The Greg Brady Project
Welcome to the official Barry Williams' blog
My friends call me Barry. From time to time I also hear the name Greg. Yeah, as in Greg Brady. The Brady Bunch represents a fun time in my life. But it’s only part of the story. There’s more to say and that’s what The Greg Brady Project is all about - a place to say it. So, I’ve invited some friends to join me and share their perspectives on the Brady’s, the 70’s and just about everything else. Now, I’m inviting you…
One of the funniest stories from Barry’s Growing Up Brady concerns his adolescent crush on Florence Henderson. The tale prompted a lot of publicity due to its apparently taboo nature. Taboo, that is, until we understand that: 1) their celebrated “date” was as innocent as a Brady Bunch episode, and 2) Florence Henderson is not Barry’s mother, fer cryin’ out loud! Barry himself has tried to help us understand this, writing the following: “Most everybody thinks of Florence Henderson as the quintessential television mom, and that vaguely oedipal association seems to have successfully inhibited the American public from ever realizing what a totally white-hot babe she really is.” Sorry, Barry, but I’m not buying it. She might not be your mom, but the rest of us can’t shake the conviction that she is our mom.
Recent surveys support this notion. As Eric Greenberg reported, Carol Brady came in third place (behind Clair Huxtable and Marion Cunningham) when TiVo asked viewers to identify their favorite TV mom. A recent Harris Poll found similar results after asking people to name the TV mom they wished had raised them. Once again, our Lovely Lady took third place (this time following June Cleaver and Clair Huxtable). Interestingly, when the Harris folks broke down their data into demographic chunks, they found that Carol Brady was the number one TV mom among two subgroups: Gen Xers and Republicans. Among conservatives aged 32 to 43, presumably, that preference must be through the roof.
The Cincinnati Kids. Hawaii Bound. Pass the Tabu. The Tiki Caves. The Subject Was Noses. You might know the five aforementioned Brady Bunch episodes by the key words King’s Island, Hawaii, and Oh, my nose! Time and again as I interviewed fans who were gathered for a recent personal appearance by Barry, these shows were cited as personal favorites. Although I would agree that each of them is a classic, none of them appears in my Brady Six.
The Brady Six is your personal top-six list of favorite Bunch episodes. There is only one criterion for inclusion: each episode you choose should be one that you never tire of watching, the sort of show that causes you to be delighted as the opening credits conclude and you realize that one of the best Brady Bunchesever is on the air. While compiling my own list, I noticed that five of my six favorites include Greg in a prominent role. I swear on my tiki idol that my list would still be the same if I were blogging for the Cindy Brady Project! Here, then, presented in the order in which they originally aired, is my Brady Six.
The ubiquitous yellow smiley face of the 70’s has never faded away, especially at Wal-Mart, where its contemporary cousin accompanies every in-store “price rollback.” But for the people of Canton, Ohio, there were quite a few more smiles in the aisles than usual on a recent Sunday thanks to the arrival of another 70’s icon: Barry Williams. There he was, sitting at a table near the front registers, and woe to the casual shopper who merely wanted to take the shortest path from greeting cards to the pharmacy. That route was occupied by a steady presence of fans and admirers. They snapped up autographed merchandise, captured photos, and mostly, they smiled.
Local resident Marcia Miller provided the reason why. “I’ve just always been a Brady Bunch fan,” she enthused, “because it was just one of those shows that made you feel real good.” With a prized CD of Meet the Brady Bunch in hand, she had arrived two hours prior to the scheduled start of Barry’s autograph session. Marcia described herself as a fan “ever since the show came on, 1968 to 1974,” and like others in attendance, she singled out the King’s Island show, Hawaii episodes, and Marcia Brady’s disastrous encounter with a football as memorable highlights.
Celebrity is a funny thing. We enjoy a famous person’s work and occasionally catch a glimpse of what is purported to be the star’s personal life. After consuming magazine interviews, chat show appearances, and the standard fare from an official website, we are left to fill in the holes by inferring what our favorite celebrities are really like. With no evidence to the contrary, we are likely to project our own preferences and values upon our heroes. The more we do this, the greater the disillusionment when we discover - horror of horrors!- that the personality we’ve admired for so long thinks very differently than we do. The naivete of a fan, if you will.
I used to be a big Woody Allen fan. The outrageous non-sequiturs of his short stories and the surreal silliness of early films like Take the Money and Run and Sleeper struck a major chord during my adolescence. His intellectual persona gave me hope on the bleakest high school days that there was intelligent life out there, if not in my study hall. Even his experimentation with the more serious themes of Interiors and Stardust Memories intrigued me, and I admired the integrity of a talented director who demanded and received creative control of his films.
By early adulthood, I was an entrenched Woodyphile.
“Wonder what I could trade for a groovy Richard Nixon rookie card?”
With baseball season now underway and welcome signs of spring appearing each day, I recently indulged an old compulsion for the first time in nearly thirty years: I bought some baseball cards. I chose Topps, the brand of my youth and the name that adorned countless sports cards left behind by my older brothers. Noting the price of $2 for a pack of 10, I sighed at the fact that baseball cards are about as affordable a luxury for me now as they were when I scrambled for spare change as a child. Nevertheless, with the responsibilities of adulthood comes the freedom of frittering away our finances as we see fit, and so it was that I brought home a whopping 60 cards from the 2008 Series.
Among the stack were a couple coveted Cleveland Indians (Kenny Lofton - oh, he’s gone already - and Victor Martinez) and what I perceived to be a rather repugnant postseason card of Manny Ramirez “being Manny” (my apologies to Eric Greenberg). There were extraneous cards like checklists and promotions, and then…and then…What is this? Ron Paul?!
