"You about to get fired up?"

I freely admit that I had unusually adult tastes in TV for a kid growing up in the late 80s and early 90s. For one thing, we weren’t allowed to watch MTV. I barely watched “Saved by the Bell” or “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse,” but I was obsessed with “Golden Girls” and “Designing Women.” With the death of Dixie Carter over the weekend and Bea Arthur’s death last year, I’ve lost the women who played the two characters on those TV shows – Julia Sugarbaker and Dorothy Zbornak, respectively – that, out of each show’s quartet of women, were (at least according to the people who knew me back then) were the most like me.

I kind of take that as a compliment. Especially being compared in any small way to Julia. After all, she was a graceful, classy woman who was nevertheless a successful business owner who managed to tell off at least one small-minded bigot per episode. Like this one, from an episode I had on tape and watched over and over:

Do you know when this aired on network TV? 1987. In later years, when I’d run up on the prejudice that, as a Southerner, I was supposed to be a cross-burning, ignorant rube with three teeth, I knew that wasn’t true in large part because of “Designing Women.” I know it sounds strange to credit a TV sitcom with shaping my feminist and political consciousness, but I think it’s true.

It’s interesting that Carter herself was a political conservative, given that she played the apparently liberal Julia Sugarbaker. It’s a credit to Carter as an actor that she was able to so convincingly play a character whose pronouncements she didn’t agree with. The character she created certainly had an impact on me.