Celoron, New York, became a less frightening town on Saturday, with the unveiling of a new statue of hometown hero Lucille Ball. Since 2009, a terrifying bronze monument to the television actress and producer, which came to be known as “Scary Lucy,” has presided over the town’s Lucille Ball Memorial Park. Its sculptor, Dave Poulin, must have been looking for a challenge, because he chose to depict Ball in her iconic “Vitameatavegamin” scene, in which she pulls a variety of disgusted faces as she pretends to enjoy the taste of a health tonic:
Poulin’s sculpture doesn’t particularly resemble Lucille Ball, but it definitely conveys the idea that whatever’s in the Vitameatavegamin bottle is bad news:
After a Facebook campaign to get rid of the statue, Poulin apologized in a letter to the Hollywood Reporter for what he called “by far my most unsettling sculpture.” (He also referred to it as “the Celoron Lucy,” which is what it should be labeled if it somehow ends up in the British Museum.) To be fair to Poulin, the sculpture was a private endeavor that was donated to the town by its first owners, not a commissioned monument, and he offered to fix it at his own expense.
Instead, the town held a national contest, eventually choosing sculptor Carolyn Palmer to create a new Lucy from scratch. Her version shows Ball in a polka-dot dress standing atop her Hollywood Walk of Fame star. It is recognizably a portrait of Lucille Ball and does not appear to be offering the viewer a spoonful of poison:
The new sculpture was unveiled at a ceremony on Saturday, on what would have been Ball’s 105th birthday. As for “Scary Lucy,” the Paris Review reported that it had been donated to the National Comedy Center in Jamestown, New York—Ball’s birthplace—to enjoy a long afterlife as a joke, but the Hollywood Reporter said Friday that it will simply be relocated elsewhere in the same park. Wherever it ends up, it’s crucial that lightning rods be installed nearby, lest the statue, infused with electricity, come to life and go on a Vitameatavegamin-fueled rampage.
