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Copyright (c) 1995, Sylvia L. Oliande
FOR SEARS SHOPPERS, IT WAS A CLOSE ENCOUNTER OF THE BRADY KIND
By SYLVIA L. OLIANDE
Last summer, a quiet whirlwind blew through Sears in the Santa Clarita Valley. Its name was Brady.
For a few days in July, the cast and crew of Paramount Pictures' "The Brady Bunch Movie" descended upon the Valencia Town Center store, rearranging its displays and taking over a few departments for a brief sequence in the film.
"We were all pretty excited about it," said manager Mike Martinez of the store's close encounter of the Brady kind. "It was a little bit of Hollywood in our small town of Valencia."
Shooting took place on the store's escalator and in the hardware, home fashions and electronics departments. In the film, the Bradys celebrate a bit of good fortune with a trip to their favorite department store, grooving through Sears to the bouncy beat of "It's a Sunshine Day."
Employees admitted being a bit starstruck during the brief Brady invasion although they mostly left the cast and crew alone.
"We had customers walking through," Martinez recalled. "They mostly stayed out of the way and we waited on them at the same time."
In fact, the bunch was something of a boon to the store's cash registers, he admitted.
"They bought a lot of stuff from us," Martinez said of the filmmakers. "Phones, televisions, refrigerators. They figured, 'When do we ever get a chance to shop?' The crew bought tools and stuff."
All right, but how did they behave?
"They were all very nice," Martinez said. "Shelley Long was very nice." The actress even posed for a picture that employees saved on a store computer, he explained.
"We took about two or three. She didn't like the first one and made us take it over again. After the second, she said, 'OK, that's enough.' She was working and all," Martinez said.
Shoppers who came to see the softer side of Sears that day even went home with a treat -- an autographed picture of Long as supermom Carol Brady.
OK, but was it all really groovy? Weren't the salespeople sharing Brady horror stories over the water cooler for months afterward?
"You mean, like were Marcia and Jan fighting?" Martinez said. "No, nothing like that."
Well, what do you expect from the Bradys?