Lucille Ball Archives - Ramblin' with Roger

April rambling: Beat the Broligarchs

Rod Serling documentary

Catbird: “When I viewed it again, it looked like a heart that had been run over by a tire, which reflected my yet-unrealized reaction to what DOGE had just started. My conscious mind didn’t know yet, but my hand did. What a revelation!”

Patriotic Millionaires challenge oligarch power with sweeping economic plan: How to Beat the Broligarchs

EFF’s lawsuit against DOGE will go forward. ”Sweeping and uncontrolled access by DOGE agents who were not properly vetted or trained.”

Did you hear Canadians are wearing MAGA hats? There, they mean Make
America Go Away

Working to Preserve .Gov Websites. “Web archiving is more than just preserving history—it’s about ensuring access to information for future generations. “

Tuberculosis Is Back in the Spotlight. Does the U.S. Even Care?

Buster Keaton made a silent film AND a talkie … in 1965

Lucille Ball – ‘America Alive!’ 1978 [Interview]. from that, a viral clip: When Lucy said, “Take your hands off her, David.”

Val Kilmer, An Unclassifiable Heartthrob Who Always Had an Edge

Jay North, Child Star of ‘Dennis the Menace,’ Dies at 73. He was best known for playing the towheaded Dennis Mitchell on a sitcom that ran on CBS from 1959 to 1963, which I watched.

Goodbye Park City: Sundance Film Festival Heading to Colorado

Does ginger ale really taste better on a plane?

When You’re Better Off Skipping a Court Date and The Cat That Inherited Millions and The Man Who Takes Apostrophes Very Seriously

Until then…

Appeals Court Orders Thousands of Voters to Verify Information in Contested N.C. Election. The ruling was a win for the Republican who narrowly lost a State Supreme Court race in November. The case has tested the boundaries of post-election litigation.

His order on voter policy could disenfranchise millions, but multiple lawsuits have already sprung up to challenge it.

DOGE Is Not Cutting Government Spending

Judd Legum on Popular Information: “Musk has set a goal to cut $1 trillion annually from federal spending through DOGE. But his efforts have largely ignored the DoD, according to data compiled by the Musk Watch DOGE Tracker.”

HHS Job Cuts: Entire CDC Team Focused On Infertility And IVF Is ‘Gone’

Not to mention…

States Challenge Trump’s Effort to Dismantle Library Agency. In a lawsuit, 21 state attorneys general argued that the steep cuts to the Institute of Museum and Library Services violate the Constitution and other federal laws related to spending. Call on Congress to Protect Federal Library Funding

Smithsonian’s Chief in the Hot Seat. The executive order demanding change at the institution presents a perilous test for Lonnie G. Bunch III, its secretary, whom the White House calls a partisan Democrat.

‘It’s a shambles’: DOGE cuts bring chaos, long waits at Social Security for seniors. “Elderly and disabled people — and those who care for them — are encountering a knot of bureaucratic hurdles and service disruptions… ‘The system, it’s broken down,’ Veronica Sanchez, a 52-year-old medical practice manager in Canoga Park, said, after calling a Social Security hotline and waiting on hold for six hours.”

FOTUS Is Trying to Axe Collective Bargaining for 1 Million Federal Employees

LA Times: Regime “has issued an order demanding that all national parks remain open amid severe staffing shortages — an action that one conservation group called ‘reckless and out of touch’ as park personnel brace for millions of visitors this summer.

‘I was a British tourist trying to leave the US. Then I was detained, shackled and sent to an immigration detention centre’

Trans Athletes and Tasers & Excited Delirium: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

Another rupture: Keystone pipeline shutdown threatens fuel prices and exposes pattern of failure

Critic’s Notebook: ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ and Trump, Reunited

How Actually Crazy is This Mess?

An Experiment in Recklessness: The global trading system is only one example of the administration tearing something apart, only to reveal that it has no plan for how to replace it.

Tariffs: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

What to Learn (and not Learn) from Trump’s Tariff Blunders

Jon Stewart on The Botched Tariff Rollout & The Stock Market’s Meltdown | The Daily Show, especially from 15:35 to the end

He’s not very bright; Inside his dumb lifelong obsession with tariffs and trade deficits

Why Lutnick Displaced Musk As ‘Most Loathed’ Adviser. Lutnick: “The army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little screws to make iPhones — that kind of thing is going to come to America.”

I don’t make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts.– Will Rogers

**Former President Harry S Truman appeared on Jack Benny’s television show in 1959, when the show was filmed from the Truman Presidential Library in Independence, MO.**

Was Binghamton unavailable?

