I fell in love with Temperance Brennan…

…from the get go. Maybe it’s due to the contrast between her bright brains and her sinner’s body, or maybe it’s due to the nonchalant disdain for all things that our pop-bubblegum culture thrives on. Truth is, I love her dedication. Her utter obsession towards the task at hand. Towards solving the mystery.

Her selfless quest for truth and enlightenment almost erases her inner self. Piecing together the puzzle of a smashed skull, the looks straight into the abyss of death, and although the abyss looks back at her, her capacity for marveling with the hidden truths and the cold equations of the universe, smothers that frightful look, like vacuum killing a flame.

Working throughout the night she seems lonely, but one feels she’s never truly so, as if she’s carrying the ghosts of all her broken, twisted, charred skeletons within her, collecting experience – lived experience – through the martyrdom of the victims she reveals in every episode. 

In a way, it’s as if Bones (Brennan’s nickname, derived from her anthropological expertise) is meant to give life to the Cartesian duality of body and soul. Something the series – Bones (2005-2017) – hints at, but never quiet fully explores. Temperance, Dr, Brennan, or simply Bones (Emily Deschanel), is a focused mind lodged in a body she’s oblivious to, however a body that we’re all too aware of.

Although to say she’s oblivious to her body is not the most truthful assertion, as she keeps it honed as a lethal weapon through martial arts training. The more correct statement would be that she thinks of her body as an instrument to her mind, and so the attention she gives to it is the same we give our cars. It must be kept functional, and clean, and impressive, but it is not who we are.

Not having met her when I was kid, I didn’t fell head over heels for her, as I had for Wilma Deering, or Daisy Duke, or Triple A. But I fell in love nonetheless. How can you not, when such a sharp mind is housed in a body like hers? 

I fell in love with Amy Amanda Allen...

... as soon as I saw THE RABBIT WHO ATE LAS VEGAS (Episode 7, Season 1, 1983). Although that isn't entirely true. Melinda Culea, who plays Triple A in the cult series The A-Team (1983-1989) is one of those actresses whose screen presence is charged with that kind of sensuality that makes one both want to cuddle and do dirty things to her, irrespectively of which one does first. Although her character, a journalist, was the pivotal element that led the viewer to the A-Team in the two-parter first episode of the series, she wasn't given much to do in the following episodes... that is, besides being pretty eye-candy with a promise of intellectual depth. Not withstanding, her interplay with the other characters (specially with Dwight Schultz's Howling Mad Murdock) is always funny and nice, and it was not gladly that we saw her disappear from the series after only 25 episodes.

So, in truth, I fell in love with Amy Amanda Allen from the start. Who can resist a sexy investigative reporter that follows doggedly a crack commando unit, surviving as soldiers of fortune, to engage them in a foreign mission and than has the gall to blackmail them into accepting her as one of them? Not I, rest assured.

And she was sexy from start of episode one, wearing a pink dress on a Mexican beach, smiling that warm smile of hers, playing at being the all-american sweet-heart. But it wasn't until episode 7 that she got to wear an unforgettable mini-skirt, carried in Face's arms. Man, the way the light played on her stockinged lithe legs... Everything in her was luminous sensuality, from the red suede boots to the dark patch of panties peeking from the shadowed valley of unfulfilled promises between her shapely thighs.

Amy would ware some other mini-skirts and short-dresses on later episodes of the show. Bu you know what they say: there's no love like the first love, and no memory moment carries more magic than that one.

We miss you Amy.

I fell in love with Daisy Duke...

... when I was but a teen. And how could you not? She was sassy, smart, sexy and a she-devil behind the wheel of a car. I remember going to high-school carrying a Dukes of Hazzard ledger, graced with wonderful pictures of Daisy (Catherine Bach) and her hypnotically short denim shorts.

Yes, for the teenager I then was, Daisy Duke had the most gorgeous legs in the entire world! And since then, her legs have inhabited my memory as such. They were long as ideal female legs should be, shining under the sheer hose she seemed to perpetually wear. And the show knew it, displaying them openly as the eye-catching treasures they were (both getting her in trouble and out of it... along with the viewers out of our minds).

Strangely, Daisy never stroke me as a breasty girl. All that leg, climbing all the way to that shapely buttocks of her, dominated my mind for the years since I've last seen the show in 1985.

Yesterday I was watching the first episode of the first season of the cult TV Series (The One-Armed Bandit, 1979), and the revelation was breathtaking, as the screencap above can well attest.