by Jim Colucci
So perhaps this episode’s anti-Reagan dig was still fresh on Republican senator Mitch McConnell’s mind in March 2013 when he invoked The Golden Girls at the Conservative Political Action Conference outside Washington. The then Senate minority leader from Kentucky was trying to pay a compliment to the youthful Republican rogues’ gallery of Paul Ryan, Rand Paul, and Marco Rubio as he quipped, “Don’t tell me the Democrats are the party of the future, when their presidential ticket for 2016 is shaping up to look like a rerun of The Golden Girls.” Undoubtedly McConnell meant the remark—a sexist slam aimed at Hillary Clinton, to be sure—to be disparaging. But by linking the Democrats in the minds of voters with four of America’s most beloved ladies, McConnell inadvertently illustrated just another way his right-wingers are out of touch.
Despite what McConnell seems to think, America continues to cherish its Girls, decades after the show went off the air. Alexander Payne’s 2013 film Nebraska, nominated for the year’s Academy Award for Best Picture, contained a nod to The Golden Girls, as Bruce Dern’s character’s extended midwestern family sat silent in their living room, mesmerized by the Miami matrons on their screen. And just a month before McConnell’s comment, in February 2013, an episode of NBC’s short-lived, decidedly young-and-hetero sitcom Guys with Kids (“Gary’s Idea”) had built a B plot around straight, young divorced dad Chris’s (Jesse Bradford) love of all things Golden. After deciding in a moment of midlife crisis to become a DJ, Chris’s new career was floundering—until he played his own custom remix of “Thank You for Being a Friend” for his college-age clientele.
In fact, on the small screen, the ladies of the eighties continue to earn shout-outs on the hippest, twenty-first-century shows. In 2004, after overhearing his star Rachel Bilson talking about how she loves to watch The Golden Girls with her friends, writer Josh Schwartz decided to write her passion into his teen soap, The O.C. And so in the first-season episode “The Third Wheel,” Rachel’s character, Summer, bonded with her romantic rival, Anna (Samaire Armstrong), singing “Thank You for Being a Friend” in front of the ladies’ room mirror at a rock concert. Two seasons later, in “The Party Favor,” Anna returned to Newport Beach to reassure Summer—“You’re still my Blanche, you know”—extending the Golden Girls reference into an extended, multiyear metaphor for female friendship.
In the last weeks of 2013, the elderly Girls were paid major homage on another youthful soap, with a plot thread on Candace Bushnell’s Sex and the City prequel series, The Carrie Diaries. In 2007, Bea Arthur had appeared in a TV Land spoof, playing a geriatric Carrie Bradshaw obsessed with landing Abe Vigoda’s Mr. Big. (See it on YouTube by searching “Sex and the City—Parody starring Bea Arthur.”) But with a second-season story line on the CW network’s Carrie Diaries, the two worlds officially collided, resulting in what can only be described as a fan’s fever dream.
In the episode “The Second Time Around,” teenage Carrie’s high school friend Walt (Brendan Dooling), having been kicked out of his parents’ house after coming out, showed up at the Bradshaws’ door toting his prized box of VHS tapes full of Golden Girls episodes. And although Carrie’s lawyer father, Tom (Matt Letscher), was initially uncomfortable with the new living arrangement, he ultimately accepted Walt into his Connecticut home as the two bonded over their appreciation for the ladies of Miami.
With her show’s 1980s setting, The Carrie Diaries creator, Amy B. Harris, admits, “I always wanted to put The Golden Girls into the show somehow.” Amy, who previously had written for Sex and the City, had always heard that show called “a younger, more modern-day version of The Golden Girls,” and so mixing the Girls officially into the Carrie-verse “would be a really fun, meta experience.”
Aware of the gay community’s affection, the Carrie writers immediately focused on Walt as the character who would be the Girls’ biggest fan. “I loved the idea of a kid who was struggling to find himself being able to find a sense of community with these older women. And not only did the show give Walt comfort, but then it also provided a surprising common ground with Tom, where he could open up to him about the difficulties in his life,” Amy explains.
