Source: fabulously40.com
When I was growing up in the 1970′s, sitcoms were an important part of my family life. The TV was always on and I remember watching them so vividly with my two sisters. From The Brady Bunch to The Facts of Life to Laverne and Shirley, we watched everything. The characters in the shows meant more to me than just regular TV shows. I wanted to be them, and I learned a lot about life through their experiences. I loved the family on The Brady Bunch, and yearned to be like them and wanted someone like Alice in my life. Getting stranded on Gilligan’s Island didn’t look so bad either. We grew up on shows like The Partridge Family, Maude, Good Times, All in the Family, Bewitched, The Waltons, Welcome Back Kotter, One Day at a Time, The Jeffersons and more. Oh, and Soap, I loved that one.
When I walked into the DR2 Theater in Union Square last night and sat in my seat, the first thing I saw on stage was the millions of pictures on the stage walls from all my favorite 70s shows, many of which are mentioned above. I knew something interesting was about to come my way.
In the first minute of her show, Judy Gold lets us know that she’s a 6’3” Jewish lesbian mom of two sons. She grew up in New Jersey and learned almost everything she knows about anything from these television shows. She kicks off the show with her own rendition of the theme song from The Brady Show called “The Gold Bunch”. We learn immediately that she grew up thinking the parents of TV sitcoms were cooler than her own parents and that as a child, she spent “spent hours lying on my belly on the shag carpeting getting lost in the world of the 70s sitcom.” She liked these shows because the characters in these shows actually talked to each other. In her own family, there were two kinds of communication: “screaming and not talking to each other.” In the playbill and in the show, we learn that she learned about racism and politics in All in the Family and The Jeffersons, abortion and divorce in Maude, single mothers in One Day at a Time, poverty in Good Times and homosexuality in Three’s Company and Soap, unmarried professional women in Mary Tyler Moore. There was life outside the Gold home.
She then launches into a 80 minute recount of her existence on this planet, comparing every stage of life to a TV show. As a young girl, when her mom informed her she was going to a Jewish sleep-away camp, she thought it would be more like Mash but was more like The Facts of Life. She hated camp so much that she compared it to the Exodus chapter in the Bible and the showers to the the ones in concentration camps. Gold’s own life with her parents was like a sitcom and it has certainly given her food for fodder as a comedienne, but she clearly loves them very much.
Gold’s memories of her childhood morph into tales about her young adulthood. When she and here mom were looking at colleges, her mom said to her, “What are we, the Rockefellers?” At Rutgers, just 15 miles away, she breaks out into her own, finding her love of comedy and coming to terms with her gay identity.
In the show, Gold spends time exploring relationships with women, the birth of her two children and her relationship with her father who she never revealed her lesbianism to, although he obviously knew, and deeply regrets that decision. Judiasm and her mother are integral story lines, and I think, for me, since I could relate to her mom’s nagging to her obsession with sweet & low, I enjoyed the show all the more. Her mother was..and is…(she’s 89) critical about everything she did…and still does. Her motto was always, “I came. I saw. I criticize.”
And I related to Gold. I used to want to jump into the TV screen, and when she sat at the piano and belted out my favorite TV show theme songs, I couldn’t help but smile.
Confident about her abilities as a comedienne, which she seems to have always had, Gold tells her audience that she decided to develop a TV show based on her life as a sitcom to networks early on her career, which she pitched in 1999, 2004 and 2009. She have never given up on her dream and it’s an important part of the show. She tells the audience that she wants a sitcom so that people can see families like her and she that they are not so strange – an observant Jewish lesbian with two kids, with an ex-girlfriend who lives in her building on another floor who gave birth to one son, Gold to the other son. After the gay network rejected her pitch (“Would this make a good animated comedy?” ended every pitch session) in 2004 because she didn’t want to make the show “The L Word on the Upper West Side”, Gold got excited when OWN recently picked it up. She was crushed when they recently decided to can it after their financials came back and her show seemed “too risky”. Still, I don’t think she will ever give up on her dream to have her own show, and I hope that she doesn’t.
Gold is engaging and funny, and the show, written by her and Kate Moira Ryan, flies by. I highly recommend it. You’ll appreciate it for its humor, slice of life mentality, but most of all, for its nostalgia and walk down memory lane.
“The Judy Show” continues through October 23rd at The DR2 Theater, 103 E. 15th St., New York. Call (212) 239-6200 or visit www.judygold.com. You can get tickets here.
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