Funny Lady
Funny Lady
Pennies and Apartments
December 18, 2018
A Milwaukee Apartment
(Penny Marshall 1943-2018)
If we had to choose one period in life to live over and over again one of the most serious contenders would be that year on the third floor of the cold, old apartment in Milwaukee.
It was a beautiful building that we believe once was the home to six luxury apartments, probably back in the 1920s and 30s. By the time we lived there in the late 1980s the neighborhood had changed, changed again and changed some more and the building was partitioned into 12 apartments, though still of good size, and affordable for college students.
The finest attribute of the cold, old, creaky, vintage apartment wasn't the apartment itself. It was the people who lived there, as fate was kind enough to deliver two of the best roommates a foolhardy college guy could have.
But still, the apartment was great. Laverne DeFazio would have liked it.
Laverne wasn't really Laverne. She was Penny Marshall. But the quaint Milwaukee apartment she shared with her best friend Shirley (Cindy Williams) on Laverne & Shirley from 1976 to 1982 on ABC was a place sort of like our own.
We are also willing to bet Laverne and Shirley had a Marquette pennant on the wall of their bedroom though a Google image search is not backing us up.
Laverne & Shirley was a 1970s show set in the 1950s because the 1950s was a simpler, better time than the 1970s. And by the time we lived in that old apartment in Milwaukee the 1970s seemed like a simpler, better time and now, thirty years after that, it all seems like lost time.
But it's time that you can recapture, if only for a moment. You can live it again on cold nights before Christmas when you walk past any old apartment building and hear laughter. And you wonder who helped that laughing person carry that couch up to the third floor. --TK
Tuesday, December 18, 2018