Just Like Lucy by C.R. Mason
Just Like Lucy
by C. R. Mason
Growing up in the sixties and seventies in a large family meant watching a lot of TV. Many nights I stayed up after everyone was asleep to watch World War Two movies, most of which were made after the war. My favorite was ‘The Great Escape’ with Steve McQueen. When he psychs himself and revs his motorcycle to jump over the border barbed wire fence, time seemed to stand still. That message of pushing yourself to do the impossible when the alternative is captivity has motivated me many times. I also loved double features of old monster movies on ‘Horror, Incorporated’. I learned that the bad guy is usually the good guy. Prisons seemed to house those who were not greedy, corrupt, murderous, or conformist. And whether it is angry Nazis with machine guns or villagers with torches, escape comes through daring and creativity.
Sometimes I would come home to find my mom ironing shirts and watching old ‘I Love Lucy’ reruns. Lucy seemed heroic to me, although her prison was a stylish New York apartment and her jailer a sexy Latin lover of a husband. Her character had so much talent, intelligence and enthusiasm it could not be contained in a bedroom with twin beds and a kitchenette. Most episodes featured her trying her hand, or feet, at some kind of job. She worked at the chocolate factory, she stomped grapes at the vineyard, she baked a giant loaf of bread. She often conspired to help Ricky at the Club, where he never really welcomed her talents. She was so talented and so thwarted, but she always made the best of things through humor.
In Junior High School I became friends with a very funny girl named Debbie. Debbie was thin with white blond hair. She made everyone laugh and never took anything seriously. She wore white button down shirts with T shirts or tank tops over them. She wore hip huggers with belts. She wore make up and twirled her eyelashes into points like stars. She used joy to mask any hardship. She, too, was a youngest in a big family. I began to wear white button down shirts with striped tank tops over them.
One day Debbie told me that she had a job and that they would hire me if I applied. It was at a nursing home on 46th Street. All I had to do was go there and ask to speak with Fran. Fran was an old lady herself, British, with a bit of a humpback. Like every boss that I have ever loved she never stopped moving. She talked to me while she went about her tasks and I followed her around the industrial kitchen at the Angelus Nursing Home. We toured the ‘Walk in’ cooler, the ‘walk in’ freezer, the basement storeroom all the while filling a little cart with colossal cans of peaches and giant plastic bags of pork chops. Then we went into the tiny ‘break room’ where she chain smoked Benson & Hedges while I filled out my application. My work experience was like most young women: Baby sitting, my reference: Debbie!
Other girls from my school soon worked there, too. We worked shifts from three thirty to seven thirty weekdays or weekends, or six, yes six in the morning until two thirty on week ends and Holidays. We cooked, we plated, we moved big carts with trays to the three floors of the home, we did dishes and cleaned. We chain smoked at our breaks and we played music while we worked. It still amazes me that fourteen, fifteen and sixteen year olds were left alone to run the kitchen but we often were. So we blasted the radio stations that played rock and funk. Singing ‘Play that Funky Music White Boy’ in our white uniforms we organized the tags for the diabetics, salt free, purees, lo cal, or liquid diets for the patients. We refused to wear hairnets covering our heads with little bandana kerchiefs of red or blue, there were not all the color choices back then. I was a twig back then and preferred straight cut uniforms with ample patch pockets. Our friend Pamela wore A line styles that showed off her lovely, womanly figure, and made her look like a Dutch girl. We hated how quickly our polyester dresses acquired a stench of old toast and left over Cream of Wheat. We worked hard and fast for the years through high school and soon made more money hourly than most of the other kids we knew.
People say terrible things about the nineteen seventies but looking back people were changing and questioning things just like my heroes from old movies. Adults were confusing because they seemed to not believe in their jobs, their marriages, their families, their government. But people were partying. It seemed that since you couldn’t control much about your life the only thing you could do was to celebrate it. And so we young dietary aides, high school students, college students and many, many people around us began to party hearty.
We smoked, pot, cigarettes, sometimes hash. We drank. At first we drank horrible things like Sloe Gin or bright green Lime Vodka. We went to houses where the parents were gone and danced on the furniture. We had keggers in the woods behind golf courses. Once in awhile there would be adults we knew at a party or someone’s older siblings. Our school had dances with live bands that were all school dances. We were lucky, Jimmy Jam went to our school and played for us. The music brought us together and we danced, and danced, and danced, to Earth Wind and Fire, Bee Gees and KC and the Sunshine Band. During the day we listened to Hall and Oates, Eagles, Bowie. Driving I liked Stevie Wonder, Cat Stevens and Moody Blues. My friends liked Roberta Flack, Diana Ross and Carly Simon. Dancing, singing, smoking, working.
One Friday night during that lilac period of spring there was a big party that we all wanted to go to. There were four of us girls working that evening because we were training in Debbie’s cousin who had moved here from a town in Wisconsin. She was a nice girl who was a waterskier and we all welcomed her but we wanted to get out fast to go home and shower and get to the party. We were not in the mood to do much training. There was a feeling of excitement in the air. And so we hurried. We got high in the alley during our break, we cranked the tunes and as soon as we could, we got the dinner carts back from the floors to wash up. We put the new girl on ‘pots’ scrubbing the pans, I had the sprayer to wash and load the dishwasher, Debbie was setting up for the next day down in the storeroom and my pal Carol was unloading the dishwasher and putting things away.
Aha! I knew what to do to make things go faster, I sprayed and put extra dishes in. Things were humming along. Carol and I were bumping as we worked, all of us were singing and moving fast. Then Carol had to bring back a few things that came out dirty. I needed to use more soap. I took the florescent pink soap and put more in. I added extra soap, then threw in a load. They came out cleaner. I turned to take more dishes and saw the garbage can was overflowing. I left the sink to take the can to the door, it was stinky. I went back to spraying the dishes and loading the next tray. When suddenly I heard Carol screaming.
When I looked at her she was about to be knocked over by a giant shaft of bubbles that was coming out of the dishwasher. It was a four foot by four foot column of dense bubble matter and it was ten feet long and growing. At first I was mortified! Bubbles were flowing out of the machine. I lifted the dishwasher door which moved upwards and more bubbles came out. They covered half the floor and were growing. We would never get out of there.
And then I laughed. And beautiful brunette Carol with smiling eyes laughed. And we laughed loudly. Gail, the new girl, was freaked out but she began to laugh, too. We were up to our waists in bubbles. They were white and blue and pink and sparkly. They filled half the length of the room. They floated in the air and caught the light. It was beautiful. They were after all, only bubbles.
Debbie came into the back of the kitchen. She laughed. But then she got mad. We all scrambled to restore order. I felt foolish but I could not stop laughing. Carol tried to be serious but she could not stop laughing either. I found that spraying the bubbles with cold water made them dissipate and in the end the kitchen floor had never been cleaner. Or slipperier.
Somehow we all made it to the party that night. It was at the Mississippi River. Somewhere someone was wondering in the woods yelling ‘Ruth, Tell me the Truth! Are you just like Lucy?’ all night long, I never knew who it was. But I know that laughing at adversity is the surest way to confront a problem. For in the end, most problems are like bubbles, they challenge us, scare us, catch the light, and dissipate. And sometimes they leave us laughing. Just like Lucy.