Our trip is slowly winding down now. We slept very well in our casino parking lot, where it was quiet all night. A torrential thunderstorm came along at about 9:30 a.m., but other than that, and the thousand or so seagulls who also spent the morning in the parking lot with us (poop!), it was really a nice pause in the action.
We continued on our way just after 10:00, timing ourselves to arrive in Jamestown, NY just before 11:00, the opening time for the Lucille Ball/Desi Arnaz museum in the quaint little downtown there. We were lucky to find curbside parking just a couple of doors down from the museum. We enjoyed it very much, although we didn't love it as much as we loved the Wizard of Oz museum in Kansas. It was similar in idea-- a background of both Lucy and Desi's life, and the of The Lucy Show, and of their lives after they moved on from that point.
The Lucy Show started as a radio show called My Favorite Husband, which Lucille Balll starred in (Joey said he's heard most of the episodes on the Olde Time Radio station he listens to on Sirius Radio.) When they decided to make it into a TV show, she suggested her husband Desi Arnaz for the part. The sponsors were not wild about the idea, but eventually they gave in (no Desi, no Lucy!) and the show became the most popular show on television. Interestingly, Jamestown was Lucille Ball's home town. Desi actually came from a very prominent Cuban family--his mother was one of the heirs for Bacardi Rum (her father was one of the three founders) and his father was prominent in Cuban government before Batista took it over. The family owned a lot of property, including in southern California ("Ventura" is a family name.) Desi and Lucy divorced right after the show ended, and she went on to continue her career on television while he concentrated on production behind the scenes. They remained close ,and their company, DesiLu, produced many other hit shows.
We liked the museum, but thought they skimped on information about the actors who played Ethel and Fred Mertz-- they gave at least as much background on the writers and even on some of the people behind the scenes. They also didn't do enough to share the music from Desi's Cuban orchestra, which was quite successful in its own right before he became so involved in DesiLu. We would have liked more interview videos and things like that, and they really needed a small room where they played reruns of the various Lucy TV shows for people to watch (the Wizard of Oz museum continually runs the movie in the museum.) So we think the museum could have been "done" better in some ways, but we did enjoy the stop anyway.
We arrived at Ed's, just outside Ithaca, NY, at about 6:30, and spent the rest of the evening just shmoozing. Ed made us a fabulous pizza with his own sauce and veggies from his expansive garden, super yummy! And that was pretty much our evening.
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| My impression of the Vitameatavegamin Commercial |
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