Rhode Island plays a starring role in the forthcoming Rod Serling documentary:

“The state’s Film & Television Office… touted how the Ocean State is playing a starring role in a forthcoming documentary on the life of Rod Serling, the legendary mastermind and iconic narrator behind the pioneering, 1950s and ‘60s science-fiction television series, ‘The Twilight Zone.’

“The film, authorized by Serling’s two daughters, Jodi Serling and Anne Serling, is being produced by Verdi Productions, an East Greenwich, R.I.-based production company. State officials announced… that Leonardo DiCaprio’s company, Appian Way Productions, has also joined the production…

“Although Serling, who died in 1975 at the age of 50, hailed from upstate New York, the documentarians used locations in East Greenwich, Providence, and Wakefield — the village in South Kingstown, R.I. — to help recreate moments in Serling’s life, ‘mirroring the same cinematic black and white style’ of his signature show, officials said.”

MUSIC

My Spine Is The Bassline: Dave Allen (1955-2025)

Fees, Fees, Fees – A Randy Rainbow Song Parody

Everybody Plays The Fool – The Main Ingredient

Lonely -Justin Bieber & benny blanco

Locust Laced – Sleigh Bells

Manic Monday – Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day feat. Susanna Hoffs of The Bangles

The Lady of Shallot – Loreena McKennitt

Coverville 1528: The AC/DC Cover Story IV and 1529: The Pixies Cover Story III

Girl – Beck

The Parables by Bohuslav Martinů

We Got The Beat – The Go-Go’s

Chuck Mangione’s Land Of Make Believe

Fool In The Rain – Led Zeppelin

Sergei Rachmaninoff Vocalise

The Bank of Harmony with a medley of three Hanna-Barbera theme songs

All Day and All of the Night – The Kinks

One More Night – Phil Collins

What A Fool Believes – The Doobie Brothers

William Tell Overture – Rossini

Movie review: Being The Ricardos

Aaron Sorkin

When she co-hosted the Oscars recently, Amy Schumer “took a swing at Aaron Sorkin’s Being The Ricardos, the Nicole Kidman-Javier Bardem film about Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. ‘Aaron Sorkin: a genius! Truly, right? I mean, the innovation to make a movie about Lucille Ball without even a moment that’s funny? Not your fault, Nicole.'”

But Sorkin was not making a comedy. “This is no more a comedy than the ‘King of Comedy’ or ‘Joker’ is a comedy.”

I read all of this after I saw the movie, which I watched just before the Oscars. The harsh criticism I’d read about how Nicole’s face was stiff whereas Lucy’s was rubbery had made me wary about even viewing it.

I should note that I’m a big fan of Ball and Arnaz. It’s less about the I Love Lucy series, which of course I had seen many times. It was more about WHY I was able to watch it over and over. Desilu essentially invented the rerun at a time when the general perception was “We already saw that episode. Why would we watch it AGAIN?”

I’m enough of a devotee that our family stopped at the Lucy-Desi Museum in Jamestown, NY in 2016, which was very much worth visiting. We bought the I Love Lucy DVD box set there, which my daughter has watched in its entirety. Also, in 2019, I read her autobiography, Love, Lucy. It was written in 1964, but not published until 1996, after both Desi and Lucy had died.

The vision thing

So I think that Sorkin achieved what he was going for, although he consolidated certain elements that took place over a few weeks into one week of shooting an episode of I Love Lucy. We see the Red Scare stuff, discussed in her book; this has to do with her grandfather, who helped raise her. The couple wanted to include Lucille’s pregnancy in I Love Lucy, but the network and sponsors thought it was a terrible idea; we now know how it turned into comedy gold.

Was Desi unfaithful to Lucille? The bitter relationship between Vivian Vance (Nina Arianda) and the much older William Frawley (J. K. Simmons), who played the neighbors Ethel and Fred Mertz, was on full display. We see the plan to fatten up Ethel/Vivian.

Ultimately, I mostly enjoyed it. There’s latitude in the biopic genre that I allow for. I do agree with the assessment by Ken Levine that the writers on the show were perhaps treated more shabbily than necessary.

The film received The Women Film Critics Circle Awards’ Hall of Shame “For taking a beloved female icon and turning her intelligence, talent, and work ethic against her as a harping shrew, and the deeply flawed men around her as downtrodden male saviors.” I think this is a bit harsh. Lucille Ball was one tough woman.

