And then there’s more…
Yesterday, TVOne was airing a daylong Good Times marathon (counting down the viewer-voted top episodes and whatnot). Good Times was, of course, a spinoff of Arthur’s Maude, and the sparring scenes between Arthur and the late Esther Rolle dug right into the uncomfortable, and often unacknowledged, racial tensions boiling beneath the Friedan-Steinem feminist movement. Sadly, Rolle scenes have been uniformly omitted from Arthur’s memorial clip packages, though they contain some of both actresses’ finest (and most subversive) work. (I do love hearing the Maude theme song though, my pick for the all-time greatest TV theme: a Donny Hathaway vocal and a cheeky line about Joan of Arc’s death.)
Speaking of Maude, let us not forget that I’m banking on another of Arthur’s Maude co-stars dying this year. No, not Bill Macy (who was born a mere five days after Arthur). But Conrad Bain, number six on my deathlist. Here’s to hoping Maude stars become as hot a Reaper target as Golden Girls seem to be!
Thank you for being a goddess
I usually take pleasure in celebrity death, especially the unexpected ones. But it is with misty eyes and a sunken heart that I admit the following: Bea Arthur has died. I am still in disbelief. Yes, she was 86. Yet her passing still comes as a shock. Arthur is the second Golden Girl to die in the past year. Unlike Estelle Getty, whose demise was slow and relatively public, Arthur’s fatal battle with cancer was an amazingly well-contained secret. In retrospect, she did look alarmingly ill at her Television Hall of Fame induction this past December, as the below photos demonstrate.
