As soon as I heard Jean Stapleton died, I watched one of my favorite episodes of All in the Family — the one where George Jefferson said Archie paid for his dry-cleaning with a counterfeit $20. I couldn’t care less about who cheated, who was honest, and all that math Meathead did for the episode-ending reparations. Even the show’s stereotypical racist humor bored me, except, I’ll admit, in one of the episode’s best jokes. George tells Weezy she has to be on his side and believe he’s honest because “blood’s thicker than water.”
She quips, “We aren’t related. We’re only married.”
But as soon as the laugh track stops, I remember that Edith’s hurried waddle, by far, is my favorite character on the show and favorite part of this episode. Gunning her own engines in the first scene, she stands in front of the fridge, telling Weezy the location of the butter before even opening the door. She’s got it memorized: “I try not to keep the refrigerator door open too long, to save energy.” On the no-look take, she misses the butter and gets the cheese.
Clearly Edith’s constant state of motion is not about conserving energy. She really only sits during the opening credits, warbling “Those Were The Days” in such a way it sounds like her own voice is mocking her sincerity. Tottering on the balls of her house-shoed feet, gravity pulling her breasts forward as she bends under her own weight, Edith Bunker’s world is all gravity and none of the rules that go along with it: no inertia, not even any friction for all of those 30 minutes or less of problems.
I’m convinced the sitcom’s set was one of those handheld pinball games. Archie or the director or a piece of ’70s-tastic furniture would catch Edith, and, for a second, she’d stop moving. Then they’d tilt the brown carpet floor and (laugh track!) she’d stumble in the direction of the tilt.
It’s a wonder she always eluded the hole, wherever it was.
There were plenty of places for her to fall, but, perhaps, no actual hole for her to fall through. Forget about her husband, the insipid daughter and son-in-law who really needed to get the fuck out, and the brown floral wallpaper literally closing in around her as her clothes remained, without fail, the same exact color.
TV was and is all about archetypes: white Archie, black George; good-guy Joe Mannix, the bad guy he jumped out of a car to escape; the movie star and Mary Ann. But Edith wasn’t the inane, trapped housewife to Jessica Fletcher’s hyperaware busybody (a role Stapleton actually turned down). Edith did the damn thing, and not just the standby stand by your man. She wasn’t “only married.” She was committed to, not trapped by, what she was: wife, mother, caretaker, even the floor she cleaned.
Maybe, per the old Jeffersons theme song, it took a whole lot of trrryyyyin’ just to get up that hill, especially in a war-drained, pre-Reaganomics era. Still, it took way more trying to stay atop Edith’s ever-moving plane and keep some semblance of footing.
All in the Family went off-air seven months before I was born, but it was one of my ’80s syndication favorites. Despite all our progress as working women and Stapleton’s own feminist ideals, I wouldn’t mind being Edith Bunker for a few days. The monotony of a constant fall is failsafe — a risk and a reward.
I should mention, though, that while I’d be Edith for a working week, I’m Erica Kane’s namesake. Edith Bunker is not my if-I-were-a-TV-wife destiny. I have at least 11 marriages on the horizon.
Maybe I’ll get lucky and find just one that always keeps me on my toes.
This article appears in Jun 6-12, 2013.