Golden Girls Episode: Love, Rose

"The Golden Girls" was a comedy series set in Miami, Florida (it wasn't filmed in Miami) and originally telecast on NBC from 1985 through 1992. The basic gist of the show is that four women, 3 widowed and 1 divorced, share a house together and develop such a strong family-like friendship, they deal with and overcome their differing personality conflicts, as they support each other in life's challenges, including that of aging.   

 

This episode of "The Golden Girls" first aired in December 1986. Paul Dooley is great as Isaac Q. Newton. Dooley, who was born and raised in Parkersburg, West Virginia, is known for his portrayal as the father of the star cyclist, Dave Stohler (played by Dennis Christopher), in the 1979 movie, "Breaking Away."*  

 

Episode Cast: 

 

Bea Arthur as Dorothy Zbornak

Betty White as Rose Nylund 

Rue McClanahan as Blanche Devereaux

Estelle Getty as Sophia Petrillo 

Paul Dooley as Isaac Q. Newton

Colin Drake as Wilfred  

This episode has some good laughs, as Dorothy and Blanche convince Rose to run an ad in the personal's column to get a date. When Rose's ad fails to get any replies for two weeks, Blanche decides to help cheer an increasingly despondent Rose by writing a letter to Rose in answer to her ad. Blanche chooses the name Isaac Newton for her made up man. When Rose gets the letter her spirits rise, and Blanche admits to Dorothy that she wrote letter, but that brings Dorothy to question what will happen if Rose decides to arrange a date with the fictional guy. This prompts Blanche to answer that she'll write a letter that will have the guy saying he's moving to Saskatchewan, Canada. Dorothy reluctantly joins Blanche in writing letters to Rose, with Dorothy adding some poetry to the letters. Rose stuns her two friends when she tells them she has decided to meet Isaac, leading Blanche to ask Dorothy the spelling of Saskatchewan. hahaha  The girls are all going to a reception when Rose springs the news that she has invited Isaac to accompany her for the evening. She explains that he is moving to Saskatchewan in a matter days, but that she found one listing in the telephone book for an "Isaac Q. Newton," so she called and invited him to the reception. When he arrives at the house and introduces himself as Isaac Q. Newton, Dorothy jokingly says that he must get kidding about that (meaning his name), but he's a lot like Rose, and he has to ask, "(Kidding) about what?" Throughout the evening Rose mentions things from the letters she thinks Isaac wrote, but he naturally never knows what to say. When Rose mentions that she knows how he likes to dance, Isaac asks, "I do?" But he makes a failed effort at dancing, which makes Rose believe his letters to her were all a big joke (Isaac says, "Oh no, I have no sense of humor."). Dorothy and Blanche now confess to Rose that they wrote the letters to cheer her up. Rose is very upset and runs off by herself. Isaac hilariously says, "I'm glad you straightened that out, I was beginning to remember writing those letters!" haha  Rose locks herself in the ladies' room, and Blanche and Dorothy talk to her through the door to try to make her understand they only meant to cheer her up, not to hurt her. As the conversation goes on, a crowd of women waiting to use the restroom gathers, interrupted briefly by Isaac, who has to be told the area is for ladies needing the restroom. The girls finally convince Rose they meant no harm and she comes out of the restroom to the applause of the crowd. (NOTE: There is a secondary story line in this episode, which has Sophia pursued by an elderly Englishman. It turns out he heard a rumor that Sophia was a wealthy widow, but when he finds out the story is untrue, he quickly departs the reception, in spite of his insistence that he was not after Sophia's money.) 

 

* For more about "Breaking Away," here is the link: https://pontificating-randy.blogspot.com/2017/01/breaking-away-showed-growing-up.html

Photo is of the 2005 Buena Vista Home Entertainment Season 2 DVD set

WORD HISTORY:

Tomb-This word is closely related to "tumulous," a rarely used word English borrowed from Latin. "Tomb" goes back to Indo European "tewheh," which had the notion of "swell, protrude" (from the idea of a grave having a mound of earth). This gave transliterated Ancient Greek "tymbos," meaning "grave mound, burial mound," which was borrowed by Latin as "tumba" with that same general meaning, and this passed to Latin-based Old French as "tombe," with the more general meaning "grave, burial site." This had a couple (at least) of renderings in the French dialect used among the Norman French speaking upper classes of England: "toumbe, tumbe," and English borrowed the word in those forms initially in the early 1200s, but the first decades of the 1300s saw this altered to "tombe" and then "tomb," where it has remained to this day.