I Love Lucy

Greetings from Jamestown, New York and the Lucille Ball Comedy Festival!

After a few days of rest and relaxation on my porch I packed up my suitcase again and headed south of the border with my good friend Andrea.  After a brief but dramatic moment involving red peppers at customs we gleefully headed towards the birthplace and childhood home of Lucille Ball.

Yes, we had shirts made. They were black and sexy and had “Lucy, multum habetis ut explicandis!” written on it. Any true Lucy fan will recognise Ricky’s most quoted line in there somewhere.

Today we did a bus tour of the town, a lunch with Greg Oppenheimer (son of the creator of I Love Lucy) in which we heard about some of the backstage stories of the series, an acting workshop where we re-enacted the Lucy and Ethel scene where they sing their famous song about friendship while tearing each other’s dresses apart, and had a great dinner while watching an originally scripted show that highlighted some of the most famous scenes from the series.

To say that we had a great time is a gross understatement. I think we giggled constantly from when I parked the car to when I opened up my laptop to write this.

During our rehearsal in “Comedy College” Andrea and I may have gotten into a little bit of trouble. Neither of us actually remembered the scene all that well so we decided to block it our own way. The lovely teenager who seemed to be in charge was fine with this, but T. Faye Griffin, an actress who has a brief IMDB profile and a creative web page, was not impressed. Not at all. She introduced herself by saying that she had run a series of classes for the past week and “boy did we miss something”.  She then explained that she was here to help the teenager and that was it.

When she came up to us and saw our work she first told us it was wrong. We knew that, and we told her it was because we could only remember fragments of the original scene. So...here we were making some decisions and hoping for the best! Isn’t that peppy? Isn’t that swell? Isn’t that just the very spirit of performance?

No. According to T. Fay Griffin it was wrong. “Don’t mind me,” she says to us. “There is a big picture of my face on the outside of the street because they hired me to come here.” I suppose, with Andrea and I having had some experience on stage and in front of the camera, we had a look that made her feel like we didn’t really give a crap about her big-ass picture out on a street in Jamestown, New York. “But you two just go ahead and do your post-modern deconstruction,” she said as she backed away from us. Then she started doing that jazz hands thing people do when they are trying to tell you something doesn’t matter to them when it is clearly pissing them off. “I love what you’re doing! I love it!”

So we did what we wanted, everybody else loved it, and the teenager asked us twice if we could perform our version for the closing ceremonies on Sunday afternoon. By this time Miss Big Ass Picture was nowhere to be seen. So much for being helpful. Maybe being helpful was answering her phone yet again while people were performing their scenes.

I still feel back for the teen ager. She was lovely and was obviously a volunteer working her dear little heart out and being saddled with Miss Big Ass Picture because the organisers wanted their money’s worth.

After a dinner where we watched some pretty good impersonators act (the actress playing Ethel seemed to channel Vivian Vance!), we took part in the Opening Ceremonies of the Lucy Olympics.  I have decided that I shall one day return to this event with a team and own the Lucy Podium. Let’s face it, with events like grape stomping and chocolate wrapping, this is the only kind of Olympics I have half a chance at winning!

Who is signing up for my team?

All pop culture cheesiness aside, I have to say that this festival is very important to the fair city of Jamestown. Certainly it is a money maker, but I really do think it is more than this. As I watched the torch go down the major street in town with a police escort, as I toured the city and saw the murals (one in progress), and as I spoke with locals about having an invasion of Lucy-lovers come to town,  there was a sense of pride of their favourite daughter and her husband. But there also seemed to be a sense of history, of a very famous person who became a touchstone for the time in which she lived. She was not just a star, she was the teenager that danced at the ballroom that was destroyed by fire when she was twenty. She used to go to the amusement park that was attended by ten thousand people annually at one time but was eventually lost to a tornado. She was a girl who started a drama club in her high school.

Lucy is an icon, a product, and a tourist attraction, this is absolutely true. But she is also personal for these people.

Tomorrow we have a cemetery tour, more Lucy Games, and a live radio show featuring original work showcasing the series and My Favourite Husband, the radio show that inspired it.

Then Eric and Andrea’s family (Carlos, Sofie and Kipi) join us in Jamestown. On Sunday we go our separate ways as Eric and I begin our road trip south.