“I once asked my friend about how hard it was to come out. And because this was back in the eighties, when gay men didn’t necessarily think they could have marriages and kids of their own, he said the hardest thing was realizing he had to give up the ‘white picket fence’ dreams for his life. I think that’s what The Golden Girls was all about, too,” Amy theorizes. “Like the Girls, who lost their husbands, you envision a certain life for yourself for so long, and then you don’t get it. But in a way, you probably are happier—because you get something even better. That’s a powerful theme that resonates for so many people, and that’s what we wanted to tap into for our story line.”
Girls in the Afternoon
SHORTLY AFTER THE Carrie cast gave the Girls some prime time love, a very similar story line began to play out on daytime TV. In the summer of 2014, ABC’s soap General Hospital invoked The Golden Girls as a device to spark romance and jealousy in the love triangle of Felix the nurse (Marc Anthony Samuel), his former patient Lucas (Ryan Carnes), and Brad the lab technician (Parry Shen), as the former two stayed up all night—shirtless, of course—drinking wine and watching their fave eighties sitcom. Later, when Lucas introduced the show to his recently discovered dad, Julian (William deVry), he was able to bond with Port Charles’s tough mobster over their own mutual appreciation of The Golden Girls; GH’s episode on New Year’s Day 2015 then found the father and son hanging out on the couch together, debating about whether to watch a football game or a marathon of their favorite sitcom.
As GH’s former head writer Ron Carlivati explains, The Golden Girls proved to be a useful story device not only in bringing together an otherwise disparate father and son, but also in playing out the beats of gay romance. At various points, the three gay characters played the inevitable game: Which Golden Girl Are You? But sometimes, The Golden Girls brought these guys a bit too close. “We had Brad, who was jealous, deliver a speech where he said, ‘Oh, please—watching The Golden Girls is basically the equivalent of gay foreplay! The next thing you know, you’ll be watching Knots Landing, and then heading for the altar!”
The Golden Girls references have proven popular among the soap’s fans, who immediately expressed their approval on Twitter. But interestingly, Ron notes, “Some of our audience was surprised, not knowing that The Golden Girls is something that’s popular in gay culture. I had thought that the link was something well documented, so it was funny to see that a lot of our young, female fans didn’t realize that.” After Ron then tweeted some links to web articles about gays and The Golden Girls, he was happy to see the show now bringing together different demographic groups within his GH fan base as well. “I got a really nice response from at least one fan, who said, ‘Cool, I didn’t know that! You learn something new every day!’”
Ben DeLaCreme in her winning Golden Girls gown on the sixth-season premiere of Logo’s RuPaul’s Drag Race, February 24, 2014.
Photo courtesy of WORLD OF WONDER.
“Girls” Will Be Girls
AT THE SAME time the Girls were bringing together daytime’s men, they were also being celebrated by the queens of Logo’s hit reality show RuPaul’s Drag Race. In the main challenge at the heart of the show’s sixth-season premiere in February 2014, seven contestants were assigned boxes of mystery materials themed to various TV shows and tasked to create couture. Six of the boxes related to current hits, such as Downton Abbey, Game of Thrones, and Duck Dynasty; The Golden Girls was the only classic.
The season’s eventual runner-up, Adore Delano, hinted at wanting to get her hands on the Golden box. But it was instead given to Ben DeLaCreme, whose pastel paean to the Girls went on to triumph over tributes to pop culture flashes-in-the-pan Honey Boo Boo and the Kardashians. A Connecticut native now based in Seattle, Ben had first begun watching The Golden Girls with friends while in college in Chicago, and
was secretly thrilled when the Miami-themed box landed in her lap. Inside, Ben recalls, “were lots of fabrics that looked like the décor of the Girls’ living room, a mix of muted pastels and then bright patterns with flowers and palm fronds.” In creating the week’s winning gown, Ben looked past “the surplus of flamingo memorabilia, both cardboard and stuffed,” but did take advantage of one key item: an actual cheesecake.
