12

"Well, now, take down your fishing pole, and meet me at the fishing hole, you'll feel fresh as lemonade a setting in the shade…" Usually when Andy whistled that ditty, he immediately thought of Mayberry as the small peaceful community where everyone knew each other, but when he looked at Mayberry with four story buildings, busy sidewalks and harried merchants, that little ditty suddenly got hit with a guitar riff and a loud percussion beat as if Sean Finnerty was jamming with Keith Partridge. Hearing that tune belted by Sean on the Freddie Fillmore station made Andy change the radio dial.

"You get the best of both worlds, mix it all together and you'll have the best of both worlds…." Hannah Montana was on another station. Andy changed it again.

"…And my friends are Jem girls, Jem! Jem is my name! Beauty and fashion, that's the Jem-girl glamour, fashion and fame…" He changed the station again and heard Charlie Pace from Driveshaft, a British import now gaining popularity since Pace had vanished on his plane in the South Pacific.

"Come on, everybody… come on, everybody…" Andy changed the radio station again.

"…get the last train to Clarksville and I'll meet you at the station. I'll be there by 4:30, and there'll be no reservation so don't be slow…" Andy started to turn over to the Dave Allen at Large radio program then changed his mind on hearing jokes about the Catholic Church and switched it off altogether. Sitting at his desk, he started mulling over allowing Mel Sharples to have a parking permit for his corvette or excising altogether Clancy Wiggum as the town truant officer. Enos was doing better at it in addition to his regular duties than the fat and dim retired cop ever did. He lifted his head up to Barney pulling in the other local town drunk.

"Sheriff…" Dick Montague rather resembled local grocer Sam Whiffle. "I swear… there's a witch in the Stephens House… she sort of looks like that Nicole Kidman. Not that I'm complaining, mind you…"

"He keeps saying that, Ange." Barney held on to the shaky drunk.

"Really…" Andy looked to Montague. "And who does her husband look like?" Andy asked. He knew Samantha Stephens. For the longest time, she had looked liked TV star Elizabeth Montgomery, but now with her hair restyled and having lost a few pounds, she did look like Kidman.

"Dick York…" Montague looked at Barney and shuffled to stay on his feet. "But if I squint and close this eye, he looks like Dick Sargent from the Super Password program…"

"Squint and close one eye…" Barney had heard enough. "All right, into the cell with you…" He swung Montague into Otis's favorite cell. Andy meanwhile answered the telephone on his desk and took a phone call. As Barney turned round from locking up the town's second favorite inebriate, Andy was rising to his feet and heading for the doors heading out to the patrol car.

"Barney, the No Ma'Am guys started a fight at Moe's Tavern and we gotta go clean it up. Dang that Al Bundy, I'm going to throw the book at them this time." He opened the doors and hurried to the patrol car.

"What is it this time?" Barney was pulling out his bullet for his revolver. "Another more taste/less filling debate?"

"No," Andy started the squad car. "It was a Ginger/Mary Ann debate that turned ugly when the Skipper suddenly showed up." The vehicle started up and pulled away from the curb. Tim Taylor stepped from Floyd's Barbershop and sent a wave to his Uncle Andy then stepped aside to miss running into Lora Gilmore and her daughter Rory. The mother and daughter duo headed past Orville Munroe's Funeral and TV Repair Shop and crossed the lot toward the Mayberry Grand Hotel. John Masters was hanging posters for "Night At The Museum" with Ben Stiller to keep up with his family only films. A local detective named Monk stepped away from the two Gilmores to avoid being touched and Ellie Walker across the street hung a sign in the drugstore to re-elect Senator Burl "Gopher" Smith. Nearing the alley, Rory lifted her head and heard a crash come from above enter the alley. A dynamite-eating goat screeched and came running out ahead of Ralph Hinkley adjusting and pulling on his shirt and jacket.

"Mr. Hinkley?"

"Rory…" Ralph recognized his student. "Oh, I, uh, was just collecting aluminum cans…" He noticed her mom.

"This is my mom." Rory introduced her mother with the movie-star good looks.

