in the blind school that didn't really exist. (Did you ever notice how much the school for the blind looks like the Keller house in the version of
The Miracle Worker
I did in 1980?)

It was all made up! All of it, from whole cloth.

All things being equal, let's assume that it all was real and it all happened. If you look really, really closely, you can see that Mrs. Garvey is using her own arm and elbow to try to break the glass. Yes, it's the arm that's holding the baby, but it's still her own arm. It's a really scary moment—acted perfectly, in my opinion. It never even occurred to me that she had used the baby to break the window. Not until all of you started asking me about it!

So, the bottom line is NO. Made-up Mrs. Garvey did not use Mary's made-up baby as a battering ram to break the window of the burning made-up school for the blind!