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Sophia: The change of life didn't change her life!
Four Old Women Share an Apartment *Why The Golden Girls was sitcom genius.* By
Troy Patterson
http://www.slate.com/id/2217147/
As if presiding over a festive wake, both the Hallmark Channel and WE tv are airing *Golden Girls*marathons
this week. This heavy-rotation tribute to the show's top-billed star, Beatrice Arthur, provides die-hard fans with a low-key alternative to rending their garments. Additionally, it provides us all with a fine opportunity to assess the sitcom anew. We begin with the observation that *The Golden Girls *is way too good for WE, where it rubs its '80s shoulder pads with *Amazing Wedding Cakes* and *Women Behind Bars*.
The show debuted in September of 1985, a time that, in TV terms, is as distant as the Enlightenment. *The Golden
Girls * joined an NBC lineup that featured *The A-Team*, *Remington Steele*, *Hill Street Blues*, *St. Elsewhere*, *Miami Vice*, *The Cosby Show*, and *Cheers*. To be sure, there was room for raw idiocy on the schedule of programming executive Brandon Tartikoff. *TV Bloopers & Practical Jokes* aired on Mondays at 8 p.m., thus anticipating the current strategy of programming executive Ben Silverman: Howie Mandel's *Candid Camera* knockoff does the practical jokes while his thought process behind greenlighting dreck like *Crusoe* covers the blooper angle. Those were different times, and *The Golden Girls* aired during a two-hour block of Saturday-night comedies. Yes, children, people used to watch network TV on Saturdays, instead of going to meth parties or diddling their Twitters or whatever passes for an evening's entertainment nowadays.
It aired at 9 p.m., between *227* and *The Facts of Life*, two other gynocentric comedies, the one celebrating the role of women in holding communities together, the other inculcating a fetish for prep-school girls. But *The Golden Girls* —about a group of older women sharing a Miami house designed like a multichamber sunroom—trafficked in something like pop feminism, and it's terrifically apt that Arthur played the Carrie Bradshaw figure in a sketch deftly spoofing on *Sex and the City*.
Created by Susan Harris—a pioneering producer and the writer of the famous abortion episode of Arthur's *Maude*—*Golden Girls* boasted characters who were sharp in their humor and secure in their freedoms, which included the freedom to be mean. The show's most biting laugh lines—which are shaped so well that these scripts would work
for radio—achieve that ideal bitchiness animating *The Women*. In a typical moment, Blanche, the vain Southern belle played by Rue McClanahan, preens, "One thing I know for sure, I have not lost my hourglass figure." Which is the cue for Arthur, as acid Dorothy, to snipe, "And it looks like somebody poured about 90 minutes of extra sand in the glass." The in-studio audience laughs, and Blanche laughs it off. That the characters insult one another so viciously indicates their intimacy. When addressing the comforts and frustrations of friendship, *The Golden Girls* is more interesting than *Friends* (which had its moments) and as compelling as *I Love You, Man* (which has some rather awesome moments). Call it *The Sisterhood of the Comfortable Slacks*.
Let us review the girls' bios, as if you need reminding: Blanche Devereaux was the youngest and most sexually ambitious, occasionally catching the vapors, sometimes mincing rhythmically. Blanche vamps along as a cartoon
version of a Tennessee Williams hothouse flower, with her first name swiped from *A Streetcar Named
Desire* and her regular references to her father as "Big Daddy" nodding to *Cat on a Hot Tin Roof*. But McClanahan brings the part to life by coming on like a light-farcical version of Maxine Faulk, the rapaciously lusty widow played by Ava Gardner in the underappreciated film version of *The Night of the Iguana*.
Betty White played Rose Nylund, who had relocated to Miami from St. Olaf, Minn., where all children are subnormal, based on the evidence of her cracked anecdotes and gloriously dingbatty self. *The Golden Girls* is a broad ethnic comedy, and she is its Norwegian-American emissary of the upper Midwest, as affable as Marge Gunderson's accent, though without any brains. Not just the daffiest of the girls, Rose is also the prettiest, and the combination gives her an aspect of Elsie the Cow.
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Estelle Getty was Sophia Petrillo, the mother of Arthur's Dorothy. From Sicily by way of Brooklyn, she slices off her lines like Catherine Scorsese in her bit part in *Goodfellas*. Because *The Golden Girls* made the scene before the political correctness and identity politics of the 1990s, its writers didn't get hung up on inappropriate jokes, and Sophia, because of her advanced age and old-world attitude, was given the most tasteless. In a fairly tame instance,
she wonders, of a girl-on-girl hug, "What is this, Wimbledon?"
