I Love Lucy/Headscratchers

• Vitameatavegamin. Is 6 tablespoonfuls of something that's 23% alcohol really enough to get a 129-pound person drunk?
  • It is when they're already a Cloudcuckoolander.
  • Possibly, considering she clearly wasn't accustomed to alcohol and hadn't eaten anything in over 24 hours.
    • That looked like it might have been an oversized spoon that would read better on television. And considering that 23% alcohol is more potent that undiluted sake, it seems very likely that six shots of the stuff in less than 10 minutes might hit a thin woman who hasn't eaten very much pretty hard.
  • Maybe she was already tipsy and it just pushed her over the edge.
  • It was more than 6 tablespoonfuls. It was around 15-20 tablespoons (about 3-5 'shots' worth) -- there were many takes and she was sampling it beforehand. Easily enough to get a 129 pound woman drunk without much trouble at all.
  • The script said "take a tablespoonful," and I counted her taking 6 of them on camera before she started acting tipsy. Since she didn't realize how horrible it tasted until the first take we saw, she obviously hadn't been taking any beforehand.
  • There also comes a certain point where she completely ditches the spoon and drinks straight from the bottle, although she's completely drunk by then...
• I just watched the sketch at Youtube from start to finish and she actually takes seven spoonfuls with a frickin' enormous spoon, after which she's so impaired that she can't even get it into the spoon again so she just drinks it out of the bottle. It's not hard to imagine a thin person getting that tipsy from seven spoonfuls out of a spoon that large when the liquid in question is a quarter pure alcohol.
  • Maybe it was a larger than regular tablespoon used so that it would show up better on camera for the ad.
• Am I the only one who thought Lucy was blond? Hair colors don't translate well with black and white, and I've never seen a color picture of her actress until a few months ago. I guess I missed, or forgot, any references to her hair tone.
  • That's interesting. I have only watched ILL and the other Lucy shows in reruns, but I don't ever remember not knowing she was a redhead (in terms of the Lucy franchise). For me, at least, I can tell the difference btwn Lucy's hair color and Ethel's, or Carolyn Appleby's, or Betty Ramsey's. There are some references in the show. In one episode, Ricky refers to her as 'Rhode Island Red' and in another episode she mentions that she hasn't been to the salon in weeks which resulted in her head looking like a fire broke out. I took that to mean dark roots and reddish tips. I do remember a couple of movies from the 20s or 30s where she was blonde.
• Did Fred and Ricky ever win a bet? It seemed like Lucy and Ethel either always cheated or Ricky/Fred conceded and paid for whatever the girls wanted.
• Lucy seems like a very inquisitive and curious woman (it seems like half the episodes involve Lucy sticking her nose someplace Ricky told her not to.) Does it seem odd to anyone else that she never learned a word of Spanish? It just seems like eventually she'd want to know what some of the things that Ricky was shouting actually meant. Also, doesn't it seem odd that she's lived with a native Spanish-speaker for years and didn't even pick up what muchas gracias meant through sheer osmosis?
  • It wouldn't have been funny.
• Lucy and Ricky live on the third or fourth floor in New York, right? Why then did they have so much trouble going up 4 flights of stairs in Italy? The third or fourth time they go up makes sense, but they shouldn't have had a problem at least the first time...
  • Steeper steps?
    • Might it have had something to do with elevation. Maybe if the oxygen level was lower it would hit them harder than in they were in New York.