Queen for a Day – Lee Duigon

The Cisco Kid - The Carriage and Western Art Museum

Duncan Rinaldo (right) and Leo Carillo (left) in The Cisco Kid

I’m trying to kick my memory back into gear. A spotty memory, part of “chemo brain,” is a standard leftover from chemotherapy and radiation. In my own case it’s taking a lot of time to fade away.

Yesterday I was exercising my memory by asking it what TV shows I used to watch with Grandma. I spent a lot of time at her house. I was too young to realize this, but television had only come along later in her life and still seemed a touch miraculous.

When the weather was nice, of course, we were out on the porch–me with my pick-up sticks, Grandma with her Reader’s Digest. When it wasn’t, we resorted to the living room and turned on the TV.

Here are three shows I remember from back them.

*The Cisco Kid (1950-1956). I loved this show! So exotic! Certainly nothing like it in New Jersey. Grandma always tried to please her grandchildren, so we watched The Cisco Kid. I’m not convinced she thought it was so great.

*Arthur Godfrey. Great Caesar’s ghost! Could this guy put you to sleep, or what? Grandma never missed it. He played a big part in early TV history, on air 1949-1959. And it was live TV: sometimes he liked to just throw away the script and wing it.

*Queen for a Day (1956-64). This started out as a radio show in 1949–and who can forget it? Old ladies competed with each other, and whoever could trot out the most abject misery got to be “Queen for a Day.” Really, this was just awful! Grandma lapped it up like chowder.

I want to get my brain back on line. Somewhere out there is Ozias, Prince Enthroned–but where is it? I’ve got the longhand copy, but the finished manuscript is still hiding in the blahsmos.

Come on, memory! No more lolly-gagging!

My Grandma had what I could only think of as a very strange taste in television. I ought to know: I spent many an afternoon at her house, just the two of us.

She loved those old soap operas with the creepy organ music, most of whose plots seemed to consist of old ladies getting a raw deal; but the show that really gave me the willies was Queen for a Day. As I remember the format, the poor old trout with the most baroque sob story got to be Queen for a Day and received a lot of rather cheap prizes. This pioneering effort in reality TV ran on NBC from 1956-1960, and on ABC till 1964. It has since been equaled many times for sheer horribleness, but never surpassed.

For entertainment and edification value, it ranked somewhere between a deep paper cut and stepping in what your neighbor’s Great Dane left on your lawn when he got loose.

Oops! Wrong video! Somehow I got the 28-minute sample instead of the 2-minute one. Please don’t feel obliged to sit through the whole thing. Two or three minutes is more than enough.