Here Comes the Kicker

Yesterday, while Dr. Theresa was out doing some errands, I watched MADADAYO, Kurosawa's final movie, a surprisingly (and gratifyingly) lengthy portion of which was taken up with the protagonist looking for his lost cat. During that section, the shamisen was mentioned a few times, as something - and I hate to say this - made partly from cats, and the man and his wife and all his friends were hoping that no one had made a shamisen out of his cat. I confess that in my ignorance, I did not know what a shamisen was, nor, in my obstinance, did I look it up. Okay! The next thing you need to know is that Dr. Theresa routinely dismissed the show GILMORE GIRLS when it was on the air. "Too girly," she said on more than one occasion as I sat there watching it. But somehow or another, she recently got the idea to give it another try. Maybe she's mellowing out! So, when she got home, we watched an episode in which a kitten appeared. "Is something going to happen to the kitten?" Dr. Theresa asked (something happened to a cat several episodes earlier). "I don't think so!" I said, reminding her, however, that it has been many years since I watched the series, and I did not remember every detail. Or any detail. Or anything. So check this out! The kitten got lost! Just like the cat in MADADAYO. Please do not concern youself: the matter was swiftly and successfully resolved by the eponymous Gilmore Girls. Later, of course, Dr. Theresa and I retired for the evening. As we often do, we set the bedroom TV to Frasier, whose soothing tones have lulled us into a peaceful slumber on many a winter's night. He's a human white-noise machine! We half-listened to two episodes. In the first, Frasier's radio listeners called in to describe their lost cats, much to Frasier's displeasure! Ha ha, that's not what Frasier's radio show is about, or so Frasier seemed to muse as he fumed. But he grudgingly let them describe their lost cats. This, you will note, was the third bit of entertainment I had consumed in one day concerning lost cats. Okay. Get ready. Here comes the kicker! Now, in the next, entirely different episode of Frasier, having nothing to do with cats, he mentions, of all things (are you sitting down?), the shamisen! His less educated friends, much like myself, don't know what a shamisen is, so Frasier somewhat smugly explains that it is "a kind of Japanese guitar." I did not have to look up the shamisen. It came to me. And with that, the circle of the day was complete. Well, I did have to look it up, because I didn't entirely trust Frasier, and you, by doing your own research, may judge in what ways the shamisen resembles a guitar, and in what ways it does not. The preceding has been adapted freely from an email I sent to McNeil.