FoLCs, do you know about that movie Lois is watching here? Woman of the Year with Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn? I saw it about a hundred years ago, but I don't remember much, so I'll have to rely on an internet site I found (
www.imdb.com/title/tt0035567) to talk about it. Tracy and Hepburn play Sam Craig and Tess Harding, two reporters who are married to each other and are working for the same (possibly big-city) newspaper. Tess Harding is "a dedicated multilingual political columnist" while Sam Craig is a sports columnist. "The problem is that Tracy is a traditional male, while Hepburn, although distinctly female, isn't much of a Hausfrau." So they have this bickering love-hate relationship, while Hepburn, Tess Harding, is agonizing over how much of herself she wants to give up to get that romantic domestic bliss she's dreaming of. Should she really change her name from Tess Harding to Tess Craig, for example? And should she try to cook? She answers the latter question in the affirmative, and catastrophe ensues!
As for Hepburn and Tracy themselves, they are known as one of Hollywood's most romantic couples. They were never married, but they had this almost life-long off-screen relationship nevertheless. Tracy was a Catholic and couldn't get divorced, while Hepburn, or so I believe, never had any other love interests. Seems to me that Hepburn was the one who had to give up the most to make her relationship with Tracy work. He, on the other hand, could eat his cake and still have it, having both a mistress and a wife. Similarly, Tess Harding was the one who had to sacrifice the most to make her marriage to Sam Craig really happy.
As you can see, the similarities between Lois and Clark and Tess Harding and Sam Craig are incredible! Did the people behind Lois and Clark even use that movie as an inspiration for the TV show? Possibly, but it is equally possible that the people behind Woman of the Year looked at a certain comic book for inspiration. By the time Woman of the Year opened in 1942, Lois Lane and Clark Kent had already been working together at the Daily Planet in the comic book world for four years!
Anyway, it's a brilliant choice to have Lois watch this particular movie, where one of the two main characters is so much like herself. Let's see if our editor has planned to end her story in a way that bears any resemblance to the movie ending, which may be the cooking disaster scene - but I don't think you would do that, would you, editor?
You have certainly been doing great so far!
Ann
