We all know the behind-the-scene stories that we have heard for years and years. Bea hated Betty. Bea carved an exclamation point in the front door to encourage high energy during taping. The house's exterior is actually taped in Brentwood, CA. Bea hated cheesecake and they ate over 100. There was a gay houseboy in the first episode. The pilot for Empty Nest started out on this show. But there are some fascinating things you may NOT have noticed as the show has been in reruns. Here is yet ANOTHER top five Golden Girls facts list for you to add to all those spam sites you've come across.
1) The girls always wear shoes.
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They wear shoes while they're cooking, they wear shoes while they're cleaning, they wear shoes while they're lounging around the house, they even wear shoes while they get ready for bed time. There is a valid reason for this. Studio stage floors are dirty and dangerous, and there is a liability clause in actors' contracts requiring them to wear shoes on the set unless otherwise stated. In fact, for most sitcoms you watch, you'll usually see shoes on the actors. It just looks weird here because, honestly, who wears shoes in the house all the time beyond 17 year old boys? Plus, it's not unusual to see Rue McClanahan and Betty White wearing high heels around the house as well. There have been rumors that Bea Arthur pulled some strings and signed a clause stating she wouldn't sue the studio if she could walk around barefoot, but if you watch, it is very very rare that you see her without shoes on. There are times when the actors are taped from the waist up for the whole scene so the viewer can't see their feet, but in every scene a shot of shoes for each character always peaks out.
2) There is no cheesecake for almost a whole season.
What is this show synonymous with? Cheesecake, of course! That's the general premise of the show: one of the three younger women has a predicament, and it gets resolved as they sit around the kitchen having a dessert of some sort-- often cheesecake. So it comes as a surprise while watching the episodes chronologically that it took 22 episodes before a cheesecake even appears in an episode! In the episode Job Hunting (Season 1, Ep 22), Rose loses her job as a counselor at the grief center because it closes. Now, later in the episode she becomes a waitress at a restaurant, and miraculously becomes a counselor at the same grief center a few episodes later without the restaurant or her job there ever being mentioned again........but I digress. Between being grief counselor the first time and being a waitress, she's down in the dumps and Dorothy helps her fix her resume.
In a bout of insomnia after all this work, changing 5 sentences on a half page resume, the girls decide to go to the kitchen to have some warm milk. They decide cookies have to go with the warm milk to make it palatable, and then this leads to the suggestion of having cheesecake with it (and eventually eating a whole meal). A few episodes later in the season finale, entitled The Way We Met (Season 1, Episode 25), a flashback shows the girls devouring a cheesecake after their first fight as roommates, flashing forward to the present, where Dorothy licks the back of her fork and says "Some things never change...." as if they'd been eating cheesecake this whole first season. Uh, no.
3) It takes Rose almost TWO seasons to say "Back in St. Olaf".
Another staple of the show: while the girls sit around eating cheesecake on an average episode, working through their problems, Rose will tell a story about her days in the fictional town of St. Olaf, Minnesota, where the antics are similar to those of Hooterville in Green Acres. As the episodes roll on, she starts these stories with the phrase "Back in St. Olaf", but for most of the first two seasons, her stories don't start with this famous catchphrase. No, "Back in St. Olaf" actually prefaced a very sad story the first time it was used, in a touching flashback of the episode A Piece of Cake (Season 2, Episode 25) where Rose speaks to her deceased husband, an empty chair, about her desire to leave Minnesota and move to Florida to get on with her life. Anyone who has seen this episode can tell you that it is one of Betty White's finest moments as an actress, showing off her ability to handle dramatic scenes just as well as comedy.
4) Sophia doesn't tell the first "Picture it...." story.
Another catchphrase of the show belongs to Sophia. When the three younger women are having a personal issue, and an insomnia dessert binge doesn't solve the problem, nor a St. Olaf story, Sophia steps in with a historic story growing up to put things into perspective. These stories usually are prefaced with a phrase similar to "Picture it: Sicily, 1920" or "Picture it: Brooklyn, 1941", wherein she then goes into detail with the story's events. However, this phrase was actually not originally coined by Sophia. In the episode The Sisters (Season 2, Episode 12), feuding sisters Sophia and Angela have not spoken in years and the girls are trying to get their sides of the story. Angela then introduces the "Picture it" line by detailing the evening of the dance where the sisters had a falling out and never spoke again. In the next scene, Sophia uses the line, and uses it regularly in episodes for the rest of the series. Of course, the more intriguing part of the story than their falling out is why these two women are from Sicily, one of which still lives there, and both have Brooklyn accents without a hint of anything Italian.
5) The time span of Dorothy's and her children's ages makes no sense.
Dorothy and her ex husband Stan-- oh what a pair. They were married for 38 years before he left her for a much younger woman without a proper 'goodbye', and then reappears toward the beginning of the show constantly nagging her for money, support, and with his wish for the two of them to get back together. They have been separated at least two years at the beginning of the show and their divorce has just been finalized. This is all fun, except for a few small details that don't make sense. When the show starts, Dorothy is 55 years old. This means they got married when she was about 14 or 15 years old, depending on the month.
Okay, fine, we'll move on from that as plausible. Maybe the "38 years" did include the two years of separation which could have bumped this to the age of 16 or 17. Plus, after all, Stan did get her pregnant and it was a shotgun wedding. Soooooo, why are her kids Kate and Michael so visibly young? In fact, there are TWO actresses who play Kate that are far too young for the role! In Guess Who's Coming to the Wedding (Season 1, Episode 2), Kate is played by the then 30 year old Lisa Jane Persky:
and in Son-in-Law Dearest (Season 2, Episode 23) by 31 year old Deena Friedman.
Can the people at NBC count?
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Can the people at NBC count?
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Anyway, there you have it-- five new facts about the Golden Girls that were as plain as the nose on your face but maybe never noticed!
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