Which brings us to Dorothy Zbornak, who, despite having been raised by Sophia, speaks in the Catskills cracks and vaudeville cadences of Jewish humor. Either Dorothy is intended as a generically ethnic New Yorker or else
she picked this up during her decades of marriage to ex-husband Stanley. Significantly, while the other three girls are widows, Dorothy is a divorcee. Her lines are the most bitter and world-weary. She exudes the strongest scent of desperation about dying alone.
Wrapping up the first night of its *Golden Girls *marathon on Monday, WE aired the series finale, the second half of a two-parter titled "One Flew Out of the Cuckoo's Nest." For a valediction, *The Golden Girls* married Dorothy off to an eligible bachelor played by Leslie Nielsen. In her angular white wedding dress, she looked like a hybrid of Ivana Trump, Krystle Carrington, Cruella DeVille, and a snowy egret. The episode ends with a group hug and then an encore of the hug. What was this, the LPGA tour? Then Dorothy disappears into the sunset, perhaps the one from the first scenes of the opening credits, with a jet sliding in front of an orange disc like a friendly vision of the great grand finale in the sky.
So a bunch of Estelle Getty items are being auctioned off this Sunday at Bonham's and Butterfield's. Among the items you'll find her purse, glassesand some awards. I really want this http://is.gd/Z9Sp but I may be outbid as so many people loved Estelle and her work!
I still can't believe Bea Arthur is gone. It's just a bummer to know that
another Girl is gone. Thought I'd do some Dorothy quotes. Her and Estelle
Getty had some of the best lines:
Dorothy: [to Sophia] You're a furry little gnome and we feed you too much
_______________
Dorothy: It's wonderful dating in Miami. Every single man under eighty sells
cocaine.
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Rose: Charlie once had a business partner who was also a lying, cheating,
evil, slimy human being!
Dorothy: Wait, Rose, let me guess. Hans
Zinglefruberdanshoodlegadenhinkelmeier?
Rose: Yup! That's the louse!
_______________
Dorothy: Now look here... you withered old Sicilian monkey!
I still can't believe Bea Arthur is gone. It's just a bummer to know that
another Girl is gone. Thought I'd do some Dorothy quotes. Her and Estelle
Getty had some of the best lines.
And as much as Dorothy loved her Mother, she had plenty of names for her!
Dorothy: [to Sophia] You're a furry little gnome and we feed you too much
_________________________________________________________________
Dorothy: Good night, Rose. Go to sleep, honey. Pray for brains.
__________________________________________________________________
Dorothy: [to Sophia] Get back here, you deceitful little Sicilian gekko!
__________________________________________________________________
Dorothy: You remember my lying vicious toad of a mother?
__________________________________________________________________
Dorothy: Shady Pines Ma! Shady Pines!
R.I.P. Bea Arthur, aka Dorothy Zbornack. We'll miss you.
from Fox News and the Associated press...
LOS ANGELES — Beatrice Arthur, the tall, deep-voiced actress whose razor-sharp delivery of comedy lines made her a TV star in the hit shows "Maude" and "The Golden Girls" and who won a Tony Award for the musical "Mame," died Saturday. She was 86.
Arthur died peacefully at her Los Angeles home with her family at her side, family spokesman Dan Watt said. She had cancer, Watt said, declining to give further details.
"She was a brilliant and witty woman," said Watt, who was Arthur's personal assistant for six years. "Bea will always have a special place in my heart."
Arthur is survived by her sons and two granddaughters. No funeral services are planned.
Blanche: Look on the bright side, he did get to kiss me.
Dorothy: Big Deal. more people get to kiss you than the Pope's ring!
Sigh! It's the end of an era! No more episodes of The Golden Girls on Lifetime after tonight. The show moves to the Hallmark channel this Sunday. The saddest part is that I don't HAVE the Hallmark channel ::wails:: This is horrific! I only hoarded about 28 episodes. I didn't know this awful time was upon us! ::sigh:: Well for those of you that have the Hallmark channel, they'll be playing a massive marathon on Sunday.
Blanche: This is strictly off the record but Dirk is nearly five years younger than I am.
Dorothy: In what, Blanche, dog years?
