In 1990, Someone Thought Roseanne Barr Singing the National Anthem Was a Swell Idea

Picture this: It’s July 25, 1990. You and your family are settling in to your seats at San Diego’s Jack Murphy Stadium to watch the second game of a doubleheader between the Padres and the Cincinnati Reds.

It’s a special Working Women’s Day at the ballpark, so there will be lots of family friendly entertainment and appreciation of working women.

A guy on the field announces “And please give a great big Major League San Diego welcome to America’s most famous working woman, Roseanne Barr, who will sing our national anthem.”

And then, this:

To be followed by all the pearl-clutching and hand-wringing and “think-about-the-children”-ing from the media.

Somehow, America survived that. And the Padres beat the Reds 10-4.

Roseanne kind of faded into the background for a while there, but she came back with a vengeance when ABC rebooted her Roseanne sitcom in 2018.

And then she sunk that ship, too.

Let this be a lesson to all: When you get Roseanne, you have no one to blame but yourself when Roseanne does what Roseanne’s gonna do.