Does anyone remember Oblivia Offenfaulty? Oblivia Offenfaulty, girl reporter, and her Offenfaulty Report from Washington? True, she was never Barbara Walters or Cokey Roberts or Leslie Stahl, but she had a little something. True, she did have a slight speech impediment, but, well, so does Barbara. True she did get lost somewhere between Mt. Illampu in Bolivia and Lake Titicaca in Peru. But that could happen to anybody.

The point is, Oblivia, as inept as she may have been, started out at Special Features Workshop in Connecticut, and she should be remembered with pride. She tried. She had enthusiasm. She had integrity. And she was cute. Best of all, she was drawn by the wonderful Pulitzer prize winning cartoonist, Etta Hulme. Not bad for a little girl from the boonies. Only her script came from Kay Kelley at Special Features Workshop. It has been noted that Oblivia's last recorded words were, "I'm sorry to report that my little Peruvian guide's hat has just blown off down the mountain. And now he's disappeared! But he must be out there somewhere." Last seen on camera, Oblivia Offenfaulty was holding her microphone in one hand and with the other she was shielding her eyes as she searched valiantly through the ever growing mountain mists for any sign of the guide or his large, colorful hat.

Some people might be interested to know just why Oblivia Offenfaulty was in Bolivia, of all places, reporting her semi-soft and semi-hard news (one might say "her sort of semi-al-dente-news"), when she unfortunately was stranded in the dewy mists of beautiful Mt. Illampu. This is all we know of Oblivia in Bolivia:

She was on assignment to do some reporting live (her specialty) with her crew of two, plus her small, elusive guide, who it now appears was not very enthusiastic about leading these American touristas. (He wasn't so sure they were proper tourists.) He seemed very suspicious of his charges, and kept glancing back at them nervously. At one point the guide turned his head around so quickly that his hat stayed in the same spot on his head. Oblivia noticed that he was so short that when he hunched over, adjusted his poncho and his hat, he suddenly became even shorter in appearance. Oblivia had a funny feeling about this odd little man, but her naturally sunny disposition made her laugh off this telltale sign. She did wonder, however, if he were somehow involved in the cocoa crisis she had just heard of in his native land of Peru. Was he a spy? Was he possibly running from a cocoa coup? When he got Oblivia and her tired crew to an altitude of over 18,000 feet and their hiking had slowed down because the air they were breathing was very thin, he rushed ahead, lost his big hat, which flew off his head in a sudden breeze, and left our intrepid band of Americans to their fate.

It was in the middle 1980's and people were worried that another gasoline crisis might occur in America after the crisis of the late 1970's. Bolivia has lots of rich mineral desposits and tons of petroleum to be recovered from its mountainous regions. Therefore the United States, with its vast and ever expanding car culture, was very much interested in what Bolivia had to offer in the way of averting any further gas crisis.

Oblivia Offenfaulty, the Washington reporter, was sent on "special assignment" to Bolivia. And, while she and her crew were investigating the petroleum issue in Bolivia, they ran across something else. It came to their attention that a group of terrorists, in neighboring Peru, were trying to corner the market in cocoa and cause something even worse than any gas crisis: - a chocolate crisis! Can we even imagine a world-wide chocolate crisis? No, of course not, because "riots in the streets" would be just the initial reaction to such a crisis. Do we even know how many cups of cocoa are served and consumed during the cooler months each year?

So after Oblivia and her very weary crew finally found their way down off Mt. Illampu, they got their second wind and set out for Machu Picchu, sailing on Lake Titicaca from Bolivia to Peru. Fearlessly and with great determination, they were on their way to investigate thoroughly the cocoa situation. And evidently, although we don't know for sure, but perhaps, alas, they foundered on Lake Titicaca. We will never know what really happened. And to this day, their mysterious disappearance haunts us, or haunts some of us, or haunts a few of us, or, probably, haunts just me, Grandma Minutia.