"Good Night, Weezie"

Isabel Sanford, former actress on "All in the Family" and its spin-off, "The Jeffersons", has died at age 86.

She always struck me as so sweet and funny. For a kid growing up in an all-white town, in a nearly all-white state who watched the breakthrough show of "All in the Family" as Archie Bunker had to come to terms with having a black family move next door, her gentle, often smart character of Louise Jefferson made me want to have her for a neighbor, always made me smile. I learned my sharpness of tongue from women like her, the character of "Maude", and others.

While I might often lament that we're still discussing race so frequently in the new millennium, I look back and think that when I was very small, African American characters were still relatively new in TV shows except for playing support roles (with rare exceptions: Julia with "Diahann Carroll" as well as Bill Cosby in "I Spy").

For me, from my all-white background and growing up in a time when many of the adults around me blamed blacks for busing, for forcing integration, for cities having riots, et al, having characters like Louise - strange as it sounds - allowed me to transcend some of my limited social experience.

Hmm... I'm not quite saying what I want to say here, so let's just leave it with my sincere thanks to Ms. Sanford for all the laughs, the smiles, and the enjoyment.