Thursday, December 15, 2011

Paly*+ Play* (for Play* or Paly*)

Did the March 19, 1971, episode of TV's The Odd Couple ("What Does a Naked Librarian Say to You?") go beyond the pale in its allusions to public nudity and the stereotyping of our profession? Well, probably, yeah, but on viewing it over forty years later, it still speaks to me with its lighthearted references to both censorship and librarianship. Written by Peggy Elliott and Ed Scharlach, the story concerns Felix's new girlfriend, Madelyn (played by Marj Dusay), who tells him she's a librarian as a means of throwing him off the track to her real occupation, which at the moment is being the lead actress in a nude off-Broadway play. (Murray the cop remembers arresting her during a recent raid on the theater.) The title of the episode is a play on the 1970 film by Allen Funt called What Do You Say to a Naked Lady? Today's combination typo found 23 results in OhioLINK (half a dozen of which were false hits on proper names and words like palynological) and 431 in WorldCat. What do you say you check this one out in your own library's catalog?

(Photo of Marj Dusay, found on the Web.)

Carol Reid

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