In a work conversation a several months ago, I used the term “Popeye Moments” to describe feelings of exasperation, where screaming Popeye the Sailor’s catchphrase “That’s all I can stands and I can’t stands no more,” seems like an appropriate next step.
Often this is a precursor to a vigorous, occasionally uncharacteristic, response to a stressful situation. Fittingly, one of my earliest Popeye moments that I can recall was directed at a member of Popeye’s family.
Actually it was an actor who portrayed a live-action version of Poopdeck Pappy (Popeye’s dad in the cartoons) on a Norfolk, Virginia-area television station.
We left that area when I was quite young, though Poopdeck Pappy was one of two children’s show hosts that I remember from that market. I didn’t mind Pappy, though the other host I recall was a man in clown makeup (oh for fuck’s sake!), I used to run from the TV when “Bungles” came on.
When I was not yet 3 years old, and seated in a shopping cart in a store–the Commissary (grocery), or the Exchange (department store)–on the naval base in Norfolk, when a man with a white beard, clad in dress blues, approached my father with a microphone and asked him a few questions.
I recognized that it was Pappy from (black and white) TV, but seeing him in three dimensions, and in color, were a bit unsettling for my young mind.
I stared at him as he and my father chatted for a few moments, then he asked me: “Hey son, how’d ya like to meet Bungles?” and he tipped the microphone toward my tiny mouth.
And then I saw him, that gawdamn TV clown, and he was approaching me, doing his trademark, pinky finger-only wave…it might as well have been Pennywise, from “It” crawling from the sewer with a knife. My thoughts were much like Tracy Morgan’s:
I’d had all I could stands and I couldn’t stands no more.
My mouth–tiny no longer– screamed (“bloody murder” according to family lore) into the microphone. I take it Bungles was accustomed to this reaction, because he did a smooth and prompt about-face and (I assume) went off to terrorize another toddler somewhere in the television market.
My father matter-of-factly informed Pappy “He’s scared of clowns.”
Though I am fairly confident that Pappy had already reached that conclusion.