Today is the 15th of January, Day of the Left Hand according to the Universal Solar Calendar, and we're not even fully halfway through this winter month. Most of the country is suffering crippling cold temperatures today. It's in the 50s right now in Atlanta, but we're forecast to have lows down in the teens for the next five or six nights.
I read in the news today that actress Joyce Randolph, who played Trixie Norton in the 1950s sitcom The Honeymooners, died Saturday in her Manhattan home. She was the last surviving actor from the show. Impermanence is swift.
Fun fact: Trixie Norton's original character was an ex-burlesque dancer, played by Broadway actress Elaine Stritch, improbably married to a Brooklyn plumber. The ex-dancer character was rewritten and recast after just one episode with the more wholesome-looking Joyce Randolph playing the character as a housewife. But in one episode, she was improbably a pool hustler, and in others, her on-stage past was obliquely referenced.
One of the reasons for the popularity of the show was the unspoken tragedy behind the characters. Despite the title, the characters weren't newlyweds and appeared to be at least in their late 20s, if not well into their 30s. But between the two couples, there wasn't a single child. Did the economic limitations of their working-class lives preclude them from affording children? Were both couples infertile? Or was there something else? The show never tells.
It may not seem so strange today to find a show centered on childless couples, but the in the ultra-bourgeois conformity of 1950s television, there were no single parents, no divorce, and I can't think of any other childless couples. Other than The Honeymooners, it was all white-picket fences, wives happy to be stay-at-homes, 2.5 children per household, and the family pet.
The Honeymooners only ran for one season (1955-56), which amazes me with regard to its impact on the national psyche. However, prior to the show's debut, The Jackie Gleason Show ran regular sketches of the Honeymooners characters since 1951, and due to their popularity, the sketches gradually expanded from 5- to 7-minute sequences to nearly the entirety of the 60-minute show. And I probably can't overemphasize to younger readers accustomed to modern streaming media how often rerun shows were repeated and aired over and over again in the '50s, '60s, and '70s.
If you were a middle-class American kid in the '50s and '60s like me, you watched hours and hours of televised reruns from the 50s, from I Love Lucy to Groucho Marx's You Bet Your Life, not to mention even older theatrical shorts like The Little Rascals and The Three Stooges, to the point where you could recite by memory every line of every episode. The reruns created a weird kind of anachronistic time dysmorphia, where on the same day you might watch Jefferson Airplane perform White Rabbit on The Smothers Brothers Show or see the first televised interracial kiss between Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Uhura, after earlier watching Spanky and Our Gang share the street with Model Ts and Trixie Norton marvel at her neighbor's new-fangled kitchen freezer.
Joyce Randolph became typecast as Trixie and never had another significant acting role.
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