Wise-cracking women: From Lucy to Michelle Bachman and Sarah Palin

What did you do to mark Lucille Ball’s 100th birthday on Saturday?

Hundreds of people dressed as Lucy gathered in her hometown of Jamestown, New York, in an attempt to set a world record for the most Lucille Ball imitators in one spot. I saw footage of overweight men dressed in polka dot dresses wearing red wigs and lipstick. It wasn’t pretty.

We marked Lucy’s birthday in a more sensible way by watching one of her old movies, made long before Lucy was “ditzy Lucy.” It was the 1937 comedy Stage Door, which was shown as part of Turner Classic Movies fine “Essentials” series every Saturday at 8pm. Lucy was 26-years-old when this movie was made, and she played a wise-cracking woman in a house full of wise-cracking women. Those were the days when Lucy was making movies with both the Three Stooges and the Marx Brothers. Along with a bevy of great women actors like Eve Arden and Ann Miller, she supported Ginger Rogers and Katherine Hepburn in this one. Stage Door is the sort of movie sympathetic to women that just doesn’t get made anymore. It was a comedy with melodramatic overtones about how hard it was for young women to break into the theatre. All the women lived in a boarding house for aspiring actresses called “The Footlights Club.” It was written by two giants – Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman. See it if you ever get a chance.

Just to keep our theme of sassy women going, we watched the 1972 screwball comedy What’s Up, Doc?, last night with our trusty On Demand movie feature. This movie had another unbelievable cast – Barbra Streisand, Ryan O’Neal, Madeline Kahn (in her first movie role), and some character actor favorites of mine like Kenneth Mars, Randy Quaid and Emmet Walsh. Barbra Streisand makes one smart quip after another throughout the whole movie. I’m scratching my head to come up with examples of current movies like the ones we saw this weekend with women in strong comic leads.

So I laughed a lot. That beats crying thinking about the possible world-wide economic meltdown we seem to be on the brink of, or lamenting the deaths of all those Navy Seals killed on that helicopter in Afghanistan.

I will restrain myself and only make two political comments. First, the people who are blaming the economic problems on Obama are simply idiots. This is a worldwide crisis. Obama didn’t cause the problems in Greece or Ireland or Spain or Portugal. I saw an editorial from the state-run Chinese newspaper this morning which talked about the solutions to the US economic problems in words that sounded exactly like a Tea Party speech. Think about that for a moment.

Second, I heard the commander of our forces in Afghanistan talking about the Navy Seals that died and calling them true heroes that died in the defense of liberty. There is no question about the courage of these men. But I’m sorry; I fail to see what relationship there is between the hunt for Muslims in Afghanistan and liberty. I really don‘t.

Okay, I can’t help myself – I’m going to say one more thing. Few people are connecting the two stories. They are integrally related. Over the past decade the United States has spent over a trillion dollars on two wars we have had no intention to finance. We haven’t sold war bonds or initiated a special tax to fund the war on terror. We simply borrowed money (from the Chinese) to do it. Again, Obama didn’t start this. He’s slowly stopping it, and while the pace of our exit from the Middle East frustrates me, it is a sign that Obama is more of a pragmatic moderate than the wild liberal his political opponents make him out to be. The whole mess is extremely depressing.

I was about to say I’m so sick of it I’m ready for the world to be run by wise-cracking women, but then you might think I support Michelle Bachman or Sarah Palin. No, no, no. Unlike them, Lucy’s ego had limits. She understood she was acting and was content ruling network television for a couple of decades. God help us if either Bachman or Palin become President. There won’t be anything funny about it.