One of the beauties of being retired is how my time is just that — MY time. Aside from the occasional appointment with this or that sawbones and having bills to pay, there’s almost nothing I have to do and nowhere I have to be.

As a result, I am a-chronometric. Or to put it in plain English, when it comes to days, dates and the rest, don’t none of it mean a tiddly-doo. So imagine my surprise on Tuesday, when writing the date on a check I was shocked when I saw the date.

Dec. 17? Had anything important ever happened on Dec. 17, either in history or in my life? I thought maybe it had, but I was jiggered if I could think what it could be.

Of course Dec. 24 is Xmas Eve. And the 25th is Christmas day. Dec. 7 was the attack on Pearl Harbor, and along those lines, Dec. 3 is The Noodge of the North’s birthday. Dec. 18, while eminently forgettable to everyone else on God’s Green Earth, is un-forgettable to me, and for good reason: On that day in 1969 I flew to Germany, courtesy of This Man’s Navy, to start my two-year tour of duty in Bremerhaven.

Though that was over a half-century ago, the details of that day are as shockingly clear as if they happened last week. Matter of fact, given my collateral damage from being marched over, and on, by The March of Time, those details are a helluva lot clearer than anything that happened last week.

OK, so I remembered the day I left, but what about the day before? The more I thought about it, the less I recalled anything of note. Clearly, nothing important had happened that day. And then it hit me like a direct shot between the running lights: Yes, nothing had happened that day. But something had indeed happened that night. It was that I had sat glued to tube, watching the Johnny Carson show, waiting for its featured act — Tiny Tim’s wedding to Miss Vicki.

I don’t imagine anyone under 70 knows who Tiny Tim was, nor should they. But back in the late 60’s, at the peak of his fame, everyone knew him, whether they wanted to or not.

So who was he?

He was a singer/musician of a special ilk. For one thing, he had long, dark curly hair, almost exactly like Weird Al Yankovic’s. But there the resemblance ends, because while Weird Al isn’t weird, Tiny Tim was.

He played a ukulele (which for your elucidation is a Hawaiian instrument and which translates: “jumping flea.”) and sang popular songs. But the songs he sang weren’t popular at the time — they were the hits of the 1920’s. He had a good strong voice, but he sang a lot of the time in a rousing falsetto. Beyond that, he seemed childlike most of the time and spoke in a formal manner of the past (or what he, and the rest of us, thought was the past). He was in his mid-30s, which was ancient for a pop musician in the ’60s, since the field was covered by the boomers. And as opposed to all the wild rockers, he still lived with his parents.

Today, he’d probably be considered on some spectrum or other, but back then, lacking such classifications, we just thought him odd, but harmless. Plus I think most of us regarded him with affection of one sort or another, perhaps because we sensed he was a world-class naif.

Interestingly, when it came to music, he was no flake and was admired by musicologists as being one of the foremost archivist of 1920s music. No less a luminary than Bob Dylan said “A lot of people think he was a joke. But no one knew more about old music than Tiny Tim did. He studied it and he lived it. He knew all the songs that existed only in sheet music. When he passed away, we lost a national treasure.”

But what does all that have to do with his wedding?

Well, quit being so impatient, and keep reading and you’ll find out.

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When weird was normal

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At the height of his fame, he appeared on TV talk and variety shows, racking up 13 appearances on Johnny Carson. So when he announced he was getting married, Carson said his show would be the perfect venue, and that’s what happened. And that’s why on that Dec. 17 I was plopped in front of the tube, watching history in the making.

Of course it wasn’t history in the making in any sense, but it sure drew and held a whole lotta peeps’ attention.

One reason was the choice of his bride, Miss Vicki — a Tiny Tim groupie from New Jersey whose real name was the less lofty-sounding Victoria Mae Budinger. She was cute and seemed about as naive as TT, which was perfectly understandable since she was 17. Given her age and his (37), many people branded him a cradle robber. But I’m not so sure they weren’t cherry picking their outrage, because there was a lot less of it when in 1966 and at the tender age of 50, Frank Sinatra married the long-in-the tooth 21 year-old Mia Farrow. Maybe because they weren’t seen as weird (whether they were or not), them getting married wasn’t either.

But Tiny Tim, no matter how anyone cut it, was weird. And let’s face it: Weirdness draws audiences, much like the old sideshows at the circuses and carnivals of my youth. Plus, given the 60’s Zeitgeist, weird was practically the norm.

While the war in Vietnam was tapering off, it still provided more than enough death, destruction and government lies to keep the six o’clock news hopping. It also kept anti-war protest and radical groups in full force — neither of which anyone at the time had ever seen in America, at any scale.

And of course there were all sorts of other radical groups — who in the case of of mad bombers ran the gamut from the consciously homicidal to the accidentally suicidal. Both of which stayed in the news continually.

Fashion went from as plain-as-can-be to over-the-top psychedelic. Psychedelics went over the top too.

As far as art went, you could take your pick. With music, you had Frank Zappa and his GTO’s and Wild Man Fisher. With painting, you had Andy Warhol and his autographed Brillo boxes. Warhol also made a movie called “Sleep.” It was, as the name implied, five hours and 21 minutes of some guy snoozing. At its 1964 premier in NYC, nine people showed up, and two left within the first hour, thus showing maybe there was some hope.

Not to be outdone, in 1967 Yoko Ono presented a video masterpiece called Film No. 4, which was 80 minutes of close-ups of naked dupas walking. Apparently, its premier, as opposed to Warhol’s, was a raging success. To me, that’s a perfect comment on the times. Or as Hunter S. Thompson put it (and he should’ve known), “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”

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Draggin’ out a drag

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And in the midst of this Mulligan stew of strangeness we have Tiny Tim and Miss Vicki tying the knot on the Carson show. And maybe even more strangely, me watching the whole damned thing, and feeling like a fool for it.

Why did I feel like a fool? Because the wedding, like everything else on TV, had nothing to do with actual entertainment. Instead, like all television, it was just a hook to get the Great Unwarshed (of which I was clearly one) to watch commercials. And to that end, while the ceremony itself took a mere 9 minutes, it took seemingly forever for it to take place — almost as bad as the champion boxing matches.

When I went to bed that night, I was furious at myself for having gotten sucked in to that blather. And for quite a while afterward, the more I thought about it, the more disgusted I was with my stupidity.

But there was one saving grace. A while later I found out that show had the largest viewing of any show in the entire ’60s. They estimated 45 million people watched it, which was roughly one out of five Americans at the time.

So while I still felt like a nitwit for having sat through all that dreck, at least I had a lot of company.