I’m rewatching The Mary Tyler Moore Show. This is the third time since, (not to brag but…), I earned my Nick at Nite Mary Tyler Moore Show merit badge in the early 1990s.

It looks like this:

And, swear to God, I keep it with my nice jewelry.

Anyway, this week I watched Season 3, Episode 19 (“Romeo and Mary”) and it contained some poems!

In this episode, Mary Richards attempts to dodge the unwanted love bombs of Warren Sturges, played perfectly boorishly by the great Stuart Margolin.

You may know Margolin from playing Angel Martin, to equal perfection, on another show I love, The Rockford Files, starring the handsome James Garner.

Mary is having a hard time deflecting the daily wooing efforts of Warren Sturges (he actually handcuffs her to him one morning so she’ll have to go to lunch with him) and her three male co-workers at WJM, Lou Grant, Murray Slaughter and Ted Baxter, stand around talking about how hard it is to convince a girl to go out with you and what efforts they found that did or did not work. Lou says it took writing a poem to get his wife, Edie, to go out with him in the beginning.

Murray and Ted are surprised that Lou ever wrote a poem. Lou tells them that poetry writing was “his job. I was a poet, a professional poet. Sixty-five bucks a week on the Detroit Free Press. It was my first job. I wrote ‘Thoughts and Rhyme’ by Lois Hammersmith.”

Lou was a ghost-writer behind the scenes. Lois Hammersmith started the column, he says, and she “had kind of a following.”

Murray and Ted ask for a sample poem and Lou recites the one he wrote for Edie, complete with his poet-reading face on.

Autumn Wood

The light from the ever-waning moon
illuminates less and less
and to the autumn wood
doth bring on an enchanted glow
of loveliness. I walk. I look.
And in this dream you alone, my love,
are seen.

Ted gives it a quick and immediate raspberry. “It doesn’t even rhyme!”

Murray says, “I think it was very moving, Lou. I didn’t know you had it in you.”

Ted is then worried about his too-quick assessment. “Maybe it does rhyme. Maybe I didn’t hear it right.”

Ted is then reminded of a poem “he once made up.” He thinks about it to remember and then starts to recite “There was once a hermit named Dave / Spent 40 years in a cave.”

Murray interrupts disparagingly, “So you’re the one who made that up.”

Murray is referencing the dirty limericks that start with “There once was a man named Dave,” the most common variation I’ve been able to find was this:

“There was once a man named Dave
Who kept an old whore in a cave.
She was ugly as shit, And minus one tit (or alternatively, “You must admit, He’s quite a shit”) 
But think of the money he saved.”

Watch the episode in full: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyBebDdmBXo

Episode #18 of the season, “The Georgette Story,” is also a very sweet one. There’s been some discussion around whether I feel more like a Mary, a Rhoda or a character named Sparkle from season one. But I feel there’s a little bit of Georgette in there on some days, too.

Here’s some meditative music to listen to while contemplating the question.