Sexy Girl Rita and Bert

[GQ28]

C39Alice and the Blind)
Who was the pretty girl Rita, that Alice, was jeloues of ? What's her real name? Did She play on any other C39 or L eps.? Is she still alive? What about the guy who played Bert Wetamire?

[Zoneboy]

Originally Posted by GQ28

C39Alice and the Blind)
Who was the pretty girl Rita, that Alice, was jeloues of ? What's her real name? Did She play on any other C39 or L eps.? Is she still alive? What about the guy who played Bert Wetamire?

I think you meant Alice and the Blonde. The actress who played Rita was Freda Rosen and that's her only credit according to IMDb

http://imdb.com/name/nm2692067/

[Bill S.]

Originally Posted by Zoneboy

I think you meant Alice and the Blonde. The actress who played Rita was Freda Rosen and that's her only credit according to IMDb

Yes, and Frank Behrens (1919-1986) played Bert Wedemeyer. But getting back to Freda Rosen...while IMDb doesn't list a date of birth or death on her page, I did find some interesting information elsewhere on the web. The first site I came across (See here) mentions that a therapist by the name of Freda Rosen passed away on July 17th, 2007. That site wasn't too helpful in figuring out whether or not it was the same Freda Rosen that played Rita in "Alice And The Blonde," but the next site I found definitely was. This one part in particular caught my attention:

And then, within a week, it all came clear to me with the "Five-E's". My therapist and ex-actress, Freda Rosen, added the pivotal middle "E" during a discussion in one of our therapy sessions. This middle "E" made the whole process make sense.

http://www.actingintuitive.com/articles/5-Es.htm

Answers.com also claims that Freda was the wife of Arnie Rosen..."one of Jackie Gleason's top writers"...

http://www.answers.com/topic/the-hon...=entertainment

[T-Greg]

Good sleuthing Bill! For years, I could find nothing on her. The only thing I can add is her maiden name was Larsen or Larson. I believe it's the former.

[dahatman]

I don't believe that is the Freda Rosen who played Rita. I have unearthed this:
Freda Rosen and I came into each other's lives in 1972. Just having ended a six-year marriage, Freda, from a central Bronx, poor, working class Jewish family, was coming out as a lesbian . a militant feminist lesbian. By this time Centers Clinic was rapidly transforming into an overtly Marxist-Leninist (Maoist) collective. Women (like Hazel, Cathy and many others) were playing major roles in the embryonic leftist grouping. Still Freda--quite correctly and properly--viewed my dominant leadership role with suspicion. Rosen was a typist by trade (and, I might add a very good one) and soon she and I came to know each other working side by side on the organization's earliest publications; in particular a weekly mimeographed paper called Centers For Change (also the name of the collective). And we fell in love! This radical lesbian feminist and I, working class sister and brother, came to love each other working together, building together, joking together, creating together.

Over time Rosen, a commercial diploma high school graduate, was trained as a social therapist and became a left-wing, grassroots counterpart to Dr. Joyce Brothers. I am so proud of her accomplishment. Women like Freda, Hazel, Cathy, Alvaader, Deborah, Marina and Rie have shown what it means to go far beyond where they are supposed to be without sacrificing themselves to a development in accordance with a white, middle class, male-dominated paradigm of women's liberation. The middle class lesbian movement brutalized Freda. "Who's that straight white man who runs the show?" they would ask her mockingly. "He's a poor working class guy from the South Bronx" Rosen would say, "and he's got a lot more respect for me, a radical lesbian, than you ****ers!" Freda Rosen is a class act.

This is that website: http://www.lyndonlarouchewatch.com/newmanwomen1.htm

[The Great One]

I think this thread deserves an award!!! I find this information very interesting!
Now, who is right? This will be fun to try to solve.

[The Great One]

Originally Posted by dahatman

I don't believe that is the Freda Rosen who played Rita. I have unearthed this:
Freda Rosen and I came into each other's lives in 1972. Just having ended a six-year marriage, Freda, from a central Bronx, poor, working class Jewish family, was coming out as a lesbian . a militant feminist lesbian. By this time Centers Clinic was rapidly transforming into an overtly Marxist-Leninist (Maoist) collective. Women (like Hazel, Cathy and many others) were playing major roles in the embryonic leftist grouping. Still Freda--quite correctly and properly--viewed my dominant leadership role with suspicion. Rosen was a typist by trade (and, I might add a very good one) and soon she and I came to know each other working side by side on the organization's earliest publications; in particular a weekly mimeographed paper called Centers For Change (also the name of the collective). And we fell in love! This radical lesbian feminist and I, working class sister and brother, came to love each other working together, building together, joking together, creating together.

