My mom had heard about the show before it aired, and anticipated it with a bit of guilty delight. She would whisper about it to my father, disappear into her bedroom for a half hour and laugh out loud behind the safety of her closed door. She never told me I couldn't watch; she just assumed it would be a bit over my head. But her laughter was intriguing. Within a few weeks, "All in the Family" became a family affair. We watched, together, as Archie and Edith Bunker brought their exaggerated version of life in the seventies into our living room. We marveled at Archie's audacity, at Edith's naivete, at the dysfunction that seemed to fuel their devotion to each other. It was reality TV, the good kind.
Jean Stapleton, the actress who created Edith Bunker and, over the course of nine years, turned her into one of the most iconic characters on television, died the other day at the age of ninety. I did a bit of math; somewhere in the middle of the show's run, Edith was the same age I am now. Funny, I always thought she was ancient. Hardly. Edith, like the actress who portrayed her, was a master of subtle deception. Like Jean Stapleton, whose screechy and dissonant rendition of the opening song belied her professional training as a vocalist, Edith was anything but the "dingbat" Archie called her every week. She may have "dummied up" more often than not, but when push came to shove, Edith never allowed herself to be silenced, no matter how many times Archie admonished her to stifle herself. Beneath the pasty bewilderment on her face and the perennial dowdy house dress, Edith was strong, courageous, and downright brilliant.
I learned a lot from Edith. For starters, she taught me to always pick my battles. She seldom lost her temper, remained quiet and calm no matter how persistent Archie was at pushing her buttons. He demanded, he demeaned, he dismissed. But when he crossed the line -- devaluing womens' work in the home, for example -- there was no stopping Edith, certainly no shutting her up. Her escalating rant in the episode during which she demanded to be paid for thirty years of household toil was priceless, leaving all of us feeling as depleted and beaten as Archie looked when he suddenly raised his eyebrows in stunned defeat.
In almost every episode, Edith found a way to speak up, however softly, for the ones whom Archie put down. As much as she had Archie's number, she did not lecture. Instead, she chipped away at him in small ways. When she thought he needed to experience a bit of change, she handed him his beer on a different side. When she needed to be heard and he told her he didn't want to hear one more mention of "cling peaches," she kept talking, clamping her lips together each time "cling peaches" came up and belting out with glee the "in heavy syrup" part, which Archie had neglected to include on his list of prohibitions. She was the Norma Rae of her own living room, a moral compass for those of us who remained silent even though we were lucky enough to not have an "Archie" telling us to stifle ourselves. Had she not been tied down by the apron strings so common to women of her generation, Edith would have been as strong and as fiercely independent as the daughter she managed to raise.
When the person whose life Archie saves confesses to Edith that he is a "female impersonator," Edith reveals a level of insight few of us can boast. "Oh. Ain't that smart. Who better to impersonate a female than a woman?" She sure got that right. Nobody understood the nuances better than Edith.
Maybe the pendulum will swing back one day, back to the days of real reality TV. Back when life wasn't all that much stranger than fiction.
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