The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel -- a Review

It is wonderful! It is marvelous. The costumes! The costumes are so Audrey Hepburn. The music is so Broadway. The street scenes are so New York! The humor! The humor is so funny! I love it!

The only caveat I have is that if you have tender ears, the language may be too coarse for you. But, then considering the current administration is also from New York, maybe it's just a sort of New York accent.

If, however, that is of no concern to you -- it is wonderful!

1958 New York City -- our vivacious, innocent (relatively,) enthusiastic heroine has graduated from Bryn Mawr, has been married to Mr. Right for four years, has two children (one of each,) and lives in a palatial apartment on NYC's Upper West Side (just a couple of floors down from her parents.) She follows the correct beauty regime, has the right kind of friends, is a wonderful cook, and is very supportive of her husband's dream to be a stand-up comedian.

What could go wrong?

Oh, my goodness. I want to tell you so bad. But I have this thing about spoilers. Suffice it to say, everything that goes wrong is surprising and great material for a stand-up comedy routine. And I don't mean HIS. Kudos to the creator and writer Amy Sherman-Palladino along with Daniel Palladino.

Rachel Brosnahan is our Miriam "Midge" Maisel. She's already received a Critics' Choice Award and The Golden Globe as Best Actress for her performance in the series. And she is perfect.

You will be forgiven if you alternate between remembering Audrey Hepburn and Marlo Thomas's That Girl. Add a dash of Marabel Morgan's The Total Woman and a great dollop of Joan Rivers and you've got The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.

There are even shadows of Downton Abbey -- The Weissmans (Midge's parents -- he's a professor at Columbia and she's a doyenne) did not raise their daughter to work!



Is she an exaggeration? I don't know. Maybe. Probably. But I do remember that my own mother did not grow up expecting to work outside the home. And, although we lived in a very small town in the middle of a fly-over state, she always dressed to go into The City. That meant hat, gloves, and matching bag and shoes.

Oh and the characters around the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel! The most perfectly WRONG kind of friends.

First and foremost Susie, played by Alex Borstein, who does not live on the Upper West Side, didn't go to Bryn Mawr, and who grew up in a family that didn't give a damn what she did. But Susie gets Midge. She recognizes talent when she sees it. She can imagine a STAR.

Borstein was nominated for a Critics Choice Award as Best Supporting Actress.


And Lenny Bruce! Yes, THE Lenny Bruce.

When I asked my daughter Grace and her friend if they knew who Lenny Bruce was. That drew blank looks.

"Was he a writer?" she asked.

Books and writers. Bookstores and libraries. These are the things that I've raised my children with.

"No!" I said. "He was a comedian!"

She and her friend Spencer broke into the lyric from Rent's La Vie Boheme, "Lenny Bruce. Langston Hughes. To the stage!"

That got a blank look from me. I have seen Rent and I do like it. But I don't know the lyrics, for heaven's sake.

Spencer immediately googled Lenny Bruce on their phone. "He was prosecuted and convicted for obscenity."

"Yes! Yes! That was him," I cried. "A comedian."

They had no idea.

"You probably don't even know who Bella Abzug was, do you?" I accused. "Feminist? Congress Woman from New York?"

"No but we know who Shirley Chisholm and Betty Friedan were," they responded.

 At least that's something. However, none of these women have anything to do with The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.

I did suggest that perhaps Grace and Spencer were not old enough to enjoy the series.

Grace pointed out "You enjoy Downton Abbey and you're not that old."

Well, that did rather burst my bubble. Having spent my fervor, I admitted a couple of anachronisms that a good editor would have caught. Things that should not have been in the scripts because they didn't exist yet. Keeping in mind the story is set in 1958. There were musical nods to later Rock and Roll.

And "Midge mentions 'pantyhose' which we didn't start wearing until the mid-60s," I said.

Blank looks.

"Remember girdles and garter belts?" I asked.

More blank looks.

Maybe not as old as Downton Abbey, but oh my. When did I get this old?

Never mind.

Watch it with Google close at hand. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is available on Amazon Prime.

P.S. The second season starts filming in March. (Filming? They probably don't use film anymore. "Starts production" I should say to cover whatever it is they do these days.)

Shakespeare, Downton Abbey, and Banana Bread

image from Vic Trevino on Pinterest

                                                    "All the world's a stage,

                                                    And all the men and women merely players"

                                                    "Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
                                                    That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
                                                    And then is heard no more"

The first quote is from Shakespeare's As You Like It, classified by scholars as a Comedy. The second is from MacBeth, classified as a Tragedy. The difference my friends is that a comedy ends happily for its main characters. In Shakespeare's tragedies, they usually end up dead.

As a writer, I have a tendency to see my life as stories. Not perhaps the most pragmatic way to live, maybe not even the sanest way to live. But I'm still here.

