TV Trivia
by Michael Karol
& Craig Hamrick

Trivia Tidbits
Nuggets of info about TV classics like I Love Lucy, The Bionic Woman, and Bewitched

Features
Funny Ladies, TV Actors on Stage, Soaps and more

TV Tidbits.com content:
© 2006 Michael Karol and/or Craig Hamrick

posted August 31, 2006

TV Tidbits is a collaborative project by authors Craig Hamrick and Michael Karol. The first printed volume of TV Tidbits, was published in 2004. This companion website was launched in November 2003. For more information on the books and where to purchase them, click here.

Michael Karol
New York-based writer and editor Michael Karol has always loved Lucy. He watched I Love Lucy as a child growing up in New Jersey, where the show was rerun in the morning (never mind what he wasn't doing in school — he can't remember)...with a trusted babysitter, laughing out loud and becoming entranced by the antics of Lucy and Ethel. Following this, when he discovered Lucy and Vivian Vance were doing a new TV show, he forced the family to watch it on their only TV. Well, his mother may have held a grudge — years later, walking into his New York apartment, she noted dryly, "You have more pictures of Lucy here than you do of me" — but let's face it, there were many other programs less worthy than The Lucy Show he might have watched. How did Michael morph from obsessed fan into highly regarded celebrity author, whose footprints are in cement and waiting for the construction of the new Lucy-Desi Museum to be installed?

As Michael grew up, the special fondness he held for Lucy and Viv (and various other Sitcom Queens, truth be told) only grew. When he graduated from BU with a Masters in Communications, he felt it was only prudent that he communicate, and began a quarter-century-plus career in publishing as a journalist and editor. Michael has written about everything from area rugs to pop music, from counterfeiting to colorization, but his favorite subjects are show-business-related, especially classic TV and golden age movies. Several years ago, Michael finally landed his dream job: as Copy Chief at Soap Opera Weekly, he is mandated to watch TV during work hours.

While languishing in a previous job, circa 1999, Michael began writing a biography of Lucille Ball, based on everything he'd read and known. Once it got to be more than 10,000 words, he realized it might make a good book. He hit on an A to Z encyclopedic format because, frankly, it was easier to organize his subjects that way.

Thus began several years of intensive research during which Michael pored over the huge files at the New York Library of the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center and watched rare videos at the Museum of Television and Radio. He even, during this period, got over his fear of the vastness of the New York Public Library and found it was quite user-friendly. That's where he found a Dewey Decimal card on the long-forgotten I Love Lucy play, an interesting artifact from the days when almost any successful property was tried out in other media. Trolling through Lucy's reviews at the Lincoln Center library brought him to a Broadway play, also long forgotten—Nobody Loves an Albatross—in which one of the lead characters was apparently based on Lucille Ball, written by a former (and somewhat disgruntled) Desilu employee. Michael was able to interview one of the show's co-stars, Marie Wallace. This led to a script in the rare manuscript section by humorist Max Shulman (Dobie Gillis), who wrote a draft of an Albatross script for MGM.

Did anyone still alive even know a script for Albatross, only a modestly successful show, was written? And discarded? Or even that Albatross itself was a minor hit circa 1963? Michael was doubtful, since mostly no one appeared to even remember the show itself. The Lucy character, much more slick and con-artist than in the play, runs a studio and has her own sitcom, and Shulman's script shows one scene being shot of the character and her sitcom friend, described as a "Vivian Vance" type, baking cream puffs and ruining the kitchen when everything explodes. Sound familiar? It was unearthing this kind of arcane yet priceless Lucy information that struck Michael as being most valuable and interesting to other fans.

The Third Edition of Lucy A to Z , revised, expanded, and with a 40-page index, is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble now!