Roper Blues

Chemistry is a strange and fascinating thing. It affects attraction between people, or repulsion between them; cooking recipes and how they turn out cannot escape the importance of chemistry; chaos in its primal beginnings owes a continuing debt to chemistry. Humour too, seems a matter of chemistry. When I was in my twenties, a hilarious sitcom was a way to distract from the stresses of being a foreign student at TCU, it was called "Three's Company". A spin off was started in 1979, called "The Ropers", starring Norman Fell and Audra Lindley as the notoriously unhappy Mr. and Mrs. Roper, the landlords to the apartment complex were Jack ( John Ritter), Chrissy ( Suzanne Somers) and Janet ( Joyce Dewitt) shared an apartment in "Three's Company". The spin off with the Ropers only lasted a year, and it also starred the outrageously funny Jeffrey Tambor. Short lived as the spin off was, and thus unsuccessful, I became captivated by the character of Helen Roper, played by Audra Lindley. She plays an energetic, enthusiastic, intelligent woman trapped in a dusty marriage to a dull and self centered man, Stanley Roper, played very effectively by Norman Fell. Their marriage was kind of sad on "Three's Company", but on their own show, "The Ropers", the funny sadness takes on a deeper melancholy, one not devoid of a palpable existential flavour, that I found and find to this day, vaguely disturbing and unnerving. I am trying to figure out why. It is probable because my parents and my in laws both had such desperately unhappy marriages, full of frustration and stupor. Mrs. Roper fights so valiantly for every scrap of hope, laughter, joy, excitement. Her husband is not a bad guy, he is just a lousy match for her, and she for him. Lousy chemistry experiment gone sour. Perhaps that is why the show quickly failed. It was too real. Comedy is fun, because it makes us forget our trouble, it makes us feel better about them at least, because we can relate to the characters and their problems. But Audra Lindley is so good at her role as the frustrated Helen Roper, that she crosses the line over to our daily reality, walks right in to our living room, and sits down. And that makes us uncomfortable. Audra Lindley was too good, and we didn't like it, because her melancholy becomes our own, and ours becomes hers, and we can't swallow it, a matter of chemistry again. I always walk away feeling slightly nauseous from watching a rerun of "The Ropers", not because I think it is awful. Quite the contrary. I feel the same melancholy when I think of Anton Chekhov and his desperately sad plays. OK, I know, the comparison between the two is perhaps sacrilegious and absurd, but remember what the French say : "On se hate de rire , de peur qu'on ne pleure", "we hurry up and laugh, afraid we might otherwise cry". Humour and sadness go hand in hand, they are twins, separated at birth, and sometimes they remain uneasily co-joined, and we squirm with unease as we have to decide whether to laugh or cry at their predicament. I was sad to learn that Audra Lindley died of leukemia, a tragic end to a woman who was so full of determined laughter and energy. Here's to you, Mrs. Roper. Thanks for the sour mixed in with the sweet of the cocktails of laughs you left for us to sample and try.