All this I Love Lucy talk is making me think about my freshman year roommate. She was from Miami and she was pretty unhappy about being at Northwestern for multiple reasons: all her friends were at Florida International University; Chicago was experiencing a fiendishly cold winter; and she was kinda not into the whole “big-at-home fish thrown into really huge and crowded pond” experience that was life at a competitive college, so she joined the conservative paper at NU in part because it had a small staff and would thus allow her to move up the ranks faster. But she wasn’t ready for the backlash that ensued when she distributed copies of it to each person in the dorm, which staffers were required to do. (The ’90s!) It was pretty traumatic—lots of angry white-board notes, crying, all that. What else. She drank Ovaltine and left half-finished cups of it around our (pretty small) room; her sister would drive out from Grinnell to do her laundry once a month; she had a thing for Toad The Wet Sprocket and was as impulsively obsessive about Q101 bands as I was about bands on Sub Pop and Kill Rock Stars. (She did let me use her computer to get on the internet, which was nice, although we would argue over tying up the phone line; ah, the days of dialup and one phone line per tiny dorm room.)
When she was depressed, which seemed to be pretty often, she would watch VHS tapes of I Love Lucy for hours on end. I would make myself scarce—go to the computer lab, dick around in the dorm’s radio station—in order to avoid the screeching comedy that overtook our small, dark space. Hearing even the opening harp-flourish of I Love Lucy’s theme now makes me agitated and feeling like I need to escape whatever place I’m in.
I looked her up on Facebook. She’s married now but she kept her birth surname. Her Facebook picture is a nice shot of her and her family, all in white, happy on a beach. She looks a lot better than she did in college; not sure if that’s because she’s finally content, or no longer awkward, or what. Good for her, though. At least that makes one of us.
And instead of posting a video of I Love Lucy because, yeah, no, here is a Mother Love Bone song in which Andrew Wood briefly channels Ricky Ricardo. Pretty sure never seeing Mother Love Bone live is my greatest live-music regret. And I have a lot of them.