Although much of the footage was edited out of the finished episode, Ben worked the runway, plate in hand, offering bites to the judges while sneaking some for herself. Although some of the other competitors eschewed props they found gimmicky, Ben explains, “It would have been such a missed opportunity not to use that cheesecake. It gave me the opportunity to create a glamorous look but also be a little silly about it, too.”
A drag veteran for over a decade before entering the Drag Race, Ben admits that in her earliest days “my character was a bitch. I think that’s the thing a lot of young queens turn to first.” But later, both Ben and his alter ego began to find feminine inspiration elsewhere. In another scene cut from the season-premiere episode, Ben chatted with RuPaul in the show’s workroom about the origins of his character’s now sugary-sweet personality. “Right away, Ru asked which Golden Girl I thought I was,” Ben remembers. “And so I said that I myself am Dorothy, definitely more cynical and pessimistic, but Ben DeLaCreme is Rose. She is willfully ditzy—smart sometimes, but ‘dumb’ when it serves her not to understand what’s going on.” Rose was “definitely a big influence on my drag persona,” Ben explains. So it was no surprise when Ben DeLaCreme would eventually be named the winner of the season’s Miss Congeniality crown.
Golden Tributes
AS MUCH AS the Girls continue to pop up on the TV screen, they’ve served as muses to several singers as well. Drag diva, comedienne, and superfan Jackie Beat was looking to honor the Girls, and knew she’d found the right base for a parody song in David Bowie’s hit “Golden Years” (her 2009 version called, of course, “Golden Girls”). A year later, she tweaked Nina Simone’s anthemic “Four Women.” Ever since, “I often end a show with ‘Four Girls,’ and by the time I get to Dorothy at the end, people are usually hooting and hollering,” says Jackie.
Growing up overseas, another lifelong fan, Jonny McGovern, relied on bootleg Golden Girls videos in Thailand, and later, episodes his stateside grandmother would record on VHS tape and mail to him in Egypt. The singer and comedian, known from his stint on Logo’s Big Gay Sketch Show and his current Internet talk show Hey, Qween on theStream.tv, released in 2012 his album The Gayest of All Time, which included an ode to his favorite slut. “‘Blanche Devereaux’ was a pop song about how a boy made me feel like her,” Jonny remembers. “I peppered it with as many Golden Girls references as I possibly could—singing at the Rusty Anchor, how I wanted a guy to come sit on my lanai, and so many other double entendres the show was famous for.”
“Blanche Devereaux” proved such a success that soon after, Jonny and his producer, Adam Joseph, birthed a follow-up EP, Songs About “The Golden Girls.” That album’s song salutes to the other Girls included “Zbornak,” which he calls “a new wave anthem to Dorothy and her fashion,” and “Take Me to St. Olaf,” the music video which depicted Jonny frolicking in a field with his beloved blonde and striding down the driveway of the Girls’ “real-life” Brentwood, California, house—not necessarily with the current owners’ knowledge or permission. This reverie about Rose “required the most research of all, to get all of her weird Scandinavian references right,” Jonny reveals. “And I enjoyed that research enormously.”
“TAKE ME TO ST. OLAF”
by Jonny McGovern
They don’t understand you,
Always telling you to shut your mouth.
But I’m here to tell you true,
I love it when I hear you talk about
Petunia the pig, and Bessie the cow,
The herring circus that got shut down,
And the time that you lost out on being
Butter Queen.
Take me to St. Olaf
Right next to St. Gustav
We’ll get there by toboggan
Play a game of whackanoggin
Take me to St. Olaf
We’ll frolic in the snow
Take me to St. Olaf
It’s where I wanna go
(Oh Rose, you and me can get together
With Ollie Neutensprinkle for a spirited game
of Googenspritzer
Then we’ll run off behind the barn
And do a sock puppet retelling of
Toonder the Tiger.
Ah, I can just imagine a perfect day
in St. Olaf!)
As soon as the rooster crows
We’ll meet up with Big Sven and Little Sven,
Have some eggs gerflaffelen
And pigs in a svooblaten,
See A Christmas Carol with a
non-chicken cast,
Play oogle and flugel until the
last person’s passed,
Visit Broom Hilda, your favorite pig,
And we’ll celebrate Hay Day,
Which is a day where you celebrate hay.
