Tom's Take: There’s Something About Mary
Mar 29, 2017 01:00PM ● By Style
Of all the celebrity deaths recently—and really, there’ve been way, way too many—Mary Tyler Moore’s might have hit me the hardest.
The iconic actress passed away in January at the age of 80 and with her (as cheesy as it sounds), an important part of my childhood did too.
When I was a kid, there was nothing better to my ears than my mom’s laugh. It was an utter burst of audible joy that filled the house, and my heart. When Momma’s happy, right? Not to get too psychoanalytical, but I think the reason I’ve always liked to try and make others laugh is because, in the beginning, I used to like to make her laugh. Right up until her last days, that laugh was always the best seal of approval I could ever imagine. No award, no winning lottery ticket, could ever come close to how good it felt to make her laugh.
Anyway, while my stuff was certainly never guaranteed to earn one of her guffaws (just like always, with me), two things were: The Carol Burnett Show and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. For a time in the early ’70s, I could count on hearing at least a couple of those hearty, wall-shaking bursts of laughter every week, the kind that would bring you from another room to see what was so damned funny. Carol and Mary, and their co-stars, comic geniuses like Tim Conway, Harvey Korman, Ted Knight, the inimitable Betty White…they were as much of an escape for her as the one cigarette she used to sneak every night after dinner.
Because—while I know she watched because the shows were funny—I think she also watched because she appreciated and admired the independence of Carol and Mary. Especially Mary.
My mom was from a different era. She and her sister grew up poor during the Great Depression, raised by their grandmother in a small Idaho town, because their mother died when they were young and their father, while he was around…well, back then most men just didn’t do things like raise girls on their own. Later, she, like a lot of young women, worked in a shipyard during World War II, dipping electrical wire into vats of molten silver. Decades later, she admitted she would bring costume jewelry to work and, when nobody was looking, would dip it into the molten silver. Hey, Depression-era people were resourceful.
After the war she held a job at a department store, but when she married she quit, and for the next nearly four decades her only job was raising four kids. She never went back to work, never went to college. And I think…no, I know…she always felt she’d missed out. It wasn’t something she talked about; her generation didn’t, about stuff like that. But I think when the ’60s and women’s empowerment rolled around, she was still young enough to understand and relate to what was going on, but because of her age and the norms of her generation, she felt it was beyond her reach. I’m convinced it’s why later she was so especially proud of my sisters for the successful, educated lives they created for themselves. Her granddaughters, too.
So, even though she tuned in because Mary Tyler Moore made her laugh, my mom also watched because she admired the character, Mary Richards, and saw in her a little of what could have been, and what could still be, for her daughters.
On behalf of my mom…here’s to you, Mary Tyler Moore. RIP. And thank you.
