Michelle, Kelly, Be, Fran and Billie

Overlooking the garish spider-eyelashes, in her younger years, Fran Allison somewhat resembled Janet Leigh. She was girl-next-door-pretty, a radio comedienne and singer from Waterloo who discovered God when she was small, after her mother, stricken with TB and locked in a sanitorium, “prayed herself well.” Even despite that and her father’s chronic illness, Fran stuck with god and stayed tender, which made her an ideal matriarch to a cast of furry puppets. In 1947, she was cast as the only human character in Kukla, Fran, and Ollie, a children’s show that aired in Chicago for ten years. She was warm-voiced, sweet and interacted with Kukla and Ollie as though they were human; kids and parents loved her because she was never patronizing. The show was incredibly successful; influencing many subsequent childrens shows, including Sesame Street and Chic-a-go-go, and hailed as adding another dimension to television, opening the door for other smart and life-enriching programming.
Or so they say. I have never seen the show; this is merely what I have learnt from cursory research. I have heard some of the songs Fran sang, however, and one of them is straight out of a children’s gender conditioning study ca. 1975. The song is “Girls Were Made to Take Care of Boys,” written in 1948 by Ralph Blane, sung also by Billie Holliday. The KF&O version begins with Ollie telling Fran she’s a great problem-solver, to which Fran responds, “Well, that’s kind of my job.” A piano scale blooms, and she begins:
Girls were made to take care of boys
Made to share their sorrows
Made to share their joys
Made to help and guide them
With ever a patient hand
Made to spread affection in the right directions
Always Understand.
Boys may think they take care of girls
Just because they pass on their fashions and their pearls
But Ive always found its just the other way around
If you love the girl
And declare you do
Shell be there to take care of you.
(The original version of the song includes the lyric that we are, “Always kind and dutiful.”) When Billie sings it’s got sardonic bite; but Fran, ever the sweet one, imbues her vocals with warmth and polite vibrato. Like Julie Andrews, she was singing nice. And here, niceties seem maniacal; listening to it from the vantage of hindsight, I can’t forget that many women of that era—kind and dutiful, always—were knocking back pills and whiskeys eight hours a day, just to endure the monotony of domestic life; the obligation of taking care of their husbands. Or Billie, knocking back whiskeys to endure the entourage of abusive men. To expunge the memory of rape. Fran’s singing from the ’50s; absent The Pill, Roe v. Wade, Title IX, even the sanctioned O (absent the discourse, even), listening to this song, I imagine her as woman whose rage is so far compressed, she’s become an emotional tundra. It makes me want to pour hot wax down my ear canal.
During the ’90s, which are easy to romanticize now, feminism became post—and now, many of our feminist cornerstones are about to be fed to the incinerator by the Bush death star. Concurrently, Destiny’s Child, who termed and personified the idea of upward mobility as lady power, who’ve been a fairly accurate thermometer of where middle-ground/sex-power feminism roosts—releases a song entitled “Cater 2 U,” a pictorial of the woman-as-rock/-servant mentality. So Fran Allison!
Let me help you
Take off your shoes
Untie your shoe strings
Take off your cufflinks
What you wanna eat boo?
Let me feed you
Let me run your bath water
Whatever you desire
Sing you a song
Turn the game on
I’ll brush your hair
Help you put your do-rag on
Want a footrub
Want a manicure
Baby I’m yours
I wanna cater to you boy
Smoove B.? Mom? When do we eliminate this idea as a road map… 2008? 2076? Should I start drinking now?
[dramatic exuent, part I]