"My daughter says you're her favorite teacher. " Lora beamed to the handsome blonde teacher with the movie-star looks. In her mind, he could be quite unlike dating Gob Bluth or Larry Dallas, something she was ready for.

"That's great… could you remind her she still owes me a report on Great Expectations." Ralph pulled on his jacket and stepped out of the way of Marion Cunningham coming from the beauty shop. "Hate to be rude, but I'm in a hurry to meet my wife." Ralph rushed across the street and stopped short from being run over by Malcolm Wilkerson on his bike. Bartender Jaime Summers was doing errands with her sister and dodging questions from high school students confusing her with a teacher named Jaime Sommars. There was no resemblance, but even Rory thought the two Jaime's had something in common.

"Oh, of course…" Lora had a brief handshake with her daughter's teacher and made a look to her daughter and acknowledged her look. Rory didn't need meeting her teacher in the street to be repeated about an assignment. Most of her lackadaisical habits had come from Lily Finnerty and Kelly Bundy. When they were not running from shop to shop, they were going to their regular hangouts. When the local Mayberry youths were not in school, they frequented the local New Market Mall east of Mayberry on the Interstate. Just eleven miles from the courthouse on the former Jubal Foster farm, the expanse of stores, markets and small restaurants was a Mecca for girls like Bridget Hennessy, Jackie Burkhart and London Tipton who made a hobby out of shopping, but it was also a place of distress for hard-working men like Al Bundy who rarely saw young nubile beauties like Rachel Green and Monica Chandler. Instead, he had to deal with the returning ghastly presence of Mimi Bobeck or Roseanne Connor, although Roseanne was the least fun to insult for fear of dealing with her husband, Dan, from the Mayberry Motorcycle Shop. In leaving Bundy, Green and Chandler then had to contend with Shelia Wajimblonsky at the Vancome Counter. When the kids were not here, they were at the local popular restaurants like The Chill Grill Restaurant eating pizza or eating burgers over at Arnold's Drive-In on the make for the opposite sex. A few hung out in the basement of Eric Forman, or returning to the school to shoot baskets like Troy Bolton and Wally Cleaver. A few girls followed round the higher female cliques girls like Sharpay Evans, a blonde diva who could not understand why she and the poor girl Maddie Fitzpatrick looked so much alike! Some girls didn't care for the cliques. Winnie Goodwin frequented the Spellman House as a friend of Sabrina and a cousin of Tabitha. Seventeen-year-old Marcia Brady went through life with her sensible Seventies values and ignored music by Jesse McCarthy to listen to Davy Jones on her CD player, and Joanie Cunningham went through school with friends trying to update her Stuck-in-the Fifties lifestyle. She didn't have the body for the thong look, but she did attract boys like exchange student Fez Wilmerashtontopherlauramila. He was from an unnamed tiny Central American republic south of Mexico and north of the Panama Canal. No one knew what the name of this country was, but they knew there was one other local immigrant from down there named Esteban Ramirez working as a bellhop at the Tipton in Raleigh.

Of the students, Pim Diffy didn't care for cliques or even school. She lived misguided by her ego that she should own and run the school, but she never really planned for the human equation. Her brother claimed she was actually botching herself unconsciously because she refused to admit she had a conscience. She had been to Principal Gibb's office more often than Assistant Principal Grace Musso or even the courthouse. It was Barney who suspected she had been the one who wrote that ditty about him on the wall outside Weaver's Furniture:

"There was once a cop named Fife

Who carried a gun and a knife;

His gun was all dusty,

His knife was all rusty,

Because he never caught a crook in his life."

Despite her self-proclaimed intelligence, Pim was a horrible student. Eugene Beakman wanted her expelled for blowing up the chemistry lab (for which she brought marshmallows), and Ralph wanted her psycho-analyzed for showing in a report where the Nazis had gone wrong in their world conquest. Jaime Sommars meanwhile thought she could save Pim from herself by nurturing the good girl buried deep within the wild child, but FBI Agent Bill Maxwell warned her not to try without a whip and a chair. By placing Pim in situations that made her more human to her classmates, maybe her peers would accept her and she would behave more. It was actually having an opposite effect; by placing Pim in public, it was giving the other Mayberry students more of an opportunity to embarrass her. That was where students like Sabrina Spellman and Evie Garland joined forces to mystically teach Pim humility.

