The 70s were a hopeful and optimistic time to be a little girl. Lots of things were possible. You could do anything--everyone said so. You could be an athlete, like Billie Jean King or Chris Evert. You could be a lawyer, or a politician. You could be a doctor or a businesswoman. The world was a wide-open place.
I was a vague, bookish little girl, so I didn't have any one particular ambition. I imagined all sorts of things. In most of my daydreams, though, I was successful, in some glamorous but undefined career. I imagined a life in which I dressed fabulously, drove my own car, and ate grilled cheese sandwiches and french fries (and sipped Coke in a glass, with ice) in restaurants any time I wanted.
I was about 6 years old when "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" first aired (you knew where this was going, didn't you?) My mother and grandmother watched the show faithfully, and I watched with them, sitting cross-legged on the floor and wearing a flower-patterned quilted bathrobe that buttoned all the way down the front. I didn't get most of the jokes, and I didn't realize at the time that any ground was being broken. I just loved Mary Richards, and I wanted to be like her when I grew up. I wanted to be smart and nice and pretty and funny and independent. I wanted a cute little apartment and a cute little car and an important job with a typewriter and a phone. And I wanted a best friend just like Rhoda.
So much has been written and said about Mary Tyler Moore and the show, especially since Mary's death on Wednesday. Most of what I've read and heard has focused on her pioneering portrayal of women in the workplace and in the world. This is right and proper, and I'm happy to have seen so many moving tributes to MTM by women journalists and broadcasters, including Andrea Mitchell and Oprah Winfrey. Mary Richards was a pioneer. And to little girls like me, she was better than any Barbie doll or Disney princess.
*****
So life happens, and most of mine up to now hasn't even vaguely resembled Mary Richards's. That's OK. Most of it has been better, despite my periodic bouts with depression. I was unable to sleep one night during one such period in my late 20s, and as I sat on my couch in front of my TV, flipping through the channels and looking for I didn't know what, there it was. "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" was on TV Land, late 90s small-hours refuge for the depressed and lonely. I watched it, hoping to feel for just a moment as I felt when I was a hopeful and happy 6-year-old.
I fell asleep on the couch that night, probably halfway through a third episode of the overnight MTM marathon that I'd happen to stumble upon, feeling a little better, and not just because I had remembered for a moment what it felt like to be six years old. It was because the show, to my surprise, was REALLY funny.
Mary Tyler Moore was already famous for her portrayal of Laura Petrie on the very popular "Dick Van Dyke Show," and she could easily have turned her own program into a showcase for herself. Instead, she found the funniest and most talented actors and actresses--Ed Asner, Ted Knight, Valerie Harper, Betty White, Cloris Leachman--and put the spotlight on them rather than herself, often playing the straight woman to Valerie Harper's wisecracking Rhoda, Ted Knight's buffoonish anchorman, and Betty White's promiscuous Happy Homemaker. Even the minor characters, especially Rhoda's mother, played by the gifted Nancy Walker, were brilliantly cast. Yes, the show was culturally significant and the character was groundbreaking, but "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" was also one of the greatest TV comedies ever.
*****
Right now feels like less than a hopeful and wide-open time for women. The rise of radical Islamic fundamentalism in countries everywhere from Western Europe to the Philippines has created conditions of intolerable oppression for women and girls. Meanwhile, privileged women like me; white, middle-class American women who don't want for a thing, have only to contend with the fact that a self-proclaimed uninvited p&%$@-grabber is now the President of the United States. All of this, though, will pass. I'm sure of it. I'm still hopeful and optimistic. Love is all around.
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