¡Feliz Cumpleaños, Lucille Ball!

Apparently it was Ms. Ball's 100th birthday this past Saturday and yet she did not show up or eat her cake or do anything.

Seriously, Ms. Ball was the star of several of my favorite TV shows when I was growing up -- including my most favorite Lucille Ball show, I Love Lucy -- a fact I always found unusual given that I watched it at a time when I was not especially drawn to TV shows with Hispanic characters.

Perhaps I Love Lucy worked so well because it was not strictly a Hispanic TV show so much as a TV show that just happened to have Hispanics in it. It did not hurt that it was one of the few shows I watched growing up in which it was not considered unusual for a Hispanic to go to work wearing a suit. (As you may guess, my late father usually wore a suit when he went to work so it was probably inevitable that Ricky Ricardo would remind me of him even though my father was neither a Cuban nor an entertainer.) Nor did it hurt that the comedy did not always derive from the fact that Lucy and Ricky came from different worlds.

I Love Lucy was never meant to be seen as social realism but it always seemed more believable to me than many of the more recent TV sitcoms dealing with Hispanics -- which might explain why it continues to be as popular today as it was in the 1950s -- and why it continues to show up in syndication long after supposedly more socially relevant sitcoms such as Chico and the Man and AKA Pablo have bitten the dust.

Then again, it may be that it has so many fans because it is just a funny show that the whole family can watch. And heaven knows there are not many shows like that nowadays.