Don't Call me Shirley (MacLaine)

Ken Jennings made an interesting tangent in his most recent post about past lives and reincarnations. By his method of determining who you were in a past life, it turns out I was Leonard Strong -- an American born actor that specialized in mostly Asian or American Indian roles. He's problaby most well-known for his role as the interpreter in The King and I, as well as the hitchhiker in the Twilight Zone episode, The Hitchhiker. He only had two lines of dialogue.

I decided to look up that particular Zone episode and found that the story of a woman driving cross-country has some classic Rod Serling prose:

"Her name is Nan Adams. She's twenty-seven years old. Her occupation: buyer at a New York department store, at present on vacation, driving cross-country to Los Angeles, California, from Manhattan....".

We learn that she had a close call on the road:

"Minor incident on Highway 11 in Pennsylvania, perhaps to be filed away under accidents you walk away from. But from this moment on, Nan Adam's companion on a trip to California will be terror; her route--fear; her destination--quite unknown."

At the end of the episode, Nan discovers that she's actually dead and the hitchhiker was some sort of Grim Reaper figure:

"Nan Adams, age twenty-seven. She was driving to California, to Los Angeles. She didn't make it. There was a detour--through the Twilight Zone."

Too bad Rod Serling died so early -- I would have liked to have been his reincarnation.