Enotes

Today I found out something new and potentially very helpful. As often happens, lessons learned are done so the hard way. I used to be a charcoal guy when it came to outside grilling, but in 2008 I broke down and bought a gas cooker at Kmart. If nothing else, my lovely bride would have a much easier time when she had a hankering for tossing some steaks on the barbie before her husband arrived home. I have come to accept the lack of charcoal cooking in my life, but there was one thing about gas cooking that stymied me and until today, continued to do so. How the heck do you know when your propane tank is running on empty? It has happened more than once, where I've been midway through some steaks or chops or chicken and the flames grew perilously smaller and smaller until they finally went out altogether. And, more than once, yours truly has had to turn off the burners, disconnect the tank and hurry it down to the local U-Haul or Home Depot for a refill---not unlike a pit...

The wise-cracking maid/butler/servant in situation comedies has been a trope for nearly as long as folks first started flicking on televisions in the 1940s. So by the time Ann B. Davis showed up to help stay-at-home mom Carol Brady in 1969, she was hardly the first of the hired help in TV history to get some funny lines. But Davis, who played Alice in "The Brady Bunch" from 1969-74, will go down as one of the most memorable, if not the most memorable, live-in helpers of all time. We lost Davis yesterday at age 88, the victim of a fall in her home. Unlike some of her brethren on screen---before and after the Bradys---Davis' Alice wasn't snarky or mean-spirited and didn't try to steal the scene. Her lines were delivered with a dose of humility and with a good heart. Davis was more like Sebastian Cabot's Mr. French in "Family Affair"---subtle but omnipresent. You knew Alice was always around, even if she wasn't chewing the scenery and alwa...