These past few weeks have been difficult. My 90-year-old father's mind is failing. That's not unusual, unfortunately. Since I am, for all intents and purposes, responsible for his care, I've been trying to find an appropriate place for him to live.

Until last September, with a bit of help from home care givers, Daddy lived with my husband and me. That had been a good situation. Daddy has always been a social person, interested in the events of the day and the people around him and their lives. His care givers were kind, efficient, and best of all, they enjoyed visiting with him.

As his dementia worsened, it was obvious that we needed someone awake 24 hours-a-day, so he would be safe. It would have been financially prohibitive to have individual care givers around the clock, and it was too much for me. So he moved into an assisted care facility.

The facility was beautiful. He had a studio apartment and could push a button on his wrist for a care giver and they would come right away. The food was excellent -- a priority for my father. His enjoyment of food has not diminished in spite of the dementia.

Now, Daddy has always been the kind of man to get things done. He would analyze a problem, consider the options, then solve it. His natural inclination to jump-to-it has not diminished.

Therein lies the problem. He could remember to push the call button, but he couldn't remember to wait for a care giver. He's wobbly. And the disinclination to wait has led to a number of falls. None has caused injuries more serious than bruising, but injuries were inevitable if we went on this way.

Looking for a facility that offers 24-hour care was in the realm of tragedy. I would visit one. It would smell clean. The rooms were bright and cheerful. The staff were gracious and attentive, but the patients were all sitting in wheelchairs staring off into the distance.

Then a friend told me that her father had been in a residential care home. These are regular houses modified to take care of people. They have six or eight patients with trained care givers 24 hours-a-day. In the one I visited, the patients were all involved in various things. The sun had come out and a good ending to this story seemed at hand.

Before Daddy moved to his new home, he was concerned that the other people there would not "be as bad off" as he. I reassured him that some would not be and others would be worse off.

And truly that was the case. His roommate uses a walker and oxygen, still reads the daily paper and works Sudoku puzzles. One day the man was watching a television show -- on a Spanish language channel. He is not Hispanic and multilingual people are a rarity in our society. I asked him if he spoke Spanish. He looked at me as though my question made no sense at all. "No," he said. So his Sudoku puzzles may be only an entertainment in the same way. I don't know. I've not looked too closely.

When Daddy's doctor asked him if he had a roommate, Daddy surprised me by saying there was "a man who rides the same broomstick." He meant his roommate. Comedy? Daddy has always had a good sense of humor, but this was not an example of that. His confusion is advancing.

Daddy moved March 5. We moved all Daddy's stuff out of his apartment Sunday, March 6. Kind of sad really because there isn't enough room in his new bedroom for his things. He does have the really big clock that he can see in spite of his macular degeneration and the wedding picture of him and Momma and Momma's high school graduation picture.

But that night I had Downton Abbey.

Downton Abbey has been my favorite TV series for all of its six years. My husband calls it a soap opera, and I suppose it is. But I care about the characters and it always seems to come out pretty much right for those characters or at least give me hope that it will. Eventually. It is the hour that I can escape my own dramas and enjoy someone else's.

The final episode. Everything changes. Everything comes to an end.

I was actually afraid that the whole thing would be tied neatly up with a shiny red bow. Words like "syrupy sweet" and "maudlin" hovered around me, threatening to undo my great regard for Fellowes' writing. How was Julian Fellowes going to end it without caving in the most Hallmarkian fashion to the public's desire that Edith be happy?

I was more concerned with Thomas. I know, I know. I adopt unlovable parrots that bite. Lovable dogs that bite. Eccentric cats that bite. I even liked Snape all the way through the Harry Potter books.

And, whether Fellowes handled it well or not (which by-the-bye, he did handle it well) the more anxiety provoking was what was I going to do with the rest of my Sunday nights?

Then, to top it all off, I decided to make a banana nut bread with the bananas Daddy had left in his apartment.

I turned on the oven to preheat, mashed the bananas, chopped the walnuts, stirred up the batter, poured it into a Pyrex baking dish that once belonged to my mother, and discovered that my oven was not heating.

Well, #$#@!

A new question -- does banana nut bread dough freeze well? Even more importantly does it bake well after being thawed?

But my husband looked it up oven repair on the internet and ordered a part. It's so nice to be married to him. Yesterday the part came and he fixed the oven.

Today is Sunday. And we have banana nut bread to eat with whatever I do with my Sunday night.

All's Well that Ends Well, not a line from a Shakespeare play, but the title. A play that the critics cannot put into a single category, but must be included in both his comedies and his tragedies. Just like life.

                    

           Thomas in a bowler, a sure sign of success at last.        A fine loaf of banana nut bread.