Behind every sitcom….

…there is another story waiting to be told. Fred and Ethel Mertz had lives before they met Lucy and Ricky Ricardo. Yes, they talked about being on the vaudeville circuit for 20+ years. But they were also committed members of the Communist Party in the 1930’s. Fred had been a very young doughboy during WWI, spending a few horrible months in the trenches of France. After the war, he followed the Russian Revolution with great interest. But it wasn’t until the Great Depression that his socialist ideals came into focus. He met Ethel at a Party meeting in a rundown flat in Chicago. And that, as they say, was that. They were both out of work and willing to try anything, and that’s how the vaudeville act came to be. Their travels took them to backwaters and through railroad yards where the hobo camps swelled throughout the Depression years, only confirming their politics. They snapped out of it after WWII, coming to realize that the worker’s paradise and Uncle Joe were not everything they were cracked up to be. At that point they were growing a too little old and a little too thick to continue hoofing it on stage. They hung up their tap shoes, bought the apartment house on East 68th Street and the rest is history.

Millie and Jerry Helper, the next door neighbors to Rob and Laura Petrie, didn’t come from nowhere. Millie’s over-eager, wide-eyed stare masked the over-achiever she really was. Millie Krumbermacher graduated from Sarah Lawrence with honors. Millie was earning a master’s degree in foreign policy and working for the UN when she met Jerry. He was finishing dental school, and as the era demanded, Millie quit her job and graduate school to marry and start a family. So much for that promising career in diplomacy. By the late 1960’s, Millie had followed her inclinations and she fell—at first, reluctantly, and then exuberantly—into the counter culture. She left Jerry and their son behind, dropped Millie in favor of Justice and reclaimed her maiden name. Justice Krumbermacher hitched her way ‘cross country to enroll in graduate school at UC Berkeley.  She eschewed the Weathermen—too violent for her taste—but became rabidly anti-government. She washed the hairspray out of her hair, let her hair grow down to her knees and wore it in braids to keep it out of her way while she picked grapes with Hugo Chavez and the migrant workers. Justice married a migrant worker and is now a retired social worker. To this day, she wonders how she ever tolerated discussing cupcakes and recipes with Laura Petrie. 

On the evening news Jerry watched Justice and a mob of women burn their bras. He remarried just as the Watergate was being burgled. He and his second wife raised little Freddie and had two more children together.

The Andy Griffith Show made Mayberry look like a serene and quiet little Eden. But Aunt Bee, that chirpy little dear, brought a great deal more to the table than we were led to believe. Yes, she cooked and cleaned for the widowed Andy, made Opie’s lunch and packed him off to school each day. But what did she do before she came to live with Opie and Andy? Even doting and dotty maiden aunts have private lives and histories. Aunt Bee’s life and history rolled out in Charlottesville, where she worked for a patent attorney. She may not have been the brightest bulb on the tree, but she was a hard worker, learning the in’s and out’s of her job thoroughly. And as a young woman, she had a porcelain skin and soulful blue eyes that brought men to their knees. She worked for the attorney for 30 years,

and was his mistress for the last 20 of those years. Like Nelson Rockefeller, the attorney died in his mistress’ arms with a smile on his face, in the lavishly furnished love nest in which he kept her. Bee came home to Mayberry with a small fortune in stock, cash and jewelry. Andy’s job as sheriff, as heartwarming as it was, wasn’t going to make it possible for Opie to attend an ivy-league college. Aunt Bee put that child through Yale undergrad and law school. And she did it with a smile on her face. As Bee trilled throughout Opie’s college years, “What else is the money for?”.

There’s a point here, somewhere. Beneath the carefully presented fiction, there’s more to the story than we’ve been told or shown. Just ask Newt Gingrich about his marriages and his affairs. He jumps ugly, and I don’t believe for a minute his reaction is a chivalric and protective impulse towards the women with whom he has slept and/or married and/or divorced. Ask Mitt about his money, and he alternates between the Aah shucks shuffle (“I really didn’t make that much.”) and rich Uncle Pennybags boastfulness  (“I’ll bet you $10,000!”).  Ron Paul bills himself as a libertarian. But behind him trails a history of newsletters laced with racism. So enjoy the debates for the bread and circus they are, and remember that entertainment--even when presenting itself as news--is pure fiction.