Ain't she something, though?

I'm very proud of my gal, Flo.

Not only was she featured in the New York Times yesterday (hint: Flo's real name is Erin), but she's organizing a coffee-related charity event on Thursday, June 5, to raise funds to benefit the Red Cross's relief efforts in Myanmar and China.

You can find all the details on Flo's blog, Meet the Press Pot, including information about how you can make a contribution, even if you're not on hand for the event.

She's quite a gal, that Flo, and I'm lucky she lets me stick around.

That was then; this is now

One of most important of the 6,549 reasons I'm lucky to have found Flo (or rather, why I'm fortunate she found me) is that, despite her relatively tender age (relative to my own, that is), she has a great appreciation for things yester (I think I may have just coined that, but I like it).

She's fine with watching old movies, listening to old music, driving by the homes of old (heck, even deceased) stars, and she likes me just fine in vintage shirts, vintage trousers, vintage ties and even vintage pajamas.

One of our favorite yester-themed activities is watching GSN's nightly broadcast of What's My Line.

I've long been fond of those old-school game shows -- What's My Line, I've Got a Secret, To Tell the Truth -- and though they've all experienced periodic revivals, it's the classic originals, peopled by sophisticates and first-nighters who somehow all have that knack of seeming simultaneously down-to-earth and urbane, of which Flo and I are so fond.

I think what draws me to these old shows is their resemblance to parlor games -- it's as if one has gathered a few of one's more attractive and intelligent friends and are engaging in some amusing play in between cocktails. It's simultaneously amusing and edifying.

Money's not the object, certainly -- the top prize in the early years of What's My Line was fifty dollars, no fortune even in the early Fifties. No, the fun is in the challenge and, even more so, in the company one keeps.

There's an elegance and sophistication to the intercourse on these programs that is all but extinct today, and there was a guest on a recently aired program from 1953 that makes my point better than ever I could.

The first guest on the program was a delightfully awkward and gangly woman named Eve Witt, who just happened to be a Fuller Brush Man.

That's their term, not mine. For those who haven't seen the show in years -- or at all -- I'll remind you that the guest's occupation is flashed on the screen at the beginning of each segment, so that the studio audience, and we at home, are in on the secret while the inquisitors on the panel are not, whence comes much of the hilarity. So it was, one assumes, the producers of the show who opted to go with "Fuller Brush Man" rather than the more genteel and appropriate "Fuller Brush Woman" (probably a quarter of the women who appear on the show are there not because they have an occupation that is unusual in and of itself, but because they are a woman in that field. It's one element of the show that definitely wouldn't carry over, where it to be revived today.)

Sure enough, though, the panel puts its collective shoulder to the wheel and solved the mystery of Miss Witt (for each female guest is pointedly asked, "Is that Miss or Mrs. Witt/McGillicuddy/Doe?" when she is introduced, another element that wouldn't make the move if the show were revived).

Next up was an gentleman of indeterminate age; he could have been fifty or seventy. He was, we learned soon enough, a horse dentist.

But his name -- and the evocative qualities of his handle only occurred to me after the program had ended -- was Harry Ball.

One could ask for no simpler, clearer example of what's charming about What's My Line than to learn that not an eyebrow was raised, nary a snicker was heard, nary a quip was cracked. Mr. Ball might just as well have been introduced as Tom Smith, Jim Reynolds, or Sam Wright for all the amused reaction the announcing of his name provoked.

Dorothy Kilgallen, Steve Allen, Arlene Francis, and Bennett Cerf merely greeted Mr. Ball and set out trying to figure out what he did for a living. No puerility needed.

(P.S. They figured out he worked with horses, but he won the full prize of $50 [!] before they pinned down the specifics.)