Our Favorite Witch
By the pricking of our thumbs, something fabulous this way comes!
ENDORA!
FAST FACTS:
Endora is a 1,000-year-old witch… though if you saw her pop up suddenly on top of a lampshade — a favorite perch — you'd swear she couldn't be a day over 999.
With her radioactive-blue eye shadow, Lucy red hair, and pursed Agnes Moorehead lips full of pruney scorn, Endora tends to be as much Auntie Mame as Wicked Witch of the West. She has eschewed witchy weeds for flowing diva robes in clashing purple-green combos. And those winging eyelashes! Already magic!
Though she is on cordial terms (for the most part) with her ex-husband, the warlock Maurice, who fancies himself an actor and speaks with a British accent (real or fake, we never know), Endora has really one mission in life:
Butting into her daughter's life at every inopportune moment. She is the voice of reason to remind Samantha… You’re not straight at all, darling, you’re a witch.
Right when Samantha is up to her twitchy nose in domestic crises, there's Endora materializing on the staircase, atop the banister, while somewhere a harp is discordantly plucked.
Endora makes no secret of despising Samantha's conventional ad-exec husband, whose name she purposely garbles -- sometimes calling him "Darwood," "Dexter," "Dum Dum" but never "Darrin" (his actual name), settling at one point on the ultimate slur "mortal!"
It is Darrin, paranoid about his job and what the neighbors will say, who has forbidden Samantha from practicing magic, insisting she keep all trace of witchiness in the closet -- as much as she can, which, as we know (too well) will be very little.
It is Darrin always fussing about, pulling down the blinds so Mrs. Kravitz won’t discover their secret… which she always does, but like a lot of people when surprised by something marvelous, she prefers not to believe her eyes.
(God, I loved Mrs. Kravitz! That face could stop clocks and strike down small children in the street! And the cackling Paul Lynde, flying in out of the blue… dear Paul Lynde…always light in the loafers.)
But Samantha, thanks to her ancestral instincts, thanks to having Endora as whatever passes for a maternal figure in the Eye of Newt world…Samantha is constantly breaking out into fabulousness. The girl can’t help it!
The globe-trotting Endora, whose broom is never grounded for long, speaks hundreds of languages (Chinese and Swahili being favorites) and is a lecturer on the Witches Council Convention circuit.
Her hobbies (other than rearranging Darrin's face when he's asleep) are mountain climbing, reading Harpies Bizarre, and lunching on the Champs-Élysées.
Just like us!
And she never hesitates to set her daughter… and the world.. on the true path of self-actualization.
“We witches are quicksilver… a fleeting shadow… a distant sound. Our home has no boundaries beyond which we cannot pass. We live in music… in a flash of color. We live on the wind and in the sparkle of a star!”
Yes, Endora, we do!
Work that acid blue eye-shadow and those winging Fabulashes, Lady of the Night!
Brazenly flamboyant forever!
Screencaps, via YouTube: Bewitched circa 1966, Screen Gems Television
DVD available on Amazon
Yours truly,
