Tic Tacs won't help

One of the joys of my childhood was watching Soupy Sales on television. Soupy had a comedy show in which he would roam around his one-room house and interact with various characters. At the window were the dog puppets, Pookie and Hippie. At the door were all sorts of characters, but all you could see of each of them was a single hand. The visitors who rang the bell included more dogs (White Fang and Black Tooth), Soupy's girlfriend (Peaches), and the occasional elephant (whose trunk you would see in lieu of a hand). Over to the right of the door, there was a stove, and then a blackboard or an easel of some kind, from which Soupy would teach us lessons.

Most of the characters' voices were supplied by one guy. I believe his name was Frank Nastasi. There was a lot of pie-throwing and other slapstick. Soupy had his own dances and songs. He'd read commercials, ad libbing a bit along the way, and concluding with, "You do that, and I'll love you, and give you a great big kiss, mwah."

Although the show was pitched to kids, a lot of the humor was directed at adults, and I remember Soupy being thrown off the air for a while for something bad that he said.

At one point Soupy became so popular that they expanded his show from a half hour to an hour. And they moved it from weekday afternoons to Saturday nights. I believe it was in the prime time version of the show that the detective character Philo Kvetch was introduced. Soupy played Kvetch, and one of the bad guys, played by Nastasi, was Onions Oregano, a man whose breath was so bad it could kill a person.

There was a scene at an amusement park, with a Ferris wheel. At one point, I distinctly remember another villain, whose name escapes me, urging Oregano to attack Kvetch. "Kill, Onions, kill!" he shouted. "If you can't shoot him, breathe on him!"

I'm reminded of Onions Oregano this morning upon reading this story, which epitomizes what this year has been like. A Trump supporter in Virginia has been charged with assault after forcefully, and masklessly, exhaling on a couple of anti-Trump demonstrators outside a Trump golf course.

It boils down to this: Nowadays, we are all Onions Oregano.

UPDATE, Nov. 26: An alert reader reminds me that Pookie was a lion and Hippie was (of course) a hippo. Please make a note of it.