In the 1935 movie Bad Boy, Eddie Nolan, a billiards player and occasional hustler, is derided by a disapproving family as a “street-corner loafer,” a “pool hall hoodlum,” and a “bad boy.” In doing so, the family proffers the argument that passion and talent for pool is a one-way ticket on a path to reprobation. Thirty-five years later, the ABC sitcom The Flying Nun made a similar contention in the third season billiards episode “Armando and the Pool Table.”
Having never known that Gidget once flew through the air wearing a habit, I was tickled pink to have stumbled across this particular late-‘60s television series. (As one reviewer opined, “Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, and The Flying Nun constitute the troika of sitcoms that truly represented the 1960s.”) For the uninitiated, The Flying Nun starred Sally Field as Sister Bertrille, a 90-pound nun who in joining the Convent San Tanco in Puerto Rico, discovers she has the literal gift of aviation, a power granted to her by the combination of her light weight, the heavy winds, and the aerodynamic nature of her cornette.
In the 1970 episode, “Armando and the Pool Table,” Carlos Ramirez (Alejandro Rey), a local playboy and casino owner who is also a patron of the sisters, unloads a pool table on the convent. Though Reverend Mother Placido (Madeleine Sherwood) initially protests, saying, “This is a teaching order not a pool parlor,” she is swayed by Sister Bertrille’s assertion that pool might provide a good distraction for Armando, a sweet-hearted youth with a penchant for pursuing risky activities like swinging from tree branches and jumping from rooftops.
Once the convent finds room for the table in the cellar by clearing out the pickles (“and so where the briny pickle had reined the billiard ball now rolled”), the impressionable Armando quickly takes a liking to the game, especially when he watches and is then taught by a local legend Emilio Gomez (John Hoyt years before achieving wider fame as Grandpa Kaninsky on Gimme a Break!).
The lessons go so well that Armando’s education starts to suffer, providing the first thematic hint that pool is a gateway to a world of damnation. Acting decisively, the Reverend Mother says Armando must focus on “his schoolwork not his pool work” and instructs Sister Bertrille that “we must give up the pool table and he must give up the game.”
But, Sister Bertrille recognizes that taking the table away will only increase his love for the game, so she concocts a scheme in which he will be shown up by Carlos, who not surprisingly for a gambler and Casanova, is also a pool hustler. In a “big time pool game” waged for “six small ones,” the “Minnesota Fats of San Tanco” (Carlos) plays the “Minneapolis Skinny of the Convent” (Armando).
More confident than his years, Armando scratches after pocketing a few balls. Carlos, in turn, quickly runs the table. At this point, to further put pressure on Armando, Sister Bertrille raises the stakes to $5,000, putting up as collateral the convent’s prized “golden candlesticks” and exclaiming, “We’ve suckered him into the big one. Now we can clean up.” Terrified by the pressure, but not wanting to disappoint the sisters, Armando agrees to play, but is then glory-hallelujah relieved when the Reverend Mother appears, shutting down the game. Swearing off all sinful avocations, the saved (and duped) Armando confesses, “I will not be a pool player or a paratrooper or a trapeze artist. No sir.”
In the end, the pool table is excommunicated, returned to its rightful hustler Emilio Gomez, and the pool passion is drowned, leaving room for good schooling, religious teaching, and (with a comedic wink), other prosperous hobbies.
The full episode of “Armando and the Pool Table” is available here. Watch carefully for a brief appearance by future Charlie’s Angel Farah Fawcett.
