Commercials past and present haunt me

"Young homeowners becoming their parents" is my favorite commercial playing on TV these days. The humor is very subtle. I don't know if it will sell very much car insurance, but I treasure every episode, even if I'm an old new homeowner becoming my parents and thanks to my parents. Yikes! The psychologist in the commercial (and I have heard he is a real psychologist who has written a book about this phenomenon) is an older man himself who is attempting to rid some younger adults of their deer-in-the-headlights nerdiness. They're in a group setting.

In one episode, one of his patients is in an elevator with a poster of the Eiffel Tower in the background. I've assumed that this represents the elevator in the iconic French monument taking them to its restaurant on top. "Three thousand pounds," says the young adult nerd facing the crowded elevator as if he is the conductor of an orchestra. "I'm glad I haven't had lunch yet. Get it?" No one laughs, and the avuncular psychologist shakes his head. "Tsk, tsk, let's have another try," he says as he puts his arm around the man's shoulder and shepherds him back into the elevator to redo the whole exercise.

You may be too young to remember this one, but when I was a young teenager in the 1960s, there was one commercial where an elderly mother tries to assist her daughter in washing dishes at the sink (no dishwashers then). Since the daughter views her mother as getting in the way, she hisses, "Mother, I'd rather do it myself!" I don't know if this was an advertisement for a nerve-soothing placebo or Joy dishwashing liquid, but I know I would never have hissed at my mother. She always came to the dinner table to scrape off the dishes after making sure at the beginning of the meal that you saw, appreciatively, the price stickers on the cellophane wrappers containing the steaks she planned to fry. "Where's the beef?” - Clara Peller. Remember her?

Besides, I would never want to do it myself. I only wash dishes to get the paint off my hands. Then there was another dish detergent commercial back then where the housewife holds up a shiny dish and utters, "I can even see myself!" meaning in its reflection. I used to know a grand lady in Wilmington who would eat dinner at The Whist Club there every night, and the staff would drive her home. Her apartment was on the top penthouse floor of the tallest apartment building in the city. Then the driver would have to wait while she looked under all the furniture to see if an intruder lurked. She once humorously showed us a photo of two bottles of dishwashing liquid and said as a joke, "There's my Pride and Joy!"

An old favorite was the Tidy Bowl Man, sailing in the top of the toilet bowl promoting the blue liquid cleaner promising 1,000 flushes that somehow disappeared after only a couple of rounds. Some local commercials are at the bottom of the bowl, so to speak. There's the fun-loving dentist who lolls about on an old brown sofa in his parking lot. I swear that sofa is a first cousin to Archie Bunker's old brown armchair! All this tomfoolery is happening outside in front of his office with his harem of female assistants dancing around and twirling umbrellas – even though there's no rain. Even worse, they move inside and display some false teeth contained within a shimmering jello mold! Get me the laughing gas, please!

Then there are the exterminators promising to rid your home of "Be-ed Bugs" or "Tormites." And there must be 50 contractors who want to install showers, but all of the new shower walls look grey and moldy. What about an aqua or pink or seafoam green shower? Does everything have to be grey in new decor these days?

I used to delight in the old auto insurance caveman commercials. Now there's the one with the Statue of Liberty in the background and another with an emu sidekick accompanying the "only pay for what you need" crazed insurance salesman. Jeff mutes almost all of them with the remote, but I welcome the torture of them and can almost recite each commercial word for word, just to prove that I don't need a jellyfish supplement for my brain to improve my memory!