Over time Rosen, a commercial diploma high school graduate, was trained as a social therapist and became a left-wing, grassroots counterpart to Dr. Joyce Brothers. I am so proud of her accomplishment. Women like Freda, Hazel, Cathy, Alvaader, Deborah, Marina and Rie have shown what it means to go far beyond where they are supposed to be without sacrificing themselves to a development in accordance with a white, middle class, male-dominated paradigm of women's liberation. The middle class lesbian movement brutalized Freda. "Who's that straight white man who runs the show?" they would ask her mockingly. "He's a poor working class guy from the South Bronx" Rosen would say, "and he's got a lot more respect for me, a radical lesbian, than you ****ers!" Freda Rosen is a class act.

This is that website: http://www.lyndonlarouchewatch.com/newmanwomen1.htm

Awesome find!!!

[Bill S.]

Originally Posted by dahatman

I don't believe that is the Freda Rosen who played Rita. I have unearthed this:
Freda Rosen and I came into each other's lives in 1972. Just having ended a six-year marriage, Freda, from a central Bronx, poor, working class Jewish family, was coming out as a lesbian . a militant feminist lesbian. By this time Centers Clinic was rapidly transforming into an overtly Marxist-Leninist (Maoist) collective. Women (like Hazel, Cathy and many others) were playing major roles in the embryonic leftist grouping. Still Freda--quite correctly and properly--viewed my dominant leadership role with suspicion. Rosen was a typist by trade (and, I might add a very good one) and soon she and I came to know each other working side by side on the organization's earliest publications; in particular a weekly mimeographed paper called Centers For Change (also the name of the collective). And we fell in love! This radical lesbian feminist and I, working class sister and brother, came to love each other working together, building together, joking together, creating together.

Over time Rosen, a commercial diploma high school graduate, was trained as a social therapist and became a left-wing, grassroots counterpart to Dr. Joyce Brothers. I am so proud of her accomplishment. Women like Freda, Hazel, Cathy, Alvaader, Deborah, Marina and Rie have shown what it means to go far beyond where they are supposed to be without sacrificing themselves to a development in accordance with a white, middle class, male-dominated paradigm of women's liberation. The middle class lesbian movement brutalized Freda. "Who's that straight white man who runs the show?" they would ask her mockingly. "He's a poor working class guy from the South Bronx" Rosen would say, "and he's got a lot more respect for me, a radical lesbian, than you ****ers!" Freda Rosen is a class act.

This is that website: http://www.lyndonlarouchewatch.com/newmanwomen1.htm

Interesting find...but other than her being a lesbian, what makes you think it's not the same Freda Rosen? It says that she was married before coming out as a lesbian in 1972, which was 16 years after "Alice And The Blonde" originally aired...and the fact still remains that she was an ex-actress. Doesn't it seem a little unlikely that there were two ex-actresses named Freda Rosen? I mean, that's not exactly a common name, and there's only one actress listed with that name on IMDb. Regardless, neither of our findings really give enough information to set anything in stone, so I guess we'll just have to keep searching until we can officially rule out one of our theories.

[dahatman]

The article states she was coming off a 6 year marriage in 1972. Arnie Rosen and her were married when she did that episode, and that was 1956. That is why I don't think it is the same person. I believe Arnie Rosen is still alive.

[T-Greg]

Here's an old thread where Honeymooners characters were discussed:

http://www.sitcomsonline.com/boards/...d.php?t=183392

[T-Greg]

Here's something else, which someone discovered above, written by Freda Rosen, I believe in 1989:

http://www.lyndonlarouchewatch.org/newmanwomen2.htm

Here's the Rosen portion. Note that which is bolded. She married in the mid 1960's and divorced 6 years later. "Alice and the Blonde" aired in June 1956. Someone mentioned she was married to Arnie when it aired, but has this been confirmed? Also, according to this article, she was entering her 20's in the mid 1960's. That means she would have been about 10 or 11 when the TV show aired. It can't be her.

P.S. About the "rape" reference. I think this explains it. The feminist theory says all heterosexual sex in our society is "rape" because of the unequal power between the parties.


Freda Rosen's farewell address
Freda Rosen

As some of you may already know, this column goes way back--all the way to January 1983, when the paper was still only the New York Alliance. Since then we've gone national, the world's changed, and with this issue "Sexually Speakin' and Otherwise" comes to an end. No longer will we separate the personal and political, even in the pages of this paper. Carrying on the column would be to cover up rather than to come out with who we really are, which is what must be done now. Let me explain.

