Mom slept late this morning, then woke up in a lot of pain. I had to ply her with medication and let her go back to sleep before it abated. I keep wondering about the conflicting advice: she should take the pain medication regularly, but I shouldn't wake her up if she is sleeping. But if I let her sleep, she does wake up in pain. It seems to be a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation.

Keeping myself occupied dubbing off between running up and down stairs helping Mom and dusting: did put Stars and Stripes at the end of the disc mentioned yesterday, so I have an entire DVD of Hollywood in wartime. I also popped the 1957 film Escapade in Japan on the end of the disc with Good Morning, Miss Dove. Two nice sentimental fifties color films. Japan features Jon Provost as the son of an American diplomat and his wife (Cameron Mitchell and Teresa Wright) who is lost in a plane crash off the coast of Japan where Dad is assigned. He's rescued by a Japanese fishing family and taken on an odyssey by the son, who sees police searching for his new American buddy and figures he's in trouble. You see a great deal of 1950s Japan in a film that was made to heal still-sore relations after World War II.

Had some space at the end and popped on three totally unrelated, but time-fitting Saturday Night Live skits from the Joe Piscopo/Eddie Murphy era, including Murphy's hysterical "Galactic Prophylactic" ad.

Now I've started on a St. Elsewhere disk. I have about five episodes and a couple of shorts from Evening Magazine. I watched both "sister" series, Elsewhere and Hill Street Blues from beginning to end, and enjoyed them both, but leaned a little bit toward the hospital series in fondness. While both had offbeat characters, St. Elsewhere was always the one that was a bit off the wall, with in-jokes and references to other television shows and movies. It was always a bit surreal anyway. Judging by the comments I see online, I think I was one of a dozen people who actually liked the infamous last episode.*

[* In St. Elsewhere, the two hospital administrators were Dr. Westphall, played by Ed Flanders, and Dr. Auschlander, played by Norman Lloyd. One of the numerous series subplots involved Westphall's autistic son Tommy, played by Chad Allen. In the final minutes of the final episode of SE, the hospital dissolves into a flurry of snowflakes and the scene pans back to a snowglobe with the St. Eligius building (really a Boston apartment house) inside. Flanders, dressed in construction clothes, comes home to a small working-class apartment where his father (played by Lloyd) is taking care of his autistic son (played by Allen). The snowglobe belongs to the boy, who, his father says with puzzlement, seems to be able to stare into it for hours. The implication is that the entire series was a fantasy dream of an autistic child.]

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 3:39:00 PM

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