man on the run
by
Douglas Messerli
Michael
S. Baser and Kim Weiskopf (writers), Jack Shea (director) Once a Friend from
the series The Jeffersons / 1977 [TV episode]
Just
as the Norman Lear series All in the Family, his series The
Jeffersons, featuring Isabel Sanford and Sherman Hemsley—who used to be the
neighbors of Archie Bunker, but who moved “on up,” while he remained stationary—covered
a great many controversial topics new to the US popular TV medium.
Louise, George’s wife is naturally
suspicious; might her husband be having an affair? George certainly doesn’t
know any Edie Stokes until he realizes that it might be his old-time Navy
friend Eddie Stokes who is playing another “gottcha” joke on him, which the two
of them engaged throughout their Navy years, consisting of practical jokes as
simple as buckets of water being poured over the heads of people entering the
camp doorways, to George’s revenge of getting Eddie a tattoo of the camp
commander’s wife.
Eddie and he did everything together. “Shoot,
he slept on top of me for two years!” Louise’s response: “That must have been
uncomfortable.” Of course, he is talking about bunk beds in the Navy, where
Eddie was his closest and dearest friend.
And he runs off immediately to visit Eddie
in the Marquee Hotel, with Louise worried about what is going on.
Eddie (Veronica Redd) appears at the door
as a lovely female, while George challenges the real Eddie to come out of the
closet, which, obviously, brings about Edie’s riposte that he is most
definitely out of the closet.
George still can’t comprehend. Is he gay?
No, Edie, explains calmly, she is not gay.
Good, because George couldn’t deal with that, as he one by one peels the onion
of his true homophobic bigotry.
Edie assures him that she is not at all
transsexual, and again, just for a moment George is relieved, surely not being
able to tolerate such “weirdo” behavior from even an old friend.
Still convinced it is a “gottcha” joke,
George tries to make his way into the closet to hand his old friend Eddie a
pair of pants only to discover an entire closet of dresses.
Finally, in a sincere and intelligent
discussion of gender dysphoria, explaining that she has always felt uncomfortable
about pretending to be a man, yes, even in the Navy. George’s cheap comeback is
that he wished he had told him given that he had daily undressed in front of
him. It is finally, not a very funny joke, nor is the canned laughter that
keeps fueling George’s inane comebacks to the truly serious conversation that
is the heart of this moment on TV.
Edie, begging George to address her by her new
name, explains that she has had to give up most of her “old” friends and has
found new ones, and developed a new life with which she has found great
happiness. But she hopes, she explains, that one of her oldest and deepest
friends might remain so.
He hurries out of the room demanding
ghostly individuals to hold the elevator, as the beautiful transgender woman
sadly stares out in the horror of his vacuum: “Yeh, George. You take care of
yourself.”
If she has found herself and come to enjoy
her new identity, George, much like Archie Bunker, is most unhappy in the world
of such flux and change.
Yes, Archie once met a serious transgender
figure in his taxi. But this is a far more serious presentation of the issue,
and beyond that this presented US audiences with a black transgender woman, who
was so beautiful that we can’t even imagine her as a sailor boy.
But confusion persists, as Louise (“Weezie”
as he calls her) calls the hotel to find out if there is actually an Eddie
Stokes registered there. She discovers, obviously that the guest’s name is
Edith (Edie) Stokes, which clearly means to her that George has been lying to
her.
Since Louise now threatens to kick him out
of the apartment for the night, George desperately attempts to find a solution,
calling to enlist his cleaning establishment employee Leroy to pose in drag as
Edie.
But Louise, always far cleverer than
George, immediately perceives the hoax, and gets even more insulted until Edie
actually visits, upon the desperate insistence of George, their apartment.
Louise is still far from convince until
Edie, talking about their Navy days together mentions the nickname “Weezie,” as
George called her in his letters, and mentions Louise’s own terms of
endearment: “fuzzy wuzzy, teddy bear.”
As punishment for George’s inability to
face the truth, the former practical joker lures George into the bathroom
proclaiming her fear of a rat, dumping a bucket of water on him. We might hope
that George, now wet and enraged will come to his senses, but at the very least
we perceive he now sees that the old Eddie is in Edie’s inner being, and despite
his fears, can still remain a friend.
If this still remains a slightly crude
representation of the transgender experience, despite the truly enlightened
description that Edie describes about her own experience as a male in a society
in which she painfully not in sync, one has only to realize that Rainer Werner
Fassbiner’s great exploration of the transgender experience, In einen Jahr
mit 13 Monden (In a Year with 13 Moons), did not appear until a year
later. Norman Lear, a purveyor of popular US entertainment, was ahead of even
the avant-garde European filmmakers.
Los
Angeles, May 24, 2026
Reprinted
from My Queer Cinema blog (May 2026).
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