User Reviews

We begin with Ann in a supermarket buying two paper bags full of groceries—for which she was charged a whopping $4.50, when the clerk spots a young boy attempting to steal a candy bar. The boy is black, which is necessary to mention because it is the key to this entire plot. He tells the clerk that his mother is in the store and was going to buy it for him. The clerk smirks, challenging the boy to point out his mother. He looks around and fingers, the one and only…That Girl! When the clerk tries to get the boy to admit he is lying, Ann becomes indignant with the clerk, asking, "How do you know I'm not his mother?" From the boy's rather dark skin tone, it would seem at best, Ann could be his adopted mother, but, hey, the clerk could have responded that he saw her come in all by herself, that she looked shocked when she was identified as his mother, or that she was about to pay for the groceries without including the candy bar when the boy was caught stealing it. The laughs are supposed to come from the racially-related lines in this episode.

Ann tries to get the boy, David, to tell where he comes from. She keeps reassuring him that it's O.K. to be poor or to live in a poor apartment. The boy plays along, after first telling her that he lives on Park Avenue, and the two spend much of the show going around tenements looking for his father, a J.J. Johnson. David tries to tell her everything he thinks she expects to hear, including the notion that he lives with rats, has 13 brothers and sisters and that his father beats him regularly. She, of course, believes all of his lies even though to us viewers it seems obvious that he is lying. Ann is quite surprised to learn at the end that the boy's father is wealthy, they live on Park Avenue, and there are no siblings.

Knowing real black people when I was a kid, I remember thinking this was a dumb episode when I saw it then. The way Ann just expected him to be terribly poor and have a father that beats him, and 13 siblings, just reeks of stereotypes. After viewing this again in 2015, this episode sinks even lower.

In Ann Marie's New York City of the late 1960s, there are incredibly few black people. This rare episode featuring one, seems to do more to perpetrate stereotypes than to try to get us away from them. Why did the shopkeeper smirk when the boy said his mother was in the store? If his store had, say, a few black female shoppers, he would have had no reason to be so sure he was lying. Now he was lying, but the clerk seemed sure because he knew his store had no reasonable candidates that might have been his mother. It would appear blacks didn't shop in his store.

Let's look at David himself. Educated kid, but quicker than the Beaver to tell whatever lies he could to anyone around him, particularly to this stranger who befriended him. And, of course, he knew all the stereotypes associated with blacks so he knew what lies to tell Ann. There was even a scene with a black apartment manager where the woman seemed totally unconcerned about this boy who seemed lost from his home when Ann was trying to help him. She too accepted the 13 sibling story without question. The 2 I rated this might be generous.