Mary (Mary Tyler Moore): Rhoda, did you ever have one of those days?
Rhoda (Valerie Harper): Yeah, mostly!
Everyone has a bad day now and then.
It's the most predictable fact of human existence. High hopes and expectations may be rare and will take a beating and go unfulfilled, but bad days are universal for nearly all of us — and occur with a depressing regularity.
There is a small portion of the population that never seems to endure a bad day, but appearances can be deceptive. When those folks do have a bad day, the rest of us take a kind of perverse pleasure in the assurance that no one is immune.
Mary Richards (Mary Tyler Moore) was having three of those days (in her own words) in a single day when the episode of the Mary Tyler Moore Show that first aired on this night in 1973, "Put On a Happy Face," began.
Actually, it all started with something small. When the episode began, Mary was drinking coffee and some of it dribbled onto her new sweater. Her date for an upcoming broadcasting awards banquet encountered some difficulties — and ultimately fell through. Then Mr. Grant (Ed Asner) informed her that, instead of disposing of the obsolete file as requested, she had thrown out the file of obituaries that news outlets keep so they will be ready in case someone famous dies.
Make that when someone famous dies.
Because, as Mr. Grant explained to Mary, "There is no 'if.' They're gonna die. We're not gonna have one thing to say except maybe 'So long.'"
(Personal note here: I have never worked in broadcasting, but I have worked for newspapers and a trade magazine, and we had certain files that we kept for future events, like obituaries and such. It was good to have them handy. You never knew when someone prominent was going to die, but, as Mr. Grant observed, you knew they would die one day.
(We didn't have to keep advance obituaries for presidents or anyone else who was nationally prominent. We knew that kind of obituary would be readily available from the wire services. A good example of that is the death a few days ago of Billy Graham. The wire services undoubtedly had his obituary ready for many years — he was, after all, 99 when he died.
(But we needed to be ready when folks who were known locally — like mayors or community activists — passed away.
(I don't remember any files that were specifically designated as "obsolete" in the newsrooms where I have worked — but I suppose there could be such a file that serves as a temporary placeholder for such files. That would be a decision for the management of an individual news outlet to make.
(And, apparently, the folks at WJM had made that decision. Perhaps the responsibility for disposing of obsolete files fell to a different person periodically — that wasn't mentioned — but, in this episode, which is the only time I can recall an obsolete file being mentioned, it was Mary's responsibility.)
Then when she got home that night, her phone was ringing as she came through the door. She made a mad dash for the phone only to find that the person on the other end had hung up. In the dash for the phone, her bag spilled and her groceries were scattered on the floor.
Rhoda (Valerie Harper) came in, took one look and said, "It looks like somebody mugged Betty Crocker."
But the really big misfortune came when Mary slipped at work and sprained her ankle. To help her ankle when she was back in her apartment, Mary soaked it — which gave her a cold. That made it hard for her to talk on the phone when she was trying to find a date for the banquet.
(That wasn't her only obstacle, though. She had been out of touch with the men she contacted — long enough for one of them to have gotten married in the interim.)
Frustrated, Mary finally gave in and agreed to go out with a guy that Ted (Ted Knight) had been recommending — only to find out that Ted had been speaking of himself.
That was bad enough, but then the dry cleaner ruined the dress she had planned to wear, and she had to turn to Rhoda to get something to wear. Rhoda urged her not to go to the banquet, but Mary insisted that she was nominated for an award and had to go. She didn't expect to win, but it would be bad form not to attend.
So she and Ted went to the banquet. Bad luck continued to follow her. It was raining, which couldn't do much to her hair since her hair dryer gave out on her earlier, but she did step in a puddle, which made her squish when she walked. Then at the banquet one of her false eyelashes came off, and she tried to put it back on while the awards were being handed out.
It was at that very minute that she was announced as the winner of the award for which she had been nominated.
The first words out of her mouth in her acceptance speech — after a rather loud sneeze — were "I usually look so much better than this."
I guess we all know people who seem to be perfect all the time — and it can be a source of, as I said before, perverse pleasure when such people have to go through the trials and tribulations the rest of us must face.
But Mary was such a pleasant person that it was hard to take any satisfaction from her misfortune.
It was still funny, though, and it remains funny today. Call it a guilty pleasure.
Oh, and by the way, there was a neat little twist at the end that Mary Tyler Moore fans will appreciate.
The usual ending for a Mary Tyler Moore Show episode showed a kitten in the same pose as the old MGM lion.
But 45 years ago tonight, Mary's face appeared in place of the kitten — and, instead of meowing, Mary stammered "That's all, folks!" like Porky Pig.
