pocket book the power of a praying husband

The script wants Lucille to come off as miserable here, a housewife scrubbing at a greasy life. The other speaker is a heavy-haired actress named Vivian Vance-tonight and forever Ethel Mertz.

The audience's laughter: respectful, obedient, we'll give you this one. 'Can't you see? Flowers in a pattern of gravy.' A specially calibrated comic beat. 'Positive, Ethel'-pointing to the mark on the plate. (No, she can't show that the applause makes her happy.) 'That's a floral decoration!' Her character is doing housewifely work in the kitchen. That's not schmutz,' Lucille, as Lucy, responds. The first line of aired I Love Lucy dialogue-'You didn't get that dish clean, you know'-isn't spoken by Lucille Ball. The farm towns, sure, but mainly the hopeful and somehow still rural-in-feel urban centers of greater America, your Lansings, your Tulsas, pale towns-thataway, past Piscataway-where, to hear Lucille tell it, neighbors provide a real community (it's the sense of many hands giving you a boost), which can be lovely until in one way or another you distinguish yourself, and the many hands slide up and seize your throat. States where adults are judged too prissy to see a married couple in their marriage bed. Her image is going to be sent out via unfathomable technology-or maybe it is fathomable, but in the way prayer is fathomable-and aimed at the montage of states between New York and Los Angeles. Lucille swears this is beyond the last chance for her. (Though nobody knows yet, in 1951, if TV can bring that intensity of stardom.) But maybe huge stardom-the golden super-prominence she's after-involves more than acting. Turning to applause is acting's opposite. But turning your face to applause is not acting.

The pilot episode was terrible.Īn audience wants you to be happy, and that goes into your blood and makes you happy. There had been a pilot episode-she and Desi filmed it back in March.

Call it, this blinking red evening, her last last chance.

Pocket book the power of a praying husband