Weezy!

Isabel Sanford
August 29, 1917 – July 9, 2004
Last year, when President Obama made a Jeffersons reference during a speech, he screwed it up. He jokingly clutched his chest and said "I'm a-comin', Weezy!". He used Weezy Jefferson's name but was actually quoting a classic bit from Sanford and Son where Redd Foxx notifies his dead wife Elizabeth that he's on his way. It was so hilarious and effective that when Sanford star Foxx suffered a fatal heart attack on the set of his sitcom The Royal Family in 1991, his co-stars thought he was doing a bit.

President Obama must have got it confused because both Redd Foxx's and Weezy Jefferson's real last names were Sanford. I don't blame him for the mix-up. Obama was in Indonesia until the early 1970s, because that's where he was born. I'm just kidding, of course. He was born in Kenya. Allegedly.

But back to Isabel Sanford, better known to the world as Weezy. What kind of name is Weezy, anyway? That's no name, that's an adjective. Eloise Gwendolyn Sanford was born August 29, 1917 in New York City, making her twenty-one years older than Sherman Hemsley, the man who would someday play her husband on The Jeffersons. Twenty-one years! That made her literally old enough to be his mother. But was she his mother? Our sources say no.

The show, of course, was a spin-off of All in the Family, and she almost turned down the role when producer Norman Lear had a congratulatory bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken delivered to her dressing room. Lear assured her that it was a sincere gift, and apparently everyone got chicken. That's some good eatin', no matter what color you are.

I always felt bad for the cast of The Jeffersons, and not just because Roxie Roker, the actress who played neighbor Helen, was in reality the mother of rocker Lenny Kravitz. When the show was cancelled in 1985, the entire cast was so stereotyped that I saw an Entertainment Tonight piece that they were doing a Jeffersons stage play. But they couldn't get their sassy maid Florence (Marla Gibbs) because she had rocketed to (relative) fame as the star of NBC's temporarily popular sitcom 227. Hemsley became the star of NBC's Amen! a year later.

Now they're all dead, except for Hemsley and Gibbs. Helen and her white husband, one of the two actors who played the Jeffersons' son Lionel, and even the annoying British neighbor. Dead and gone. Isabel Sanford would be 92 years old if she hadn't died on this day in 2004.

I'll be honest with you. I know it's Weezy's day and all, but I can't stop thinking about that chicken. I am starving. I heard so much about the Double Down sammich at KFC and when I went there yesterday, it was already gone.

So, it's a tragedy all around. Sitcoms get cancelled, old ladies die, and fast-food chicken restaurants suddenly remove items just when you're craving them the most. I think there's an important lesson to be learned about our fragile existence and crap like that, but I have no idea what it is.