Life After Lucy: The True Story of Keith Thibodeaux--"I Love Lucy's" Little Ricky
Grown-up child stars turned authors are dying to tell us about their lives after they left TV, yet our interest in them usually stops the minute the screen fades to black. Fortunately, Thibodeaux devotes nearly half his book to his years as Little Ricky onI Love Lucy. Keith was a three-year-old drumming prodigy in the bayous of Louisiana when his father took the family to California, hoping to ride his young son's drumsticks to a career in show business. That's exactly what happened as father and son became fixtures on the Lucy show, one as a gofer, one as an actor. Then it all went bad: divorces (Keith's parents as well as Lucy and Desi); the show's demise; Keith's addiction to drugs. Yet there's a happy ending in the form of marriage, children, and God. Thibodeaux describes his religious conversion with deep feeling, but many readers may grow weary, having heard the same story in other whatever-happened-to sagas. Still, if you ever watchedLucy, it's hard to keep yourself from picking up this book.Ilene Cooper