Actress Dubois Brought Privacy Ethics to Fore
The episode opens with Willona recounting to her family that day's exciting sting operation in which, while shopping on her lunch break, she caught a department store shoplifter and was awarded $50 and a job offer working part time in store security.
Of course she turned down the job, she tells her family with Dubois' signature panache, as "I ain't no spy." But Willona reconsiders the spy-for-hire offer when her adopted tween Penny (played by precocious Janet Jackson) asks for ice skating lessons and calls her "mom" for the first time.
Willona next returns to the store's manager and asks him for the job she rejected the previous day. From then on middle management sweeps her into the security team with cop camaraderie and tells "Woods" she really has a knack for this line of work.
The job entails Woods sitting for her entire shift behind a two-way mirror watching people try on clothes.
Willona expresses mixed feelings about invading peoples' privacy to her immediate supervisor. The supervisor reassures Woods that she'll get so used to watching people she won't notice her conscience anymore, to which Willona replies "that's what I'm afraid of".
This being a sitcom, the ending is a hilarious pile on in which her supervisor, while lecturing Willona, gets interrupted via intercom by the department manager, who unbeknownst to them, had been listening in on their conversation through concealed microphones.
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Further Reading:
Ja'net Dubois, 'Good Times' actress who co-wrote 'Jeffersons' theme, dies: washingtonpost.com
Tech worker Susan Fowler's family and acquaintances were followed and surveilled by multiple private investigators, some pretending to be journalists, immediately after Fowler published an essay on the internet about discrimination at venture capitalist-backed Uber, a Silicon Valley company. time.com
This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