I.

I've never been particularly good at self-exposure. In fact, I'm pretty closed. That's how I grew up, trying to hide who I was--poor, Jewish, plain. It was an impossible task--everyone could tell. That's why I never got invited to join the Girls' Club, the Women's Club, or the anti-clubs you've been reading about. So I formed my own.

I looked around my neighborhood, full of welfare families from "broken homes" like my own, I looked at the lives of other poor women, the deprivation, the desperation, the rats and roaches--the women selling their bodies to make ends meet--and I knew I didn't want to grow up to live like this. No one should have to.

My mother, a poor Jew, had fled from rural Scotland in the 30s to New York City, hoping to escape both poverty and anti-Semitism. She got off the boat and asked to be directed to the "streets paved with gold." She was laughed at for this, she told me years later. "People are poor in Scotland," she would say, "but not like here. Here, if you don't have money they treat you like an animal."

Minnie (she preferred "Millie"), my mother, was full of life; she was beautiful, but too poor, too Jewish and too much a foreigner to be invited into the Women's Club--not that she knew there was one. In fact, she never really adjusted. I saw her spirit get broken trying to raise four kids alone. The big gap between the American Dream and her ability to live it made her crazy. I was her only hope, and I wanted to get away.

I was never into boys, far back as I can remember. But being poor, all I had was my sexuality to get stuff with. The older I got the less I wanted to be a "real" woman, and the more I couldn't understand why other women didn't feel the same way. But I figured I'd better ad just--and fast! It was the mid-60s and I was entering my 20s. I looked around for the least abusive guy I could find with a good job and married him because it seemed like the only way up and out of the garbage, the starvation and poverty. It didn't work out, because rape is rape--what Fred identified as the male strategy for everyday life, which is getting as much as you can while giving as little as you can--whether with a smack or a smile. Participating in my own rape made me more and more depressed. Finally, with the help of other women, I found a way to live without him. I left my husband after six years, not having gotten very much or very far.

II.

It wasn't until the Women's and Gay Liberation Movements got underway that I seriously considered the possibility of living my life as a challenge to the oppressive and repressive social roles and rules of Real Womanhood. I tried, but failed; for much the same reasons that the Sexual Revolution went down to defeat: as Fred has pointed out, sex won and revolution lost. That is, I made certain reforms, but I hadn't transformed. I simply exchanged roles rather than changing challenging them. I was now with women instead of men, but still using my sexuality as a vehicle for upward mobility. Getting as much as possible and giving little became my tactic.

Yet while I lived my personal life this way, I was still able to develop politically. And the gap between what I said, sexually speakin' and otherwise, and what I did, grew.

During the 80s I had become a well respected sexologist in the independent political movement; lots of folks thought I was an expert on sex, intimacy and relationships, and I thought I had to be. "Sexually Speakin' "was an institution and no one challenged me, except my closest friends--especially Fred, who had taught me everything of any value that I knew. And he knew I hadn't learned enough. I played my role as Ms Sexually Speakin', the sexpert, instead of performing as the sexy revolutionary communist I had set out to be.

III.

I'm not sure exactly when I formed the Lesbian Caucus of the Women's Club--blaming women for getting raped and standing by while men raped them. But the conditions have been present for a long time--my distance, elitism and privileged position which I used to get stuff for myself, especially from those who cared for me most--all of which I thought I deserved and needed to protect me from a hostile world, a world I had committed my life to changing.

That changing is why I wanted to be close to Fred in the first place, but I ended up using him instead. So why wouldn't I go all the way with him? Well, wanting Fred is very demanding. It means wanting to live your life as a revolutionary--not separating the personal and political, not adapting in any way to a world which is inhumane. It means coming to terms with the fact that the world doesn't owe you anything--no matter how much you've suffered. It means not settling for the kitchens, closets or clubs. It means not using the caring and commitment of communists for your own ends. It means being a decent human being, all of the time, to all of your comrades (not just the ones you're trying to cut a deal for yourself with).

To my followers in the Lesbian Caucus and elsewhere: our time has come! We've all got to come out instead of covering up who we really are. I'm no longer willing to use my skills to mislead you, or to let you misuse me in this way. We can no longer be complicit in allowing the right wing to organize "personal life." We must do the work--we must dare to expose our errors and take a shot at correcting them. I for one see no other meaningfulness in this life than changing it. That's what we must push each other and support each other to do, remembering that it's bigger than each of us, even put together. It's about capitalism turning to fascism.

