Goodbye, Dixie

My intention was to have lunch yesterday with my friend Carol, but this was not to be.  Melissa needed my help with the baby and so the little one and I dined together on omelets and naan.  I missed Carol, but our lunch was a little more entertaining as Carol doesn't usually put her plate, replete with food, on top of her head, and then yell "HAT!!".

I was saddened this week by the death of Dixie Carter, the striking and talented actress from Designing Women:  one of my all-time favorite shows.  She played Julia Sugarbaker, a well-spoken, high heeled, beautiful dressed, opinionated, liberal, visceral woman.  The strength of her character amazed me as she often said things I thought, but wouldn't have been able to articulate -- like when she told the doctor of a good friend -- the doctor having berated this friend for seeking a second opinion about a lump in her breast -- that he told his patients "not to worry; he would do the worrying for them", but that he couldn't "do the dying for them," which is what happened when these women were kowtowed into following his advice to do nothing.  In an episode about a newstand that regularly featured 'men's magazines' with scantily clad or nude women, Julia ran her car into the stand, not once but three times.  She insisted that she, like the newstand owner,  was exercising her First Amendment rights. 

Knowing full well that Dixie Carter was not Julia Sugarbaker, I like to think that she did, though, help create women who could, while maintaining abject femininity, show strength and eloquence.  I know she affected me.