Reflections on Lucy
For those of you who do not live in Detroit and environs, this blog may not mean much to you. However if you live in the New York area you may want to read on, for Lucy Noland is coming your way.
For the past six and a half years Lucy Noland has been a morning anchor on Fox 2 Detroit. She is clearly one of the most stunningly beautiful women that was probably ever born - an Amerasian, born in Saigon to a "CIA duuuuude" (her words) and his Vietnamese wife and raised in Fairbanks, Alaska. Indeed, at first you get hooked on watching Lucy because you just can't believe any one person can possess so much physical, particularly facial, beauty. She's so gorgeous it's paralyzing, and the effect never totally wears off. No wonder she had to move from Alaska - her smile could melt a glacier.
But the reason one becomes a Lucy watcher in the long term is that she's so
weird. She is obviously a manic-depressive, and on air she's usually pretty manic. I haven't seen the depressive side of Lucy very often, but when it hits it usually manifests itself on air as a foul mood. At one point during her tenure she was missing from the air for two and a half months for reasons never fully explained; perhaps she shot off her mouth at the wrong person.
My friend Maeve Sullivan has observed that "Lucy does so many un-ladylike things, such as slamming her arm down on the the desktop. She'll say 'I didn't know that!" and accentuate it by slamming down her arm - hard. It literally goes 'Boom'!"
And then there's Lucy's laugh. It's not like actress Jean Arthur's laugh, which sounds like a thousand dainty little bells tinkling. It comes in two sizes - the rapid fire laugh, which is big and boomy - "HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW!!" and the low, slow laugh, which is from the gut - "HUHHH HUHHH HUHHH HUHHHH!" The latter is how I imagine an Alaskan barmaid might laugh.
Then there is the inevitable "Lucyism", which may be defined as "something that comes out of your mouth which you say before thinking about it." On this morning, her last day on the job in Detroit, the program was ripe with these slips, such as the little one where she referred to a clip of Courtney Love as "Courtney Cox." Poor Courtney Cox! But on the other hand, a **big** one could be, on some days, a five-minute long Lucy monologue where neither you, nor I, nor anyone else could deduce its coherent meaning. Her patient (and long suffering) co-host, Alan sits listening to her ramble on with his mouth growing ever agape. When Lucy runs out of steam, he finally asks "Lucy - what are you saying??"
Fox 2 in Detroit has a great morning show, in part, because there are so many women in the cast. There have been mornings where Alan was taking the day off that Lucy co-anchored with Sherry Margolis and/or Pallas Hupe. With Kam Carman on weather and Jackie on the traffic beat, it was ladies' day on Fox 2 News - and that could be tremendously chatty, silly, irreverent fun. But sometimes Lucy's fashion sense would override her sense of civility towards her co-hosts. Okay, often it would. She could find no end to the clever and oh-so-slightly cutting comments made about the hair, fingernails, makeup, outfit, shoes - you name it, that co-hosts turned up in. Once she brushed a fly from Alan's balding head, and offered to roll up a piece of paper and whack the next one should another come along. This was accompanied with a simulation of what she proposed to do. How her co-hosts dealt with this quirkiness is a mystery to me, although on some mornings I noted Kam Carman gritting her teeth a little closer together than on others. Must've been the shoes.
And despite all this, I don't think I have really said anything negative about Lucy's daily performance. Maeve and I agree that it was fascinating - her loud and trumpeting voice, dizzying arms and hair flying around, her cheating to the camera when others were talking, her interview style - Gawd. In a TV interview on the network level you can be fined for touching the guest during a "one on one." You'll note that Letterman never does that - he shakes the guest's hand and that's it as far as contact goes. Last night, Courtney Love was standing on his desk, hiking up her blouse and Letterman actually backed away (so would I!) A couple of weeks ago Lucy was interviewing some nutritionist and got hold of her wrist and grappled on to it for more than a minute - the guest had to pry her wrist out of Lucy's grip, which I'm sure is like iron. Lucy also has the skinniest legs I've ever seen - literally like the forgotten old slang term "pins."
All of this makes me wonder how she'll do in New York. I suspect she'll do GREAT with the viewers, but poorly with management types - they have rules and I suspect that she'll find a way to break nearly all of them. But Maeve and I, and all of Lucy's other local fans, will miss her neurotic energy, unpredictability, spontaneity and apparent lack of social skills. New York, our loss is your gain. Lucy's last Fox 2 News show was only this morning, and I already want her back.
Uncle Dave Lewis