The Sadness Of Ida Perkins!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

                       Almost as heartbreaking as "Cold Case's" "A Dollar, A Dream," was "The Golden Girls " episode "Brother, Can You Spare That Jacket?" which aired on December 3, 1988.

                      It centered around a lost jacket and a lottery ticket, but the heartrending part was when all go to the Mission Street Shelter, for the homeless, and Sophia runs into her old friend, Ida Perkins, played brilliantly, by Herta Ware.  She has lost everything and is now homeless.  Where were the nursing home laws, back then?

                      Ida brings home the fear we all have of aging and being alone.  This episode was wonderfully done, but a downer on a par with 1937's "Make Way For Tomorrow," which I cannot sit through again.  Directed by Leo McCarey, (who won the Best Director Oscar that year, for "The Awful Truth," but should have won for this) it concerns an elderly couple, played by Victor Moore and Beaulah Bondi, whose children cannot be bothered keeping them together.  They get taken care of, but by one child on the East Coast, the other on the West Coast. The best moment is their last; Moore tells off his kids over the phone, and they go to the hotel where they had had their honeymoon, fifty years ago.  Change is inevitable; but when the staff find out their story, their last evening is on the house, culminating with the two dancing as the band plays "Let Me Call You Sweetheart."  It breaks the heart.

                    But not as much as the train farewell scene, where he goes off to California, and she continues on her way back to Manhattan, both knowing they will never see each other again.

                     For those who have never seen this film, I defy you to watch it, dry eyed.

                     Herta Ware's brief, but impacting, performance as Ida aroused the same feelings in me.  It is an episode worth watching, but not too often.

                       And both the film and the episode do not offer an easy answer.