On losing our last Golden Girl
We lost Betty White as our last pained effort to get through 2021. I’ve been a fan of The Golden Girls for years, as most Americans have been, and I was happy to see it come to Disney+ and Star because the show simply doesn’t run in syndication in the U.K. the way it does in America.
That meant that my husband got to watch the show for the first time, which gave me a nice refresher on the comedy, the casting, the writing, and yeah, just the great way the show was put together. (And how awful The Golden Palace was. Woof.)
For those of us who grew up with this show and watched the episodes on repeat over the years, we know all these girls like friends. We know trivia about each actor and how they really got on during the filming of the show. We know every bit of dialogue and the punchline to every joke. We know what a lanai is and that a dumb baciagaloop can be an effective name to call a son-in-law.
Yes, for many of us, The Golden Girls was like our generation’s I Love Lucy. We watched this show religiously and it’s never lost its charm, wit, or sentimentality. For a show about older women who were embracing life in Miami, it was pretty cutting edge for the time. Now it seems quite tame in retrospect, but the themes still hold up.
The passing of Betty White and the media reaction to such a beloved comedic actress just shows how special this show was to us all. We loved Rose Nyland and we wanted to be her friend. We believed in her as a naive, sweet farm girl from Minnesota who would make a strong impact on women who by all accounts were completely different from her. It gave us more willingness to be open in making friendships and seeing how important those kinds of connections are for women. (I dare say, they are the pre-cursor for Sex and the City. The same generation would have been happy to see four ladies lunching once again.)
So it’s been said many times before but, thank you, Betty White, for being a friend.
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