I spend my summers on the outskirts of Celeron, NY which has the claim to fame of being the hometown of Lucille Ball. Celeron itself is on the outskirts of Jamestown which is part of Chautauqua County of Western NY. Jamestown and the region has been playing up the connection to Lucy for the last couple of decades. And why not? Who doesn’t love Lucy? I’ve watched the entire DVD collection! She set the standard for comedy and Jamestown and Celeron have been sharing the love every since. If you watch the show, listen for the references to Jamestown. They’re there.

A while back, the waterfront park in Celeron became home to a statue commemorating their favorite daughter. There’s one problem though. Take a look. That’s me and, wait, is that Lucy?

Ugly Lucy. Not sure what happened, but this sculpture doesn’t quite catch the essence of the First Lady of Comedy. This sculpture received so much negative feedback that eventually a new statue was commissioned and you can see the results here.

Much better. I’ll be using this park this summer to do some of my writing, and I will look fondly on both Lucy’s. Face it, we all have bad days and don’t quite look like ourselves. I may even have a bad writing day where I’ll be staring at a metaphorical statue of ugly Mark. But never fear, a wrong turn can always be made right.

In some ways, I wish the ugly Lucy was the only one in the park. I think that Lucy herself would have gotten a laugh out of it. Statues are rather pretentious. Ugly statues, on the other hand, might just strike the chord of authenticity better than a ravishing work of glam and glory. But it’s pretty cool that our local park has two statues of our local comedic heroine.

Here’s to you, Lucy.