That’s right, Ron Paul, the U.S. Congressional Representative from Texas and candidate for Commander in Chief, one of a dozen presidential hopefuls to have their mugs grace the Campaign 2008 subset. I’m not kidding!
Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down…
If I directed you to click here with the promise that doing so would bring you, say, compromising footage of an attractive celebrity, or maybe a hilarious clip of a monkey jockey winning a potbellied pig race, or even a music video featuring vintage footage of Gerald Ford tarmac missteps, would you follow the link? Go ahead, ponder your options. Take your time, I’ll wait right here. Feel free to click at any time.
Did you swallow the bait? Congratulations! You’ve been Rickrolled! Now that you are officially part of an Internet phenomenon that has been growing steadily over the past year, hurry up and Rickroll your uninitiated friends before the trend catches their ears and eyes. It’s easy to do: simply post a hyperlink with a tantalizing title, but use the URL for a YouTube clip of Rick Astley’s 1988 pop smash Never Gonna Give You Up. Then sit back and smile at the thought of your loved ones sitting entranced before Astley’s signature moves (or move, as the case may be).
Kevin Bacon. He has a Barry Williams Number of 2.
If you haven’t yet heard of the established pop culture phenomenon known as The Kevin Bacon Game, chances are one of your friends (or one of their friends) has. In a silly twist to the sociological theory of “six degrees of separation,” participants attempt to link various actors to Kevin Bacon through a chain of no more than five movie collaborations. The closer the connection, the lower one’s Kevin Bacon Number. Thus, Barry Williams (who appeared in Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star with Tom Arnold, who in turn shared the screen with the Baconator himself in We Married Margo) has a Kevin Bacon Number of 2. Or shall we say that Kevin Bacon has a Barry Williams Number of 2?
Thanks to a rather addictive Internet Movie Database search engine at The Oracle of Bacon, one can input the names of any two actors and instantly discover the degree of their collaborative separation. It may not surprise you that within the insular world of movie acting, most thespians can be connected to Barry in fewer than five links. In fact, when it comes to playing the Barry Williams Game, the most challenging objective may be to find an actor who has a BW Number of 4 or higher.
Welcome to the glorious debut (and quite possibly the inauspicious finale) of Brady Book Review, in which the intrepid staff of the GBP flexes its intellectual muscle (say, where did we put that intellectual muscle?) in unbiased critique of Brady literature. Today’s installment concerns William Johnston’s 1969 effort entitled The Brady Bunch, a Lancer Book publication available wherever musty, out-of-print books are sold. It was the first of eight Brady novelizations (five of which would be penned by Johnston) that crowded the paperback racks during the original run of the TV series.
If a survey of the genre is any indication, William Johnston was a prolific author of TV tie-ins, having already written books based on series such as Get Smart and The Flying Nun before the Brady Era (or BBE) and moving on to create Happy Days and Welcome Back, Kotter novels afterward (or AFJ - After Fake Jan). Biographical information on Johnston is elusive, however, leading me to suspect that he might have been the Alan Smithee of TV novelizations. Or at least the Franklin W. Dixon. In any case, real or not, William Johnston knew how to crank ‘em out.
“Gee, I wish I had taken it easy on the clam chowder…”
We laugh now at the modest conventions that censored questionable content in television’s first decades. CBS avoided tweaking delicate 50’s sensibilities by seeing to it that Lucy Ricardo was euphemistically “expecting” Little Ricky instead of being “pregnant.” The same network was still skittish in the 60’s, forbidding Rob and Laura Petrie to sleep in the same bed. And although ABC allowed Sherwood Schwartz to shatter the matrimonial bed taboo, the sight of a Brady bathroom toilet was apparently considered to be too progressive. It was up to CBS to move forward on the potty front by permitting Archie Bunker to reinvent the punchline as an offscreen flush.
Then things started to loosen up (literally), with the world of cinema customarily leading the way. A common concern among the squeamish is emetophobia, or the fear of vomit. This was exploited to horrific effect in 1973’s The Exorcist, in which Linda Blair kept the split pea soup flowing. 1983 saw Monty Python playing the phobia for laughs in a notoriously over-the-top restaurant scene from The Meaning of Life. By 1986, even a mainstream feature like Rob Reiner’s Stand By Me had its share of projectile vomiting, as outrageously depicted in a boy’s tale of a fateful pie eating contest. Television would eventually catch up with the phenomenon, most notably in the format of reality television. From Fear Factor to The Amazing Race, inducing vomiting through the consumption of barely edible entrails and insects has become something of an American tradition.
‘All You Can Hear?’
If there is an audiophile to be found in our family of four, it would be me. I’m the one who transferred a habit of precise LP and cassette tape organization to a treasured collection of compact discs, filing each jewel case by artist and then by album release date. If you’re wondering where all the RCA cables and Y-adapters went, I’m your go-to guy. And who’s the one responsible for maintaining the electronic spaghetti that makes our component-filled armoire an entertainment center? Me again. So if anyone in our household should own an iPod, it’s yours truly. Yet, I’m the only one who does not. Yes, my wife and daughters amble about with smiles on their faces and buds in their ears while I merely contemplate my digital future. In fact, I had all but made up my mind to obtain the coveted 160GB Classic by this summer, when a stunning piece of news changed my tune.
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Recent Comments
- Renee on August 26, 2008 said:
One on the list matches what I am looking forward to…House. Love that show, love... - Amy on August 25, 2008 said:
Thanks for the shout out! - Brandon Hemmy on August 14, 2008 said:
Barry Williams, please do not tell Elliot to break a leg, thanks!
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