Diff'rent Strokes for Diff'rent Blokes

Horatio writes: A lot of you have written to us about that great swordsman, Owen Wilson. Tears of a Clown. We will end the week topically with a similar cautionary tale from Jim Hawkins of Long Island:

Do you guys do obituary tributes? I would like to throw one into the hopper. The vivid fantasy life I now possess was somewhat threadbare at the age of eleven. The only trick I had in the bag was to lock myself in the toilet and focus like a fiend on my idea of the perfect woman. And the only one that came to mind was Ms. Dana Plato, Kimberley Drummond on the magnificent Diff'rent Strokes. Perky, sophisticated, caring, and as pert as a guard outside of Buckingham Palace, Dana Plato was wife material for hundreds of thousands of eleven and twelve year old boys across the nation. What a keeper. And progressive too. Whatever statements on race ABC may be cooking up with their Cavemen sitcom will be weak retreads of the heavy symbolism of the Drummond home, the sitcom equivalent of the Black Power Salute at the 1968 Olympic Games. Dana Plato was our generation's Rosa Parks. And what could be more sexy than that?

In my mind I was transported from our bathroom behind locked door straight to the Drummond house, only to find it unusually quiet. Maybe Mr. Drummond had taken the boys out to the park to play ball. No one to be found in the living room. Heading upstairs, I would find Dana on her own. Lying on her bed, reading some Judy Blum, looking sassy in her stonewash jeans and some Ton Sur Ton, with Keds perfectly white. She would beckon me over to sit with her on the bed. What happened then is between me and Dana. I am not one to kiss and tell. Truth is, I had no experience to draw on so I did not have a lot left in the hopper to imagine -- I would think about some grinding, some tongue rubbing. And if this did not do the job, would quickly switch scenarios to the Drummond house being totally empty which gave me the perfect opportunity to open Dana/Kimberley's knicker drawer and have a panty huffing fiesta.

Dana Plato's demise is well documented. She did a Playboy spread in the late '80's which I think a lot of guys in college owned multiple copies of. But it just made me sad remembering what we had and what we had lost. To those who feel the same as me, here is a treat for a (real) quick one.