Hey!
Take me to St. Olaf
Right next to St. Gustav
We’ll climb Mount Roosenbaden
And eat some floogenflaben
Take me to St. Olaf
We’ll frolic in the snow
Take me to St. Olaf
It’s where I wanna go
(You know, some people don’t understand
how I feel
But those people can blow it out their
tubenburbles
Like Rose said, “Geflectenflaffen, fleffen
fleuven
Va flecten flug, ger flaffen!”)
In September 2014 came the latest audiovisual tribute to the Girls, titled Out on the Lanai; within less than a year, the weekly podcast already boasted over seventy-five thousand downloads. Each installment features writer/comedian hosts H. Alan Scott and Kerri Doherty, plus special guests such as Grace Helbig, Baron Vaughn, and Buzzfeed’s Louis Peitzman, offering their own comedic commentary on a particular Golden Girls episode. Bringing the ladies of the eighties to a twenty-first-century hipster crowd, Out on the Lanai recorded several of its episodes live in front of an aficionado crowd at NerdMelt, a comedy programming series at the Nerdist Showroom within Los Angeles’s Meltdown Comics.
Golden Goods
BY THE FALL of 2015, exactly thirty years after The Golden Girls’ debut, the show’s fan page on Facebook would amass over 1.6 million likes. On Twitter, over a dozen accounts tweet daily about Golden Girls news and quotes, with a combined follower total in the tens of thousands. But with all this contact we fans still have with the Girls in our everyday lives, it’s surprising that there has never been much official Golden Girls–themed merchandise available for purchase. For all these lost years, picture the pepperonis the Sophias among us could have been packing into our Golden Girls lunch boxes, or the wear we Blanches could have been getting out of our Golden Girls bedsheets! Luckily now, the Internet has again changed everything; where mass manufacturing has long neglected us, we fans have started doing it for ourselves.
These days, any random visit to the website Etsy.com yields offers of thousands of often homemade Golden goods, including the typical T-shirts and magnets, earrings and charm bracelets—but also greeting cards and postcards, mugs, wallets, makeup bags, neckties, stickpins, coasters, tote bags, tutus, baby onesies, paperweights, pocket mirrors, Christmas ornaments, clocks, switch plates, nightlights, wineglass charms, lip balms, fingernail decals, oil paintings, prayer candles, and even Russian nesting dolls. A Golden Girls birthday party kit comes complete with invites, banners, place cards, cupcake decorations, and thank-you notes—all bearing the faces of the foursome. Supposed ads for the Rusty Anchor and Shady Pines are immortalized in cross-stitch, as is an ode to the Great Herring War. For $140, there’s a
silver and brass, quasi-religious medal, bearing a native of St. Olaf rather than an actual saint; the same artist offers a set of cufflinks, similarly hand carved with the image of Stan Zbornak. If you have the $210, you’d have to be a yutz not to want them.
The Out on the Lanai podcast, the brainchild of its writer/comedian hosts, H. Alan Scott and Kerri Doherty.
Design by JOE BENNETT, courtesy of H. ALAN SCOTT GETTY IMAGES.
In early 2015, New York-based toy company executive Sam Hatmaker assembled this Golden Girls tableau, stealing Blanche’s hair from Professor Umbridge in a Harry Potter play set, and the house’s beige bricks, an otherwise rare LEGO hue, from Star Wars. Soon after the forty-year-old Michigan native uploaded photos of his proposed kitchen/living room play set onto the company’s “Ideas” web submission page, news of his creation went viral on Facebook and in the blogosphere. Sam’s project handily scored the required ten thousand votes to proceed to official consideration, but ultimately, by the fall, LEGO declined to put the Girls into production. Still, he enthuses, “In the end I really did build it for myself, just for fun, just because I wanted it. It’s still put together, and it’s probably going to sit on my shelf forever. So any attention that it got after that was just icing on the cheesecake.”