IV.

I sometimes remind myself of Stella, from the South Bronx Jewish working class community Fred grew up in. She pretended she was middle class until one day she was, but she never stopped pretending. Being a revolutionary has been something like that for me. To the extent I've pretended to be a revolutionary instead of performing as one, I've only reformed. Now I want to transform myself.

Wanting Fred has been key to all this. That's why we've been writing so much about him lately, and writing to him. Here's part of a letter I wrote to Fred New-man recently.

"There were times I wanted you for the father I never had. While I respected his courage, his smartness, his good looks, unlike you it was all about him for himself, and I really didn't like him much. He was the first, or so I thought, to abandon me. You never would. (I mistook this for softness.)

"You are the only man in my life I have never felt abandoned by. You have given me so much, and I have given you so little--and I know that now. Fred, you are the brother I have abandoned. (You told me to stop feeling guilty, that my guilt gets expressed as nastiness.) Your relationship with Rie has opened my eyes to this and now I can see the possibilities of wanting. I don't know much about wanting; I have mostly known need--the need of a poor Jew for survival, for relevance. I used you for that, again giving little, when you deserve it all. And for whatever worth I have to our class, it is you who deserve the credit, as Comrade Lenora put it so well . want you--terrified, yes--and I want you. I am a believer, remember. I have always believed in you." Fred, I will do whatever I have to, to want you, by whatever means necessary, to follow you. To Hell with "Sexually Speakin' and Otherwise"! It's a new day--Long Live the New Communism!

Freda Rosen is a social therapist at the East Side Center for Short Term Psychotherapy. From 1983 through 1989 she was the author of "Sexually Speakin' and Otherwise," which appeared weekly in the National Alliance. She ran for State Assembly in 1988 on the New Alliance Party line. Ms Rosen is currently a member of the Castillo Cultural Center collective and writes regularly for the National Alliance. "Freda Rosen's Farewell Address" first appeared in Vol. 10, No. 30 (August 24, 1989) of the National Alliance.

[*ClassicPinUp*]

Originally Posted by T-Greg

P.S. About the "rape" reference. I think this explains it. The feminist theory says all heterosexual sex in our society is "rape" because of the unequal power between the parties.

What sick and twisted minds these "women" (and I use the term loosely) have. Crazy b*tches.

[The Great One]

Originally Posted by T-Greg

Here's something else, which someone discovered above, written by Freda Rosen, I believe in 1989:

http://www.lyndonlarouchewatch.org/newmanwomen2.htm

Here's the Rosen portion. Note that which is bolded. She married in the mid 1960's and divorced 6 years later. "Alice and the Blonde" aired in June 1956. Someone mentioned she was married to Arnie when it aired, but has this been confirmed? Also, according to this article, she was entering her 20's in the mid 1960's. That means she would have been about 10 or 11 when the TV show aired. It can't be her.

P.S. About the "rape" reference. I think this explains it. The feminist theory says all heterosexual sex in our society is "rape" because of the unequal power between the parties.


Freda Rosen's farewell address
Freda Rosen

...But I figured I'd better ad just--and fast! It was the mid-60s and I was entering my 20s. I looked around for the least abusive guy I could find with a good job and married him because it seemed like the only way up and out of the garbage, the starvation and poverty. It didn't work out, because rape is rape... I left my husband after six years, not having gotten very much or very far....

Great job of finding this information!!! I think you definitely solved this mystery. I got a big kick out of this thread and how it stumped me but now all is well once again in Honeymooners land!

[Bill S.]

Oh well, I guess I was wrong after all, thanks for clearing that up Greg. Looks like it's back to square one on our search to find the Freda Rosen from "Alice And The Blonde"...

As for Arnie Rosen though, I've had trouble finding any information supporting that quote I posted from Answers.com about him being one of Jackie's "top writers." All the information I've managed to find on him (on and off the internet) points in the direction of him being a writer for Jackie during the Cavalcade years and for some of the later Lost Episodes (1956-1957 season), but nothing about the Classic 39 years, when his wife guest-starred on the show...strange...

[The Great One]

Originally Posted by Bill S.

...Arnie Rosen...All the information I've managed to find on him (on and off the internet) points in the direction of him being a writer for Jackie during the Cavalcade years and for some of the later Lost Episodes (1956-1957 season), but nothing about the Classic 39 years, when his wife guest-starred on the show...strange...

Strange indeed!!! You bring up some very interesting points. So the mystery continues...