Trying to deal with those constant illusions, Pim Diffy looked over her class for a minute, turned her head disgustedly to Mrs. Sommars and then rolled her eyes. She hated oral reports even more than written reports if not more. As she started to speak, the neurons and maisons of her mind started charging and taking place with other neurons and maisons from across time. Another personality was taking over her brain and with it another mind from another individual lost in space and time.

"Any time, Mrs. Diffy..." Jaime Sommars asked the young lady.

"What?" Pim's voice wondered out loud as Dr. Sam Beckett wondered who he was and then looked across all the sixth graders looking upon him. A few minutes ago, he was in Ancient Greece with Xena and had encountered other time-travelers named Tony Neuman and Doug Phillips. Meeting them was his best chance to return to his own time. Time travelers like Darien Lambert didn't occur that often. He turned to the reflection of Pim's face staring back upon him from the glass in the side door of the classroom. He had leaped into an adolescent young girl!

"Oh boy..."

"Watch…" Lily Finnerty turned to Miley Cyrus. "She's going to start screaming she's from the future again…"

"You'd think she'd change that story." Miley mused.

Downstairs in the split-level school, Howard Sprague had handed over the papers for Principal Ed Gibb to get the school funds he needed for the increased volume of kids. Security guard Kevin Sorbo was trying to show Mrs. Sommars inaccuracies in the life of Hercules; it was almost as if he was there. Bud Bundy was again running from Larry Kubiac. Apparently Matthew Burton had told Kubiac that Bundy was responsible for spraying "WIDE LOAD" on his back. Buffy Summers was hiding a mallet and stakes in her locker as she peered over to William Collins from Collinwood. There was something odd about him and his family, but she couldn't put her finger on it. She tried to get a grasp of his character, but Bridget Hennessy kept blocking her view. Blonde, attractive and a self-avowed sex symbol, Bridget was trying to eavesdrop on Sabrina and Evie.

"Mrs. Stephens still can't get her real face and body back." Evie told the novice witch. "She needs these things from your aunts." She handed a list over.

"I'm on it…" Sabrina looked to Evie and then Bridget and gave her a look sending her away. "Does she have any idea what's going on to the world, I mean, does it still exist?"

"She seems to have an idea that the world hasn't changed, just altered…" Evie watched Kubiac stuffing Bud into a locker. Theo Huxtable walked by with his arm around Raven Baxter. "When we sent our spirits into that other plane, we might have hit a barrier preventing us from attaining another level of existence… a level that might have ceased to exist. She's going to talk to Mr. Sorbo's father about it."

"Zeus…" Sabrina made a face realizing the man's true identity. "If anyone should know…" They both turned in unison to depart out the side entrance of the school but were blocked in their path by the school's fashion zombies, Libby Chessler, Jackie Burkhart, Sharpay Evans and a host of three other girls, each of whom obsessed with shopping and clique and very little of anything else.

"What are you freaks talking about this time?" Libby largely led their materialistic coven.

"I hear Marcia Brady is going to be the next prom queen." Sabrina grinned nearly laughing and sent them all into a brief shock. Beyond them, Kellie Picker rushed for chorus class. J.T. Lambert rushed forward in a one-sided infatuation with Nicole Bradford, and Chloe Sullivan had returned to her old alma mater as a substitute teacher. Roy Hinkley left the teacher's lounge revealing more stories from his life on the island to Assistant Principal Grace Musso. Maddie Fitzpatrick rushed to make her job at the Tipton if but obsessed with from afar by William Collins. A romantic by nature and a loner against his will, he was the son of Barnabas and Angelique Collins at Collinwood. His sister, Sara, was on the student council, his cousin, Jamison, was on the school football team and he had another cousin named J.R. Loomis who seemed to be constantly in the office of Principal Ed Gibb or down at the courthouse before Sheriff Andy Taylor. Unlike the other students here in this school, he seemed amused by the people around him. He was actually mooning over beautiful female students like Sabrina Spellman, Chelsea Daniels, Lily Truscott and Maddie Fitzpatrick, he had teachers like Jaime Sommars and Eugene Beakman, role models named MacGyver and Robert Petrie and his best friends included Mike Seaver, Peter Brady, Eric Forman, Theo Huxtable, Phil Diffy and Derek Venturi. It seemed like he finally had the life he wanted. If but he could stop himself from accidentally revealing intimate items from their private lives.

