.
I don't know what this will do to my rad reputation, but I wish to state my unambivalent admiration for Lucille Ball's comic talents, as well as her body of work. She is probably the most important artist in the history of American television. No shit. You can criticize "I Love Lucy" for presenting the story of how the chaotic ambitious female must be frustrated on a weekly basis, lest the patriarchal order of the world fall apart, but note that this same chaos-maker is the featured attraction, and the show is not called "I Suppress Lucy." It's really more pre- than anti-feminist. Anyway, it was the most popular TV show ever. Beyond this, who usually remembers that as the absolute boss of Desilu, Ms. Ball decided against her advisers to green-light two high-risk projects that had been rejected everywhere else, both of which had inestimable influence: "Star Trek" and "Mission Impossible." No doubt the former has taken up a lot of space in the lives of the majority of people reading these words. And yeah, we're grown up and we know that "Star Trek" should be subtitled as "A Book of Silly Parables on American Empire," whereas "Mission Impossible" is "The Whitewashed Adventures of CIA." But there you go. The lasting impacts are that one introduced Big Idea entertainment to TV and provoked a mass nerd culture that's only now beginning to run out of steam, 45 years later, while the other was at least a small revolution in storytelling style.
Now I'm going to have to look up the details on everyone's FBI file, starting with Lucy.
SPOILER: FULL SOLUTION COMING UP...Tupac - Zimmerman - Lucy - Hendrix - Einstein - Lennon - Malcolm X
Janis - Lenny Bruce - Cesar Chavez - Josephine Baker - William Faulkner - Marilyn - Picasso
Jack London - Jane Fonda - Abbie Hoffman - Brian Wilson - King - Warhol - Lillian Hellman
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.
To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.
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