The Golden Girls prompted an unlikely friendship. That friendship taught me what matters in life.

I am the legal representative of a fifty-five-year-old neurodiverse woman named Joanna because of the television series The Golden Girls. It started twelve years ago when my husband Jim chanced upon Joanna and her mother Sunny seated outside the charbroiled chicken franchise KooKooRoo. Jim gave the women some money for lunch and struck up a conversation with them. Sunny, with Joanna tucked tight into her side, told my husband that she used to send jokes into Readers Digest, that some of them got printed, and asked if he wanted to hear one.

“Sure” My husband said. “Always up for a joke.”

“What would you get,” Sunny launched in without a beat, “if you crossed a bear with a skunk?”

When Jim shrugged. Sunny grinned, held her arms out to the side as if ready to receive gales of laughter, and served up the payoff, “Winnie the Pew!”

Comedy prompted a friendship 

Jim laughed genuinely, not so much from the wit of the joke, but in response to the force of the delivery. Sunny had committed to her material with the confidence seasoned professional and Jim told her so. He said she had told a fine joke and that he spoke from some degree of experience, having worked for many years as television comedy writer.

When Sunny asked how Jim got his start in the business, Jim told her that his first writing job was on a show called The Golden Girls.

“The Golden Girls,” Joanna whispered breathlessly, still pressed to her mother’s side, “is my favorite show. My favorite show in all the world. In all the whole world. I’m not lying. I wouldn’t lie about a thing like that.”

That was the beginning.

My husband and I became friends with the mother daughter duo and for many years we would take them out to lunch, have them over to tell some jokes, watch Golden Girls marathons TV or for various traditions (for Joanna, anything that happened twice established a tradition) like giving out candy to the kids on Halloween in costume. But then six years ago, Sunny died rather suddenly leaving Joanna alone and without the resources, skills, or community she needed to get by. I became her representative and with the help of many services, including Good Shepherd Catholic charities, Joanna learned how to live on her own; to shop, cook and keep her small apartment (within walking distance of our home) clean.

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This tale may sound like it has the makings for a sweet Hallmark movie, but it’s a bit more complex, and I would say comedic. For one thing, Joanna enjoys pointing out all the ways I am privileged, or in her terms, all the ways I live on “easy street” and don’t even know it. For starters, Jim, who she often reminds me is very handsome and has a great personality, married me.

When Joanna comes over now, the three us generally eat take-out from our local burger place as Joanna recaps Golden Girls episodes I have missed or Jim only vaguely remembers, but which she can recall with an uncanny degree of specificity.

“Have you seen the episode ‘Journey to the Center of Attention’ Maggie, where Dorothy and Blanche compete at the Rusty Anchor to see who is the better singer and Blanche thinks she’s going to be the better singer, but she’s not the better singer. Dorothy is the better the singer. Dorothy sings Hard Hearted Hannah. ‘Hard Hearted Hannah. The vamp of the Savannah, the meanest gal in town.’ And she sings better than Blanche, Maggie. Better than Blanche.”

Last December, Joanna came to our house and told us, in a soft and reverent voice, she had heard that morning on KTLA that… Betty White had died. Her chin fell to her chest and her hands held each other. “Bette White played Rose Nyland. Rose Nyland was from St. Olaf. She told lots of stories about St. Olaf. Like how she competed in the Butter Queen pageant, but the churn jammed so she didn’t win. She didn’t win the Butter Queen pageant. She didn’t win.”

The Golden Girls' youthful edge 

Joanna was not alone in her palpable sadness at hearing of Betty White’s passing. It seemed as if a nation lost its favorite grandmother. In fact, I can’t remember the death of any other celebrity in my life that seemed to strike such a deep blow to such a wide and varied range of people.

Why?

What is it about this show? 

Jim believes the answer lies in the unparalleled skill of the four actresses. He says if a joke you wrote didn’t get a laugh at the table read, you knew you had written a bad joke. If those four ladies couldn’t make it work, no one could.

Jim also thinks there was a very particular sort of bonding that happened between the viewer and the four characters because these four were characters in their living room who came into your living room once a week. Every Saturday night, a night where families could watch together or those not out on date. The weekly nature over many years led to a very different sort of bond you get from binging a show, the difference between visiting your grandmother once a week for six years and spending one long weekend with her. 

For me the appeal of the show, lies in the picture it paints of the later years of one’s life. Poet David Whyte talks about the ability to find a “youthful edge” at whatever age, where one is open to the possibilities and humiliations of a new frontier. Those four ladies rode that edge, taking courageous steps out in the world. They went on dates, got new jobs, engaged in political activism, stood up to school boards, called out age discrimination, took up new hobbies, acquired new passions, and stepped boldly into unfamiliar situations. 

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Bold moves come, of course, with the possibility of failure, of embarrassment, of exposure to judgement and rejection. Risk can become scarier with age, after we have forged an identity to protect us from the assaults of the world. Risk does not tend to be a young person’s game. We hear the phrase “you can’t teach old dogs new tricks.” That’s because learning new tricks is scary. You feel like an idiot when you can’t get right with great effort what others do with ease. Learning new tricks takes fortitude, a courageous willingness to look the fool for a time. Well, these four ladies willingly learned new tricks, especially Blanche (after she spent some time with the Flying Fanelli Brothers.)

The other big cliché of aging that The Golden Girls upends is the notion that old age is lonely. Not for Dorothy, Blanche, Rose and Sophia it’s not. And not because they are blessed with perfect loyal, long-life spanned husbands or dutiful, devoted children but because they made a family, blessed it with their attention, nurtured it with time and consecrated it with cheesecake. I think seeing this mutually crafted and nurtured family is inspiring to people born into families where they did not feel nurtured, where they did not feel seen, understood, where no one was paying attention.

And for many like Joanna, who had challenges making friends, for whom intimacy was not a possibility, these four women functioned as a surrogate tribe, loyally bringing their consistent characters, rooted and reliably set in their ways but still, open to the new, with warmth, good humor, and mirth.

I also, as a woman without children, appreciate seeing women’s lives depicted that are not centered around children. The ladies care about their children and their children’s dramas, but they’ve got their own dramas to attend to. It’s almost like Peanuts in reverse. And it is never presumed that any of them need to get remarried in order to be happy, a mate is in no way seen as prerequisite for fulfillment.

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I asked Joanna why she liked the Golden Girls so much and she told me because she’s learned a lot from them, they gave her good advice. Some of the advice she can quote. But the greater advice came by the example of Rose, Dorothy, Sophia and Blanche’s lives.

No one wants to be told with a waggled finger how they should live their lives. No one wants to be scolded into remembering “what really matters.” The Golden Girls showed us through their lives at 6151 Richmond street what mattered and what mattered was friendship, integrity, loyalty and facing new frontiers even if that means you occasionally end up in jail, stranded on a desert island or raising a three-hundred-pound pot-bellied pig named Baby.

Maggie Rowe is the author of EASY STREET: A Story of Redemption From Myself.