Among his best friends was Russell Coleman, a character slowly becoming aware of the world having changed around him. Like William, he too had suddenly found himself in a changed reality. All of a sudden, Coleman had found himself not working at the local Home Depot but for Cunningham Hardware and passing a fake ID in the local Red Boot Pub behind the courthouse. Acknowledging fifteen-year-old Tabitha Stephens and Kerry Hennessy, he turned past the school library watched by librarian Barbara Gordon and stopped William from leaving the school.

"I'm seeing Maddie at the Chill Grill." William tried to excuse himself past Russell.

"Will," Russell lifted his arm and leaned his heavy six-foot-two frame against Alex Keaton's locker. "When we visited that medium at the fair and she promised you three wishes, what did you wish for?"

"Well," Collins pulled on his leather jacket. "I wished I had powers like Wolverine of the X-Men. Look, my missing tooth came back and I lost twenty pounds. I'm hot to the girls now."

"Yeah…" Russell grinned thinking about his new look. "Well, that explains the claw marks on the cars of the football players…. Your second wish?"

"I replaced my idiot family with the Collins family from Dark Shadows." Collins confessed. In this pre-reality transformation, he'd been someone else entirely. "It is so cool living at Collinwood. Carolyn is so hot!! I love having Barnabas and Angelique as parents! I finally feel appreciated." He beamed at the notion of actually having a family that supported and loved him.

"Yeah," Russell mused. "And then what?"

"As long as I had gone that far…" William beamed covertly. "I brought all my favorite TV shows to life." He paused a bit confused. "And somehow a lot of shows I hated…."

"Yeah," Russell mused and stood up straight on his feet again. "That's the wish that did it. You see, you destroyed the town, eliminated and replaced thousands by bringing all these people to life in the real world and replaced the town with Mayberry as a result, even relocating us all to North Carolina." Coleman paused. "I was listening to Evie and Sabrina in gym class; they don't know they've been made real. They just think whatever lives they had before have been merged into a condensed universe." Russell watched the Professor from Gilligan's island talking about his life on Gilligan's Island to Jaime Sommars; she was probably still The Bionic Woman, even living alongside her modern revamped version. "They don't know that this is the real world. Sabrina thinks their world collapsed into one town."

"Is that a problem?"

"Russell…." Kelly Bundy was standing nearby waiting for Russell. In the post-wish world, she was a mere TV character he had lusted after, but in this real world, she was real flesh and blood and very physical with every personality trait, nuance and idiosyncrasy programmed into her by the actress that once played her. She had changed from a loose and immoral TV high school bimbo to a real world flirt and extrovert.

"Actually, I've no problem with it." Russell answered William's question realizing that he and a lot of the old school's survivors from the old reality had a lot to benefit from these people made real. He took Kelly by the waist and started guiding her off to the gym, and William mugged a bit himself and started on his way out. Principal Gibb from Eight Simple Rules wished him well, School Nurse Margaret Houlihan transposed out of the Korean War of MASH recognized him and Lizzie McGuire beamed to him with a secret smile with a picture of Hilary Duff on her folder, little knowing they had once been one and the same. Sheriff Andy Taylor drove by the school little suspecting the truth behind his similarity to Atlanta lawyer Ben Matlock and to TV Star Andy Griffith. Before him, Collins said goodbye to Greg and Peter Brady in the 70s convertible parked by his car, a red 1987 Ferrari 308 GTS once owned by a local private investigator named Thomas Magnum.

It was a good life for once.

END