This is the 21st century, Beaver.

Prudes need times of refreshing. The world can be a shocking place and, though we are made of strong stuff, sometimes we need to go to our happy place.
A place where dresses are cut no lower than a small hand-span from the chin, where
pants are pulled up within a small hand-span from the bottom rib, where procreation is understood but never codified and demonstrated, where children respect authority and Miss Landers, and Eddie Haskell makes naughtiness look the opposite of tantalizing.

Prudes need times of refreshing. They can leave it to Beaver to provide it.
But, this prude has learned to her sorrow that the shocking world will have its way and intrude even into June Cleaver’s kitchen.

Those of you with DVR’s, (is that right? DVR’s?) that cut out commercials have no idea what those of us without them go through.
(Let me interject here that prudish sensibilities feel somewhat obliged to watch commercials and support the economic status of capitalism and the free world.)

But prudish sensibilities have trouble making the jump from a program that won’t even show a toilet in the bathroom, to a commercial for bladder control.

In the midst of admiring, with Eddie, the ‘lovely dress, Mrs. Cleaver’ we breakaway to an ad for a new ‘comedy’ with women wearing necklines that reach a small hand-span from the bottom rib and discussing in detail their act of procreation with somebody-or-other.

Just as Ward reaches a crucial point in his deliberations about how to be a just and principled father, a commercial airs explaining how to sue the pants off drug companies/medical parts makers by calling a certain firm of attorneys.
(These commercials have the added  drawback of listing in detail symptoms that would lead one to contact the attorneys. I have all of them. Even the ones for faulty hip replacement or because I worked in an asbestos factory in the 1940’s.)

But prudes are always cautiously optimistic.
I know life in 1950’s America is not as idyllic as portrayed on ‘Leave it to Beaver.’ I did see ‘Grease’ after all.
But that also makes me hope that life in 2012 America is not as crass, self-serving and unchaste as it appears on the commercials.
Or maybe I just get a DVR.