Dixie Carter and Designing Women

Show business lost a real talent this past week with the death of Dixie Carter. She died at the early age of 70 after a long and illustrious career on the stage and television. Her breakthrough show was Designing Women, which aired from 1986 – 1993. It was and is one of my all time favorite television programs. Ms. Carter’s death also ends the character of Julia Sugarbaker that she played to the max with gusto. Yes, I am a male, but the character was role model for me.

Although Designing Women was a story about four women who ran an interior decorating firm in Atlanta, it also managed to be gender neutral in many of the ideas that came from its very talented writers. Its story line usually centered around a group of people who tried to maintain grace and style in their lives midst a world that was a little more prone to slobbery.

Dixie Carter played the feisty, responsible one, who was there to pick up the pieces of whatever fiasco befell these folks, especially her sister, Suzanne Sugarbaker played by Delta Burke. She raised telling people off to an art form by stating the truth and the obvious, while at the same time demonstrating that anger and revenge are both dishes best served cold…and calculating.

Designing Women had many memorable episodes that I often remember when facing similar situations even up to today. When I give somebody a tongue lashing, in my mind I always end it with “and that, Marjorie, just so will you know, and so that your children will know, is the night the lights went out in Georgia!”

My favorite episode, and probably one of the best sitcom episodes ever taped, centers around one of the characters giving birth to her baby at Christmas while her husband was serving in the first Iraq war. While waiting at the hospital, Julia (Dixie Carter) wanders into a hospital room and meets a hundred year old black lady who is dying alone. The lady tells her story to Julia, and tells of the deaths of all of her family leaving her alone. She speaks of the hardship of growing up in the segregated South. The juxtaposition of the death of the old woman and the birth of the new baby was predictable and hokey, and I went through a box of Kleenex; perhaps the most emotional television program since the death of Grandpa Walton.

The producers of Designing Women were among the most overtly liberal of the Hollywood establishment, and were personal friends and supporters of the Clintons. The liberalism came out in many of the episodes, but I didn’t mind. Caring, friends, strength of ideals, personal responsibility and helping folks directly rather than through the government were all virtues of the Sugarbakers. Those virtues are common to both conservatives and liberals.

Dixie Carter, in an episode where a very religious character begins to question the existence of God, did a solo of How Great Thou Art. It is the most stunning arrangement of this song I have ever heard, and I have linked it right under the web site masthead. I defy anyone to watch it and to not shed a tear at the end. That is the talent Dixie Carter offered.

Dixie Carter and Julia Sugarbaker were reality and fiction melded together to produce unforgettable television. She will be missed.