When Carolyn was cajoling her mother to hire Mrs. Johnson a few months ago, she said Mrs. Johnson was a great cook. Today, however, she didn't argue when Roger complained about Mrs. Johnson's cooking. So I think I was right before (somewhere or other): Carolyn occasionally visited Bill Malloy's house when she was a child, and Mrs. Johnson gave her snacks that she liked because it was different from home. Then when Mrs. Johnson came to work at Collinwood, Carolyn ate Mrs. Johnson's cooking three times a day and changed her tune pretty fast.
We got our first signs today of a memory problem with Jonathan Frid: some difficulty in the Old House and two bloopers in the study with Roger - "eternal health" corrected by Louis Edmonds to "eternal life" (Edmonds was nimble at correcting other people's bloopers as well as his own) and a comment about Joshua Collins's jewelry rather than Barnabas's, which Edmonds didn't correct.
I figure James Hall's bloopers were part of what got him fired, but Dark Shadows management can't do that so easily with Frid: not with the portrait of Barnabas hanging in the foyer. And I imagine they had already seen enough of Frid's acting so they would have been very reluctant to fire him anyway. So the writers learned to write lines that were easier to remember than what he got today. That laundry list in the Old House - foundation, clamshell and horsehair in the walls, Dutch something-or-other (would that be the Delft tile fireplace that I love so much?), Italian and Spanish workmen - it must have been torture for Frid to memorize.
Barnabas adores the great house of Collinwood and the Old House, but he badmouths the Collins family of the era of the supposed "first" Barnabas Collins. If I were Vicky, I'd be asking him, "Wasn't anybody nice back then?"
When I listened today to Barnabas's story of the father and son arguing on the Old House staircase, I had a different feeling from what I had the last time I watched this episode. In the intervening years I have started writing down the history of my own family, and reading whatever I can find to add to it. (Blessings be upon Google for scanning tomes and musty old magazines that nobody would ever want to read, but which contain precious stray nuggets of information.) So I can't help imagining Barnabas as if his story were true: as if he were indeed the last member of the English branch of the Collins family, with the stories he read in journals and letters, and the stories his father and grandfather told him. And I think: "It's all in his head. And when he dies it will be gone." So much is lost each time the last of a generation dies.
