I’m Back! Here’s Gidget!
Wow! Almost 2 years since I’ve updated Small Screen Pop! My apologies, although I do have a good excuse. I’ve had three books published in that time! For my return to SSP, I’ve chosen a retro series I’ve been watching on Prime, Gidget (1965-1966), as my first topic. I’m not sure how much of Gidget I watched when it originally aired. Prior to viewing it recently, I distinctly remembered only one episode, “Now There’s a Face”, in which Daniel J.Travanti made a guest appearance as a photographer whom Gidget (Sally Field) falls for, hard. The episode clearly had an impact on me as a tween, because I remembered dialogue and scenes from it quite accurately almost 60 years later. As to the rest of the show, it was pretty much a blur. The character of Gidget began life not with TV’s Sally or film’s Sandra Dee, but in the 1957 novel Gidget, the Little Girl with Big Ideas. Its author, Frederick Kohner, based the character on his teenage daughter Kathy and her experiences surfing in Malibu. ...