Bardem, Kidman, and Simmons were all nominated for Oscars, though they did not win. Kidman did get the Golden Globe, though no one cares anymore. I was actually most intrigued by the performance of Nina Arianda’s Viv. About 2/3s of the critics liked Being The Ricardos.

If you are looking for great recreations of I Love Lucy bits, this is not the film for you. If not, you might like it.

Book review: Love, Lucy by Lucille Ball

Ginger Rogers’ mother Lela became a stage mom to Lucy and many other aspiring actresses.

The book Love, Lucy by Lucille Ball I actually read last summer, on a transcontinental flight from Newark to San Diego. I meant to write about it then, but forgot. Now it’s nearly thirty years since Lucy died, so I guess it’s time.

If you don’t know, Lucy was the star of the most popular situation comedy in the US in the 1950s, I Love Lucy. She had successful programs in the 1960s as well, The Lucy Show/Here’s Lucy.

The existence of the book is a tale of its own. After Lucy died on April 26, 1989, her children, Lucie Arnaz and Desi Arnaz, Jr., were tasked with wading through artifacts. Lucie came across a 300-page manuscript written by her mother c. 1964.

Most people, including Lucy’s closest friends, didn’t know about the existence of this work at all. Perhaps she didn’t want to share it because her portrayals would hurt her then-ex-husband Desi Arnaz. But he had died in 1986, so the book was published in 1996 and became a best-seller.

The details were astonishingly precise, starting with her birth on August 6, 1911, in her grandparents’ apartment in Jamestown, NY, in the southwest corner of the state. She had many challenges growing up, including her father dying at age 28 when she was not quite four.

She was raised by an extended family, including her beloved grandfather, who everyone called Daddy. Later, there was an what she thought was a legal injustice borne by Daddy which affected Lucy’s viewpoint throughout his life.

Lucy took almost any job in New York City: showgirl, extra in Broadway and road shows, modeling coats and dresses, posing for illustrators. It was as a “Chesterfield (cigarette) girl” that first got her to Hollywood.

Ginger Rogers’ mother Lela became a stage mom to Lucy and many other aspiring actresses. “Lela was the first person to see me as a clown with glamour.”

Many more tales were shared before she met this Cuban musician and band leader named Desi. They fell hard for each other, and married rather quickly after they met.

Keeping their marriage together, though, was challenging, as they were both on the road separately a lot. I Love Lucy, in part, was born from addressing that need.

If Lucille Ball, or her TV roles are interesting to you, or if you’re just trying how one young woman worked hard to make it in show biz, I highly recommend Love, Lucy.

Ken Levine: The History of Sitcoms podcast.

What’s My Line? game show (1954), Lucille Ball as mystery guest.

Lucy-Desi Museum

The radio show My Favorite Husband morphed into the TV show I Love Lucy.

Lucile Ball's monogrammed 1972 Mercedes-Benz — Lucile Ball’s monogrammed 1972 Mercedes-Benz

Lucy-Desi Museum, Jamestown, NY: July 12, 2016

A stop in Jamestown was a last-minute addition to the itinerary when we decided that we should see a state park on the return trip, rather on the way out.

We knew that Jamestown was the birthplace of actress Lucille Ball, back on August 6, 1911. There’s something about a small town that needs to embrace its stars the way that New York City or Los Angeles simply cannot. Her childhood home is in nearby Celeron, on what was 8th Street, but is now Lucy Lane. Those homes are privately owned.

But in downtown Jamestown is the Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Museum on West Third Street, where you can find out about the early years of Lucy, from her grade school piano to costumes and gowns from her wardrobe, and some paintings and photos that once hung in her Beverly Hills home.

You also get the background about her future first husband, the Cuban-born Desiderio Alberto Arnaz y de Acha, III (1917-1986), whose father was the youngest mayor of Santiago, and his mother’s father an executive at Bacardi Rum. The family fortune was seized during the Batista revolution of 1933, and the family eventually fled to Miami, FL.

I was particularly interested in learning about a radio show called My Favorite Husband, starring Ball and Richard Denning, who played the characters of Liz and George Cugat, as a happily married couple. “Beginning with the 26th episode on January 7, 1949, confusion with bandleader Xavier Cugat prompted a name change Cooper.” Apparently, coincidentally, Desi Arnaz had played guitar for Cugat.

My Favorite Husband morphed into the TV show I Love Lucy, with Desi as Ricky Ricardo, a struggling orchestra leader, and Lucy as Lucy (nee McGillicuddy), a housewife with show business fantasies but no real talent. It would be difficult to overstate the significance of this television show on the medium.

