Since 1998, the logo on the Google search engine homepage has included hundreds of doodles, drawn by a team of designers. They’ve outdone themselves today in a salute to the 100th birthday of the great comedienne Lucille Ball.
I can remember my nana and my mother laughing hysterically at Lucy on our black and white TV. And right now, I’m sitting in my living room laughing out loud at YouTube videos of “I Love Lucy” episodes today.
Besides being side-splittingly funny, the “I Love Lucy” show was ground-breaking in many ways:
– the first mixed race marriage on TV
– the first pregnant woman to play a pregnant woman on TV, although the censors made them call it “expecting”. More people watched the birth of “Little Ricky” that was written into the script right before her real-life birth than watched the inauguration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower
– Ball was the first woman to own her own studio
– Lucille Ball once registered as a voter for the Communist party as a favor to her grandfather Frederick Charles Hunt, but escaped the Congressional witch hunts of the McCarthy era
Desi Arnaz’ oft-quoted first impression of Ball’s extraordinary beauty was “That’s a hunk o’ woman”. And, boy oh boy, was she ever!
In this famous “I Love Lucy” video clip
– which got the longest TV audience laugh in history at 65-seconds – Lucy and Ethel (have for a typically improbable reason,) just stuffed their clothes with raw eggs, just as Ricky enters to demand that he and Lucy rehearse a tango routine.
Although every second of the show, which often appeared ad-libbed, was rehearsed, Lucy insisted that the routine be rehearsed with hard boiled eggs instead of raw ones so the scene would be fresh to Desi and to the audience.
Here’s a toast of Vitamitameatavegamin, Vitavetavegivac, Mitameatamigamin, Mitavatameatimac to you, Lucy!
Lucy insisted that the routine be rehearsed with hard boiled eggs instead of raw ones so the scene would be fresh to Desi and to the audience.