boy culture

Striking Gold

Snippets from Bea Arthur's final interview. I hope they'll release the entire thing sometime soon since that Lunching With a Legend show doesn't sound like a sure thing to hit the airwaves. Thanks to Stephen for the tip.

The Golden Gloves Came Off

I Tweeted about and Facebooked about Bea Arthur vs. Betty White and lots of people seemed shocked to find out they didn't like each other. Here's more on that tip, from Globe (October 5, 2009), but who knows which parts are true...more after the jump...

Remembering Bea Arthur

Thank You For Being A Friend

I'm so sad that Bea Arthur has died. When you're that talented and beloved, even 86 is too young to die.

Coincidentally—or maybe not so coincidentally, since we do this all the time—José and I were just watching a Golden Girls marathon and relishing the episodes that aren't rerun as often. It was so good "we named it!"

I was never a huge fan of Maude; I was so young at the time I barely saw it and got it even less, though it grew on me over time. It was all about the Golden Girls, the perfect mix of types, great writing and pitch-perfect delivery. It's hard to pick a favorite Golden Girl—if you remove one, the whole thing collapses like a house of cards (or like The Golden Palace, the painfully bad spin-off that featured all but Bea after the series ended).

We were lucky enough to see Bea on Broadway in Just Between Friends. The show was not the knock-out punch that Elaine Stritch had delivered with her own one-woman performance, but it was amazing to be seated so close to Bea Arthur, still such a towering figure, as always perfectly in control of her image as she offered funny stories and sang songs that pleased her. The highlight was "Threepenny Opera/Pirate Jenny," which you can listen to here. The biggest laugh was a heartless Pia Zadora gag.

I've always been fascinated by the deaths of celebrities, going back to Gloria Swanson (whose death got me interested in the silent era), Mae West (who made me dream about the Dirty '30s), Grace Kelly and Natalie Wood (both of whose deaths seemed to affect my parents and made me want to know why) and many others. There are always certain celebrated people I always assume will be alive and around, available for all the new people in the world to sample and appreciate. They're more like friends.

All of the Golden Girls—especially Bea and Betty White, who sadly did not seem to mesh well—are in that category, and now I am sure I will find myself watching that damn show and thinking, "How in the world can Bea Arthur be dead?"

After the jump, the entire episode of All In The Family that introduced firebrand liberal Cousin Maude, and that launched Bea Arthur's second-wind career—at age 50: