Lucy goes to the movies

My sentimental journey is a path that never ends: nostalgia is in my blood.

It started last week, when Jimmy Kimmel and Norman Lear transported me back to 1978 with their re-creations of "The Facts of Life"  and "Diff'rent Strokes" that actually  made me weep as I painfully needed to recapture my youth.

Yesterday, I looked back (via a lengthly blog)  on why "West Side Story" has always been part of my world, and how that made me appreciate the Spielberg movie even more than I already had.

Tonight, I have to thank Aaron Sorkin for a wonderful surprise.

 (I don't know why I wrote that.  As a fan of "The West Wing" and "Newsroom", I'm not "surprised" that Sorkin offered something so special--I'm just surprised that it went beyond my very high expectations.)

"Being the Ricardos" is practically flawless, especially Nicole Kidman's tour de force performance as Lucille Ball. 

 I know fans objected to the casting in droves..super fans wanted Debra Messing, and only Debra Messing, after her impeccable performance as Lucy  in the "Will and Grace" tribute to this  iconic comedy.

While Debra did an unforgettable job as Lucy Ricardo, Nicole was mind-blowing as Lucille Ball.

In a way, this movie was a cousin to the one we saw yesterday, "West Side Story" only  with a Spanish-speaking man who falls for an all-American woman instead of the reverse.

Many similar themes were covered in both films--women trying to succeed in an all boys' club; racial bias.

Lucille Ball knew her stuff--she knew physical comedy, as evidenced in every performance, (think of her stomping grapes in Italy or getting drunk while filming a TV commercial) but she knew what would work and what would not.

I feel that way about myself sometimes, when I'm trying to create a blog I hope will be entertaining, and then talking myself out of keeping a sentence I just wrote. 

 (like I just now  did)

When Jim and I visited CBS studios for a live taping of the (awful) sitcom "Broke" in 2019, I kept nudging him, telling him how the line should be written, what the actors should say, what they would say if I had been the show runner.

Which of course, I was not and I never will be. 

 I'm barely a blogger. 

 And I'm no Lucy, a comic goddess who was thin and tall and red-headed and constantly dangling her cigarette.

I don't relate to the character or the actress who portrayed her, but I did sympathize with her frustration about not being heard..Feminist women KNOW comedy, even when we can't write it ourselves.

We don't do Dad jokes.

We don't laugh at bodily-function humors.

(oh, okay..THAT we do)

I am a very strange adult and was an even stranger kid, nobody has to remind me of that, but when I was in ninth grade, I was totally obsessed with "I Love Lucy." 

 I'd watch it in my bedroom, where the blanket was covered with inverted Scrabble tiles, and I'd say to myself, "if I pick up a vowel, then Lucy is going to do a pratfall in the next scenel"..weird stuff like that.

But there was this one time, I remember it so clearly, that I said to myself, "If the next tile I uncover is a "C" , then I will absolutely, positively meet someone associated with Lucille Ball within the next twenty years."

I brought that "C" tile as a good luck charm when I was a contestant on "The $10,000 Pyramid" ten years later....and a few blocks away, in just a few short years after this,  my BFF and I got first row seats..to see Lucie Arnaz in "Lost in Yonkers" on Broadway.

I know, I KNOW this should not count as an up close and personal encounter, but I'm nevertheless counting it as one.

Wanna make something of it?

I was such a super fan  that I noticed a mistake  in the closing credits in the earlier shows, that read that the music was conducted by the "Desi ArnEz Orchestra.: Arnaz is spelled with an "A"

(I noticed a similar mistake with the opening credits in Season One of "thirtysomething" where Polly Draper's character was listed as "Ellen" and changed to the correct spelling, EllYn, in subsequent seasons.)

I am very crazy and very anal, but I don't think I could live my life  any other way.

It is so nice to be triply vaxxed, confident that we can return to the movie houses that smartly space their recliner chairs at a safe distance.

And it was so great to pick a winner like "Meet the Ricardos", 'though between this and yesterday's "West Side" experiences, I wish I knew a little more Spanish. It wasn't a pre-requisite for thoroughly enjoying either movie, it just might have helped.

For once, we wisely abstained from the movie theater popcorn we had missed so much during the pandemic.  I still love it, and the comfort it gives me knowing I'm having some in a real movie house, but we've been over-dosing on it for weeks now.

One more kernel was going to make me..make me...

Well..make me feel like Lucy and Ethel did after working on the chocolate factory's conveyor belt after they  were gifted with even more candy later that evening by their clueless but well-intentioned husbands. 

I was a kernel away from exploding..and what would I possibly have left to blog about if I were  in smithereens?