As a kid growing up in a town named Normal, Ted Nichelson remembers every day after school, coming home to flip on "The Brady Bunch" reruns. He began remembering all the lines. He got to know the plot of every episode.

In life, we can all do that, becoming an authority at the unclouded, simple passions of our youth.

Ted Nichelson is 39 today.

His passion now?

OK, just re-read what you've already read.

"He knows the name of everyone and anyone who had anything to do with the show, including the guy who held up the cue cards," jokes a friend of Nichelson's, 48-year-old Susan Olsen.

You know her.

Back in the day, precisely 40 years ago now in fact, when "The Brady Bunch" first appeared on your then-humongous 19-inch TV screen, Susan was "Cindy Brady," the 8-year-old smile-box with the big brown eyes and sausage braids.

"Everything in the '70s was so bad," she chuckles today, "is it any wonder 'The Brady Bunch' was a huge hit?"

But we digress.

Next week, in honor of that late-summer night back in 1969 when "The Brady Bunch" first schlepped into TV and ultimately became one of TV's most popular families of all time, Nichelson comes out with his first book, "Love to Love You Bradys, the Bizarre Story of the Brady Bunch Variety Hour."

Olsen is a co-author.

But we digress again.

For Nichelson, a University High School and Illinois Wesleyan University grad who a decade ago, "just for fun," moved to Hollywood to experience life there, the book is a consummation.

Having met Susan a few years ago while doing Web site design ("I couldn't believe it - Cindy Brady!"), they became friends. Over time, it evolved into a partnership, too.

And the result is a 337-page, photo-filled, coffee table parody of sorts, spiced with Susan Olsen's insights, ranging from the drug use of the era and costume malfunctions on the set, to "Brady Bunch" star Robert Reed once looking at himself in a mirror to notice the pants he was cast to wear were so molding and embarrassingly tight, "you can see the whole tea set."

"The Brady Bunch didn't change my life; it formed it," says Susan, now a single mom of a 13-year-old son. "But it also availed me to experiences I'd obviously never have accomplished."

Like now, "booking" it with Ted Nichelson, the ex-after-school-TV-rerun-nutball-from-the-Heartland-who's-evolved-into-a-pop-culture historian.

"This is a dream," he says. "Even if that particular variety show is a landmark production only because it became one of worst shows in TV history."

OK, we digress.

Contact Bill Flick at flick@pantagraph.com.