there's a little hotel called the shady rest.....

Ever get a song in your head and can't get rid of it? For some odd reason, the theme song from "Petticoat Junction" has been going round and round inside my skull for the past 3-4 days now, and it won't go away. Very irritating.

I remember watching "Petticoat Junction" in the afternoons after school in my late-elementary/early-junior-high years. That, and "Gilligan's Island", "Gomer Pyle", "Andy Griffith", and many others. "PJ" wasn't a small-screen miracle, just waiting to be handed an Emmy. In fact, the shows almost always seemed to be pretty much the same. Occaisionally characters from other shows would appear; characters from "Green Acres" and "The Beverly Hillbillies". I guess the thing that intrigued me so much was the fact that in the opening credits, three teenaged girls apparently bathed or swam in the water tower. But remember, I was somewhere between 9 and 12, and seeing something like that just naturally caused me to be interested. Now I think back on it and wonder why these three girls were allowed to swim and/or bathe in the water tower. Was this water used only to irrigate the crops? If so, that's fine. But if they swam in the water tower, and the local residents then drank the water, that's another thing entirely. (This would probably explain why Uncle Joe was "a-movin' kinda slow at the junction"; he was drinking polluted water.) However, at 10 years of age, a boy doesn't tend to think much deeper than what he sees, and this boy simply saw three wonderfully facinating young ladies swimming and/or bathing in a water tower.

Meanwhile, I'm still hearing the theme song to "Petticoat Junction". If anyone has a cure for such a malady, I would deeply appreciate it if you'd send the suggestion my way.