“I Don’t Know But How Dare You.”
Lucy To Ricky
One of the most unique parts of I Love Lucy is that Lucy married a Cuban. At the time that Lucille Balland Desi Arnaz pitched the show, CBS wasn’t sure America would buy the fact that these two were together in real life. Their love was real, though, and Ball and Arnaz had been married since 1940. Their real love story helped make I Love Lucy even better than it could have been since they didn’t have to fake that aspect of the character’s relationships.
Some of the show’s best parts are when Ricky is rattling things off in Spanish, leaving Lucy confused and annoyed that he was *probably* talking about her in a negative way, and she had no idea what he was really saying. In one scene, Ricky is rattling off a few words in Spanish when Lucy says “How dare you.” Knowing she has no clue what he said, he asks her anyway, and she repeats, “I don’t know, but how dare you.” It was a scene that showed even their misunderstandings resulted in funny moments.
4“Here I Am With All This Talent Bottled Up Inside Of Me.”
Lucy To Ricky
In the episode “The Ballet,” Lucy finds out Ricky is in desperate need of a ballerina for his show. Always wanting to find stardom, and always begging for a spot in one of Ricky’s shows, Lucy begins taking ballet lessons to master the art so she can win the job. Lucy makes this comment, showing how much confidence she has in herself, even if she has no idea what she is doing, and has to somehow figure things out along the way in order to even get a chance to take the stage. Here, she trains at Madame Le Mond’s class.
In this case, she succeeds and all her hard work pays off. However, when she does get the chance to perform, she realizes that she learned the burlesque comic act and not the ballet act, and everything goes wrong. Viewers might notice that by the time that Lucy gets the chance to perform, she has bruises all over her body. What is really interesting is that those were real bruises that Lucille Ball got while training to learn ballet for the episode throughout the week.
3“That Won’t Be A Novel, That Will Be A Short Story.”
Ethel To Lucy
If anything, Lucy and Ethel are brutally honest with each other, and while it might come off as rude or condescending, it is always in the name of love and friendship. In the episode “Lucy Writes a Novel,” Lucy tells Ethel that she plans to write her own novel. The title is Real Gone With the Wind, and when Ethel asks what Lucy is writing about, she tells her that she is “writing about things I know.” That is what leads Ethel to deliver this quip, basically saying that Lucy doesn’t know a lot and surely not enough for a novel.
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However, it seems Lucy was being serious and she was writing a novel about her life and everyone in it. This really puts off Ricky, Ethel, and Fred, who secretly read the manuscript as she writes it and doesn’t want anything she wrote about them to end up being printed. Sadly, there is a miscommunication between Lucy and the publishers, and her dreams come crashing down. However, as Ethel’s quote demonstrated, that wasn’t anything that should have taken Lucy by surprise.
2“Gee, Why Is It That Everything That’s Wonderful Costs Money?”
Ethel To Lucy
If there is any I Love Lucy quote that is just as true today as it was when the show aired 70 years ago, it is one that Ethel says to Lucy about money. The idea of the lack of money is something that plays out a lot in the sitcom. Lucy is a shopaholic and likes to spend money almost faster than Ricky can make it. Ethel, on the other hand, isn’t so lucky because Fred has a very tight-wad attitude about spending, and his wife pays the price by not getting what she wants most of the time, which leads to this quote.
Ethel isn’t wrong as the best things in life aren’t always free. While Ethel bemoans the fact that she can’t afford to buy things that would surely make her happy, it leads the women to do something almost unheard of in that era. They went and got jobs at the chocolate factory so they could have money of their own to spend. Fred might have a tight grip on his money, but Ethel knows if she wants to afford things to make herself happy, she needs to make her own money, and that is exactly what she does.
1“You Mean To Tell Us That We Have Equal Rights.”
Ethel To Fred
“But You Certainly Don’t Give Us A Chance To Act Like It”
There are a lot of things that might not hold up well today in shows like I Love Lucy, based on the era that the stories came from. However, while there is sexism, body shaming, and more involved in many stories, there is also a strong backbone of women’s rights issues, something that Lucille Ball was strongly in favor of, and when a big actor like Lucille Ball said something, audiences listened. If there is one I Love Lucy quote that signifies this way of thinking, it is one that Ethel says to Fred. While she says it in jest, it hammers home what women like Lucy were thinking at the time.
Ethel mockingly asks why, if they have equal rights, the men around them don’t seem to act like it or treat them as equals. Throughout I Love Lucy, Fred kept a strong grasp on what Ethel could and couldn’t do and Ricky had a dominant personality over Lucy. However, at the same time, both Fred and Ricky were made to look like buffoons much of the time, and Lucy made sure that she did everything she could to ensure that she was treated with as much respect as possible, making her one of the strongest feminist figures on television.