Adjacent to the Luci-Desi Museum, and at no additional charge, is the Desilu Studios, which has costumes and prop. But most impressively, it has replicas of both the Ricardos’ New York City apartment of the first six seasons, and the Hollywood Hotel suite of The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour (shown), thirteen hour-long episodes which aired from 1957 to 1960.

“On March 2, Desi’s birthday, 1960, the day after the last hour-long episode was filmed, Lucille Ball filed for divorce from Desi Arnaz.” But they managed to maintain a friendship until he died of cancer. She died in 1989

Desilu Studios would produce Lucy’s subsequent programs, plus Dick Van Dyke Show, Mission: Impossible and Star Trek.

Even though she was largely unfamiliar with I Love Lucy, The Daughter was captivated with the actress and wanted an Andy Warhol-designed cup as a souvenir. We were so fond of the site that we recommended the Lucy-Desi Museum for some family members at the family reunion.

We did NOT see the Scary Lucy statue that was not too far away but agree that the new rendering is much more suitable.

All photos c 2016 by Lydia P. Green

July rambling #1: a dog for mayor of Schenectady, and the benefits of music

“There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.” – Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)

On ISIS’ Terms: Courting a Young American.

Nicholas Winton, Rescuer of 669 Children From Holocaust, Dies at 106. Here’s the 60 Minutes piece from 2014.

Why Don’t the Poor Rise Up? Is it because of a loss of the spirit of e pluribus unum?

John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight on transgender rights.

Same-Sex Marriage DOES Threaten “Traditional” Marriage. It’s “a threat to those who do not believe in EQUALITY between the sexes in general.”

So much anger about love. Related: There are 6 Scriptures about homosexuality in the Bible. Here’s what they really say. He could have gotten into St. Paul’s interesting pro-celibacy position in 1 Corinthians 7.

100 Percent Is Overrated. People labeled “smart” at a young age don’t deal well with being wrong. Life grows stagnant.

John Green explains — in under eight minutes — the mess that is the economy of Greece.

Leonard Starr, R.I.P.

Stephen R. Bissette: comics pioneer & evangelist, from Radio New Zealand.

Dondi creator Irwin Hasen’s final interview.

I Can’t Believe This Is an Archie Comic.

A most disturbing story about Jackie Fox of the Runaways: One famous band. One huge secret. Many lives destroyed.

Garrison Keillor sees transition out of ‘A Prairie Home Companion’.

Ken Levine’s ode to radio, and your own “radio station.”

Brian Eno Lists the Benefits of Singing: A Long Life, Increased Intelligence, and a Sound Civilization.

Polyphonic overtone singing – Anna-Maria Hefele.

Keith Richards: Life. Full Documentary Movie – 1 hour.

Music video: “HAVE A NICE DAY” – WORLD ORDER.

Songs that Stephen Sondheim wishes he’d written. (This is part 3, but the first two are linked within.)

Paul McCartney Opens Up About Lennon, Yoko, and More. “Our greatest living rock star on why Lennon’s a martyr, who gets the credit, and touring in his seventies.”

Nice story about guitarist Lawrence Juber.

Now I Know: A Tale of One Cities.

Leonard Maltin remembers Omar Sharif. I noted that I knew him better from reading his bridge column, initially with Charles Goren, trying (and failing) to ascertain the art of the artificial bid.

BBC Radio 2003 half-hour documentary of the romantic (and business) relationship of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz available for the month of July. Here’s Mark Evanier’s brief encounter with them.

Korean age.

Meet The Obscure Exclamation Comma: Because Excitement Can Happen In The Middle Of A Sentence. Sorry, I ain’t buying.

A Dog Named Diamond Is Running for Mayor of Schenectady, New York. And her owner, Kathy, sits about ten feet from my desk at work. In fact, I have Roger Fur Mayor bumper sticker on my office cubicle wall, from when that cat ran in 2011.

Maria from Sesame Street retires. That would be Sonia Manzano.

Muppets: Congressional Muppets and what is marriage and number six and a thank you.

This Crazy Fan Theory About ‘Jeopardy!’ Actually Makes Total Sense. Or not.

GOOGLE ALERT (me)

The Friends of the Albany Public Library presented the library with a check at the Washington Avenue branch. “The $3,500 will go towards the costs of the summer reading program. Albany’s Tulip Queen was also on hand for the presentation.”

Preparing the circus’ center ring. The state of the Republican debate.

Jaquandor links to stuff.