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Friday, March 25, 2011

On Tour

Lucy and Desi started touring in 1950, and to rave reviews.  Their act included several sketches and numbers that would ultimately end up in the "I Love Lucy" pilot, and in several subsequent "I Love Lucy" episodes.  It included the song "Cuban Pete/Sally Sweet", which was featured in episode #4, "The Diet", as well as Lucy's clown bit.  For this, the would enter during a song Desi was conducting, wearing a mans felt hat and trenchcoat, carrying a cello, and looking for "Dizzy Arnazzi".  Her clowning was coached by Pepito, a brilliant Spanish clown of the era, and a close friend of Desi's.  He taught Lucy how to work with the trick cello and effectively elicit laughter from a live audience (she had also honed this ability on her radio show, "My Favorite Husband").  The cello sketch became part of the "I Love Lucy" pilot and episode #6 of the series, "The Audition" (in which Lucy asks for "Risky Riskardoo"). 
As the network executives who had previously shunned the possibility of Lucy and Desi working together heard the public's increasingly postive reaction, they could hardly refuse such a pairing.  Talk began on realistically transferring the show to television soon thereafter. 

2 comments:

  1. Was Ricky a regular on the radio show?

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  2. No, at this point he had a radio show of his own called "Tropical Trip" in which he would host a show that gave away a trip to the tropics for a contestant that answered a series of questions correctly. He was also the musical director for Bob Hope's weekly radio show during the late 1940s (to get you the exact dates I need to look at Desi Arnaz's biography--I'll get back to you on that tomorrow!).

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