Around the time I was 13 or 14 years old, I discovered a television show in reruns that, for a few years anyway, I seemed to watch all the time. In the years since I haven't watched a single episode and yet I can still quote, nearly verbatim, several of the speeches of my favorite character from the series.
I'm talking, of course, about a show called Designing Women and a character named Julia Surgarbaker. I liked the entire cast (at least, the entire original cast; the station I watched it on never seemed to rerun the post-Delta Burke years, which was fine with me!), but I lived for the moments when Julia, an elegant, strong, intelligent, liberal woman, would get riled up and launch into a passionate tirade. Her co-workers called her 'The Terminator'.
My personal favorites were the famous 'Night the Lights Went out in Georgia' speech (watch it here) and when she let a narrow minded client, a woman who said that AIDS had one thing going for it, that it was killing all the right people, truly have it. I could only find a very blurry clip of that, but it's certainly worth listening to! The episode was from 1987, when there was still a lot of fear and ignorance among the general public about the disease.
Julia was an iconic character, and the actress who brought her to life, Dixie Carter, passed away yesterday at the age of 70. I think one of the most disappointing celebrity moments I ever had was when I found out that Dixie was a Republican in real life! It's not that her politics really mattered, of course, it's just that on some level I wanted her to be Julia in real life, too!
But then, I guess that's actually a tribute to how perfectly she played the role. Rest in peace, Dixie. Thank you for some of my favorite television moments.
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