Newlywed Game

As a child in the seventies, I really enjoyed watching the Newlywed Game. I was too young to really get the point of the show, which was to try to get newlyweds to reveal details about the more salacious aspects of their lives using suggestive and cheesy code words with questions like “when your husband goes to the supermarket, what item is he most likely to squeeze?” Sometimes the symbolism was cheesy in ways that were moronic or simply absurd, such as “what’s your husband’s favorite condiment?” The game show had a scripted doppelganger in the hit “Three’s Company,” which stretched innuendo to the outer limits of stupidity every week, and got a lot of mileage out of creating confusion over whether the symbol or the thing symbolized was the matter at hand. A clever contestant on the Newlywed Game (a rare bird indeed) could read the code and respond in code, keeping the joke alive. More often, the participant would take the question at face value and try to answer honestly, or jump over to the sexual act referenced and discuss that in some sort of new code, or be totally confused as to which way to go, and in any case, we would get the host Bob Eubanks’ deadpan reaction and, if it was funny enough, the audience would squeal.
As a ten-year-old, I saw something completely different. I saw the game as a competitive exercise in observational acuity, like the Encyclopedia Brown stories. I wondered how well I would do at it, say, if it were me and my sister up there. Does our toilet paper dispenser have a little spring in it or not? What is on top of the refrigerator right now? I imagined the couples prepping each other in the car on the way to the studio. Quick, honey, what color is mother’s car? What is my bra size? If you could trade any part of my body with that of another woman, which part would you choose and with whom?