Police Psychology | ROCKY AND IRMA

I spent the weekend in California with Rocky and Irma Kalish, and everyone should spend a weekend with Rocky and Irma. I met Rocky and Irma over 25 years ago and we hit it off immediately. They became my writing mentors, my heroes, my idols, and we even asked them (and they agreed) to be the adopted grandparents of our Russian-born baby. Rocky and Irma wrote or produced almost every  show you remember as a child. “F-Troop,” “Facts of Life,” ‘Good Times,” “Gilligan Island,” “My Three Sons,” “Family Affairs,” the list goes on and on. Heck, they even gave Edith Bunker cancer on an “All in the Family” episode.  Try writing about cancer and make people laugh at the same time if you don’t think they are skilled.  Hollywood writers and a police psychologist, who’d figure?  (If you were at my wedding or at the 2-day class I taught at Alliant University, they were there cheering me on.) To quote one of their characters, they are DY-NO-MITE!

Well, I learned a lot from Rocky and Irma over the years, and maybe even taught them a thing or two. “Always entertain,” they would say, “if they aren’t listening, you can’t teach them anything.” Or, when I was feeling I had little impact on life, Irma would tell the story of a friend of hers across the country who was dealing with a mastectomy and said she got strength from the honest talk of Edith dealing with cancer on “All in the Family,” not realizing Irma had literally put the words in Edith’s mouth. “You never know who you are going to effect,” she would tell me. But there was one thing Rocky and Irma would say that almost daily rings in my head – “NEXT!” (more…)