I think I actually was sick the day that I discovered I Love Lucy, and not playing hooky from school as I would do from time to time later just to have the pleasure of staying at home in bed watching Lucy and eating ice cream.
Everyone has a favorite episode - the chocolate factory, Vitameatavegamin. When I mentioned this post to a friend, her eyes lit up and she said, "What about when Lucy goes to Paris, determined to get a designer dress, and she gets a dress made out of a burlap sack?" I don't know if my favorite episode was the one that hooked me that first time I was home from school, but it's "Lucy and the Loving Cup." Lucy puts a trophy on her head just to spite her husband, Ricky, who is going to present the trophy that night, but then she can't get it off. She spends the rest of the episode wandering New York City trying to get the loving cup off her head. I loved the fact that the trophy has two handles that correspond to where Lucy's ears would be, thus making Lucy appear as if she were some type of robot, a very hapless robot at that.
By the time I discovered I Love Lucy, I had already watched The Lucy Show and Here's Lucy when I was in pre-school, which I guess is like watching The Godfather II and The Godfather III before you've seen The Godfather. I don't remember either show very well, but when I discovered the real deal later in I Love Lucy, it all made sense - the dizzy demeanor, the slapstick humor - as did the realization that in watching the later two shows first, I'd missed seeing her in her prime, but much like seeing a retired racehorse going around the track, she still had plenty of the sparkle that had made her a star.
The Lucy Show is the story of Lucy, and her two children, and Mr. Mooney (Gale Gordon), Lucy's insufferable, pompous boss at the bank. I had a limited understanding of what Lucy actually did at the bank, but I had very positive feelings about banks as a whole. Banks smelled nice and that they played breezy, easy listening music featuring lots of perky pizzicato strings, although that may have been my own internal soundtrack echoing the theme music of the opening that I unconsciously played in my head as we waited in line for a teller. Banks dispensed money and equally importantly, miniature rolls of five flavor Life Savers to young passbook saving account holders. It was a shock to discover later on that not all banks distributed candy.
There were several different opening montages for The Lucy Show, I think I enjoyed the show most for the "kaleidoscope" opening montage. Beside being kaleidoscopic and therefore cool and worthy of my appreciation even now, the opening montage was easier to understand than the actual dialogue and situations simply because it was repeated with every viewing and was purely visual/musical.
I remember Here's Lucy even less. I know that her real-life children played her television children. Again, I was hooked into the opening montage, featuring a claymation Lucy in a top hat and tails dancing with a cane, and I was always hoping that there would be a show that would stick to that format, claymation, even imagining the ultimate showdown between claymation Lucy and Mr. Peanut (who I planned to marry at that time), who dressed similarly - maybe a dance-off?
What was clear to me, however, was that Lucy seemed to be unencumbered, free. In The Lucy Show, there was never a man telling her what to do, except for Mr. Mooney, and Lucy's goal seemed to be to drive him nuts, which seemed entirely worthy. It seemed to me that she worked because she wanted to or she liked to.
But Lucy's antics are best when she's trying to shake off boredom or she wants to misbehave (and sometimes both), and as wonderful as Gale Gordon was in Lucy's shows, he was not the ideal foil for her. Lucy feels derision for Mr. Mooney, but at heart, she's transgressive, and transgressive types are not looking to misbehave with people for whom they feel derision. That gets boring. Transgressive types need someone for whom they feel a mixture of fear, respect, and maybe even love.
By the time I got to I Love Lucy, I had an ironic sense of understanding about the fate of Desi Arnaz, having already watched unfettered, liberated Lucy, and every time his character, Ricky Ricardo, wouldn't let her sing at the Tropicana, I thought to myself, "You won't last, my friend."
It took me a while to appreciate how good a foil Ricky is for Lucy and just why it works so well. Ricky keeps Lucy on a short leash, thus creating Lucy's boredom. She yearns to be his equal, the ultimate public acknowledgment of which would be singing and dancing at his side at his nightclub. Ricky is smart, funny and quick-witted on his own, and his constant no! to Lucy's please? only spurs her on even further. She loves him, fears him, and respects him, thus giving her transgressions a deeper core than mere derision. That zesty, unstable power struggle rooted in genuine love and physical attraction is what drives Lucy, and if he claims she drives him crazy, we all know he's just as addicted to the dance.
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