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Dorothy Zbornak Is My Spirit Animal

In celebration of 30 years of "Golden Girls."

Before anyone was wondering if they were a Carrie or a Charlotte, there was a time in America where women and adolescent gay men wondered if they were a Sophia or a Rose. I know because I was one of them, and I was always a Dorothy.

Dating myself almost to the minute here, I can say that the The Golden Girls came on when I was a child, and lasted through the beginning of my tweendom. It was a favorite in our house, and when the world was primarily 13 channels and we all didn’t have a TV in every room that was a much bigger deal than it’s possible to imagine now.

There was no such thing as a binge, and people didn’t catch up to each other on separate screens. You watched the TV in the living room and you watched what everyone else wanted to watch. I was lucky to have The Golden Girls.

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Now this isn’t some sort of “Bea Arthur made me gay,” type of poignant personal memory. It couldn’t be. I was too young for that and the real damage was done by the Thundercats. But for me, The Golden Girls was a passageway into adulthood. Watching it made me feel smart and responsible. Getting the jokes made me feel informed and part of the conversation (which as a kid is really the thing you want more than anything else). It was a part of growing up and since then I have always gone back and been comforted by this first slice of the adult world.

I liked Rose for her stories and Blanche for her accent and Sophia because she could be funny without saying a word.

But the heart of the show for me, was Dorothy and that part hasn’t changed. To me then, Dorothy was the smart one, the quick wit and the leader. The one always doling out advice and being a shoulder for the other girls to lean on.

But as I’ve grown older, I’ve started to see Dorothy in a different way. Now, let me get this out of the way now, I’m still a Dorothy–I give the long looks as asides to the imaginary studio audience that follows me in my head, and I like to drop a quip and exit the room with a flourish anytime I can. I also wear a lot of flowing cardigans which concerns me even as I write this, but some seeds are simply sown too deep.

But more than a passing resemblance, it’s her story–the one beyond just the surface resemblance–that really makes me think about Dorothy as a parable and an inspiration for some things that have been so central in my life.

I always loved that she was smart. She read books and wanted to be intelligent, to continually improve herself. Sure, it was the butt of many jokes, Dorothy alone on a Saturday night with a book, but to me then and now, I admired it. I wanted to be smart–I still do–and it’s something I work out all the time. Even as I watch it now, I always want to know what’s she’s reading, what is keeping Dorothy in on a Saturday night?

She’s got the best story of the show, really. She’s was a knocked up teenager who fell for the wrong guy and married him. She put herself through school and taught while she raised her kids and let her loser husband try to provide for the family. She was strong and determined and it paid off for her. Or it didn’t.

Dorothy is the only one of the girls that shows up flawed. She’s the only one who’s divorced and the only one whose marriage wasn’t a happy one. She got left and got left (by the yutz Stan, at that). She’s forced to start her life over again, which is a theme that runs through all the storylines of the girls. But with Dorothy it’s all the more important because she’s been to the bottom and she has to build herself back up. That’s a process with hills and valleys and she takes the hits as well as she takes the victories.

Her complicated on-again off-again relationship with Stan, her unending dry streak with men in Miami, her complicated but loving relationship with her mother, these are just the broad strokes of a character that grows up right along with you as you watch the show.

I grew up alongside her and none of it was easy. For every great date, or little win, or even finally a correct diagnosis of chronic fatigue syndrome, Dorothy gets closer and closer to rebuilding her life. She’s not always great at it. She sleeps with Stan or thinks about getting back with him in almost every season of the show. She threatens Sophia constantly with the lurking Shady Pines and she’s always the single one as Rose and Blanche go on date after date, but Dorothy at the end has the greatest victory of them all.

For a show about finding love and friendship in your 50s (yes 50s, that was how old they were supposed to be), Dorothy more than anyone finds her happiness. The lonely one, the broken one, the one with all the advice and but none of the answers for herself, ends up with the guy. It’s a pretty sweet ending to a fantastic story. But all the more so, because she’s earned it.

Dorothy grows to love herself and respect herself as a woman in charge of her own life by the end of the show. She dares to live her dream and slowly season by season she accomplishes just that. She goes on Jeopardy, she grabs that cash, she dates a fake Beatle and most importantly she falls in love. The one lady who nobody, even her own mother, thinks has a shot at happiness again, finds it and rides off into the sunset.

When it’s a Saturday night and I stay in to read D.H. Lawrence or I make a horrible self deprecating jokes about the last date I was on, I do my best Bea Arthur to really put it over the edge, but I somewhere I still think, “You know what, somebody will love this too. It happened for Dorothy. I bet it could happen for me too.”

Yes, it’s a sitcom. Yes, it’s not real or even makes sense all the time. Yes, continuity was something no one in that writer’s room ever thought of (almost everyone in Sophia’s life from her brother to her sister to her aunt to her daughter in law is named either Angelo or Angela), but it does give you hope.

Great pieces of art give you permission to dream larger than you thought possible, even in the simplest of ways. And sometimes, perhaps more than I would like to admit, Dorothy gives me permission to keep at it, and hope that some nice man will show up and fall in love with my deadpan looks and my floor length cardigans.

I mean it happened for Dorothy right? It can happen to any of us.

Catch Dorothy and the rest of the girls in a mini-marathon of The Golden Girls tonight at 5:48pm on Logo.


For more Justin Sayre, check out his podcast Sparkle & Circulate with Justin Sayre on iTunes.

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