My thanks to Merry Farmer for hooking me on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, a very short season (8 episodes) show on Amazon Prime. Woe is me - the new episodes don't begin shooting until next month!
Although the show is heavily laced with language that would make a sailor blush, the story lines are beautifully played out, with exceptional writing costuming filming matched toe-to-toe with performances.
Here's what hits home with Midge Maisel - - if she had been granted her greatest wish, she would have lived her life as a happy Jewish wife esconced in a lovely apartment with her husband & two kids. It didn't work out that way, thanks to her husband being a hapless putz who had the ideal wife - she got him better spots at the Gaslight by bribing the manager with her to-die-for brisket. She was, in every way, a great match for Joel Maisel - which was all too much for him. Especially after she discovered that his brilliantly funny bit about Abe Lincoln was actually Bob Newhart's material. Although she didn't make a big deal about Joel's comedy larceny - he refused to create original material - he knew it was a disappointment.
He deals with it by blowing up his marriage. As he expresses in the last episode of this first season, he couldn't handle that she was "too." In every way, she was too right for him. So, he leaves her for his even-younger-than 26-year old Midge.
She responds by getting drunk & heading down to the Village to get back her Pyrex baking dish ("a glass baking dish, very durable") that had conveyed the briskets that nabbed Joel his better slots. Her world is set on its ear when she wanders up on the stage - the audience assumes she is a comic. And she, unintentionally, delivers a vitriolic, profanity-laced, BRILLIANTLY funny diatribe. When she flashes her breasts, the cops move in & arrest her. And that arrest is what connects her to Susie Myerson & even to Lenny Bruce. Oh, and when Midge discovers that she is made of stronger stuff than she'd ever imagined.
THAT, dear friends, is life as it actually plays out. NOT as we're taught to expect it to be, but as it really works for all but the possibly not-so-blessed few. What defines our lives, how the turn out, is typically the stuff that tosses us off the tracks, that derails our expectations, that flings away our expectations & leave us with our own version of Joel leaving Midge - with her Bryn Mawr degree & not real world experience - to find her real way.
Along the way, through those all-too-short eight episodes, she falls & rises, falls & rises, does something utterly brilliant yet professionally suicidal & comes out of it better than she would have been had she played by the book.
I don't know why Merry loves Midge Maisel, but it's clear why I do - - Midge Maisel, a fiction Jewish housewife of the Upper West Side in 1958 NYC, is my soul sister, a reflection of my own roller coaster life that's turned out to be nothing like I planned & so totally, unpredictably SPECTACULAR.
No comments:
Post a Comment