Where Have All the Tourists Gone? Everybody's Askin'

Despite my previous post about how Salem gets crazy busy in October, this season is off to a slow start. There are tourists in town, but it doesn't seem as crowded as past years. And these past two weeks have been excrutiatingly slow at the tea shop. Today I made a total of 60 cents in tips - not even enough for bus fare home. Last year there were lines out the door for hot apple cider and hot chocolate. It's only the first week of October, though, so hopefully things will pick up. Tonight is the Haunted Happenings parade through town. It officially kicks off the Halloween season. It goes right past the tea shop, but I decided to go right home after work because I didn't want to deal with the crowds and the re-routed traffic, which might have affected my bus ride home if I left later. The fact that it's early October and it was 85 degrees out today doesn't help to make it feel like autumn in New England.

And speaking of autumn, it's time for the new fall season of television shows. Last night I watched "Pushing Daisies" on ABC. I don't watch any of the shows on the ABC network except for "Dancing with the Stars" (and don't even get me started about how they pre-empted last week's dance episode until 1:45 am because of football, which means I missed it and didn't realize it until I tuned in for what I thought was the dance episode but was in fact the results show). But now I will have to make an exception. "Pushing Daisies" is about a man who has the ability to bring the dead back to life if he touches them, but only for a minute, because if he doesn't touch them again, which makes them dead permanently, then a sort of cosmic equalization takes place and someone else dies. So he uses his ability to re-animate murder victims, asks them who killed them, touches them again, and then collects the reward money. But when one of those victims is his childhood sweetheart, he can't bring himself to touch her again to make her die permanently. The show is full of black humor, and is very quirky and charming. It has a magical Dr. Seuss-meets-Tim Burton quality that makes it unique from most of the shows out there, right down to the use of a narrator (British actor Jim Dale), which gives it the feel of a strange yet fascinating fairy tale for grown-ups being read aloud. British actress Anna Friel is absolutely adorable as the protagonist's dead childhood sweetheart. She has a gamine quality that makes her a modern-day Audrey Hepburn. And it's great to see Ellen Greene and Swoosie Kurtz again - two veterans of stage and screen in roles so quirky and eccentric that only they could play them.



Next week, ABC continues its new fall season of quirky shows with a program about a woman who's lost her memory, called "Sarah Who" - not to be confused with "Dr. Who."