Aspirations, inspirations and memories

Recently, my television has been the source of some distress.

With the exception of a few  PBS programs, there is little on the TV that entertains, gives me some sense of a good life.

To add to this dismay is the memory of television that did entertain, that did bring me a sense of the good life.

Today with the sad passing of Mary Tyler Moore, those memories become even more bittersweet.

How many of us saw the TV character of Mary Richards as an embodiment of what a young single woman’s life should be like? Real, honest, achieving, ambitious and flawed with a knockout wardrobe and an unbearably attractive apartment.

Do you remember that stained glass tambour-like window that separated the kitchen from the living area?  Or, the wood burning stove or the great triple widow next to what we believed to be a huge closet?

I was 30 years old, a relative newlywed when the Mary Tyler Moore show came on the air.  Mary’s television life was different from the life of a young married woman but it resonated so much with me that I would never miss a Saturday night episode.

We worked our social life around the Mary Tyler Moore show. I can remember one party  on South Beech Street in Syracuse at which all of the guests retreated to the bedroom to watch the show on the television while the food lay uneaten and the mood music played on in the living room.

Mary was the star and the scripts were written to showcase the story of a young ambitious woman, but if you think about the show, Mary’s character supported the stories of the others on the show.

You knew the characters as people: Gruff but with a heart of gold, Mr. Grant, Murray Slaughter and his quick wit, Ted Baxter, the dim witted news anchor, Rhoda Morgenstern, her best friend and upstairs neighbor whose self-deprecatory  quips were hysterical (“why should I eat this candy when I can just put right on my hips”), Sue Anne Nivens, the oversexed “Happy Homemaker” and Phyllis Lindstrom her nosey landlady…and all of the others who made up a fictional family that her character  and  we all loved.

The show was and is an example of both great writing and great acting without pandering to off color language and bizarre plots. Underlying it all was the not-so-groundbreaking current of people who cared for one another.

Today’s newscasts talk about the show as a breakthrough for women. Maybe for men who thought differently about female roles, but for me and my contemporaries, Mary was how it was.  Maybe a little more classy, but definitely the way it was — or should be.

You never thought that Mary’s story was any different than your story.

Why wouldn’t a competent young woman try to live her life with style, exploring  her options, building friendships, making mistakes — and that was another of the charming points of that show. Mary’s character did make mistakes. She was someone you aspired to be because you knew that no one is perfect.

I cried when I learned of Mary Tyler Moore’s death.

It was for the woman and also for the characters that she embodied.  I don’t usually cry about the passing of celebrities, but her portrayal of Laura Petry in the ‘60s and Mary Richards in the ‘70s resonated with my life to the extent that I guess I thought that I knew her, if not as a real person, as someone who would be a friend if we did meet.

When I got my Kindle Fire tablet, the first thing I did was go to Amazon and buy the first season of the MaryTyler Moore show.

Mary, the real Mary, didn’t wander through life unscathed. Suffering the loss of her child, facing the daunting task of staying alive with a virulent form of diabetes and later an addiction to alcohol, she still gave us the kind of entertainment that is timeless, an uplifting sense of lives well lived, maybe scrubbed a little clean, and this is always a question … should we not have aspirational entertainment? Life is just too real to seek it out as a diversion.

Thank you Mary Tyler Moore for hours and hours of what I needed and what, now in my mid ‘70s plus, still need.

Yesterday I bought the second, third and fourth season of the Mary Tyler Moore show.

I’ll be looking for the big M that hung on the wall next to the door smiling that although MTM has left the building, Mary Richards is still here. Memories.