Wild Women: Lily Charles

An agoraphobic, alcoholic, ex-synchronized swimmer.

One of the most creative characters to don a patch was Lily Charles, aunt of Charlotte "Chuck" Charles on Pushing Daisies.  The show's protagonist was a boy who discovers his gift to bring the dead back to life.  The gift has rules, one being he can never touch the re-living again or they will drop dead from the slightest contact with his skin.  The plot thickens as Ned grows up and brings his childhood crush "Chuck" back to life.  Then what else, but they run around solving crimes. 

Like "Heart to Heart" meets "Murder She Wrote" meets Grease.

The Darling Mermain Darlings.  I'd have taken Ellie to see them!

Enter Chuck's aunt Lily Charles, one part of the ex-synchronized swimming duo the Darling Mermaid Darlings.  Lily, played by Swoosie Kurtz, lost her eye to a cat box accident and wears beautiful, decorative patches. 
At the end of the series (spoiler alert) I find I have more in common with Charlotte.  Lily is not her aunt, she's her (dum dum dum) MOTHER!  Let's hear it for the one-eye moms!  Alright, this mom is fairly twisted.  And to be a nit pick, mom could never put her head underwater without an industrial strength facemast for fear her ocular cavity would fill with water and she'd drown.  That aside, the Darling Mermaid Darlings have elegant style and fluid moves that would have filled mom's eye with envy. 

Check out the cool patches:

Lily Charles before Early-Mid-Middle-Morning Prayer.

Shock at seeing Chuck alive.

Mom never saw the show, but one thing she would have loved was the frequent treat of Kristen Chenoweth or Greene bursting into song.  Mom loved herself a musical.  Check out the Sound of Music, Birdhouse in Your Soul, or Morning Has Broken to fall in love with the show yourself.

Swoosie Kurtz on playing one-eyed, agoraphobic, vodka-holic, "Bette Davis meets Clint Eastwood":

Video of Birdhouse in Your Soul (can not RESIST a They Might Be Giants reference):

I can't get the Morning Has Broken segment to link, but you can find it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jv0klnEAZmM

Prosthetic Eyes and Foreheads (wait for it, wait for it!)

A few years ago Eric and I were sorting through stuff in the house when he accidentally shocked himself--not with a live wire, but with a box containing two of my mother's prosthetics.  He gave a nervous laugh and handed the box over to me saying, "Look, you have your mother's eyes."

This photo tells me all I need to know about mom's esteem with the prosthesis.

Mom's long relationship with prosthetics began around age 10 and some highlights from Chapter 2 are below.  I'll scan in the 8 page chapter and post it unabridged this week, but for now this will do.

Fourth grade also marked a transition from the gauze bandage taped on my face to an artificial eye prosthesis.  It required another surgery to line the eye orbit with skin from my stomach....I was so excited about not having to wear the gauze anymore and have questions about who hit me or what happened to me.  Over the years I had asked my mom if she couldn't just paint an eye on the gauze or behind a Halloween mask for me.  I really wanted to blend in.

We started trips to downtown Chicago to get the prostheses started.  The clinician was a wonderful artist and the moon shaped part of the eyeball showing was exactly like my left eye....Sometimes it fell out, sometimes [the glue] burned, sometimes it was okay.  They got me a pair of glasses, not that I needed them, but that they helped to camouflage the seam of the circle of plastic surrounding the eye.

It took me a while to realize that although people who didn't know me didn't ask em as many questions [with the prosthetic], they were now asking my friends and family.  They were too embarrassed to ask me because it looked like I thought everything looked okay, which it didn't.




Mom and I saw TMBG in DC years ago at Wolf Trap.  What a great summer day, prosthetic foreheads and all.  The song spoke doubly to me today, "where was I, I forgot the point that I was making," seems to be the theme of the day!