Like many of you, I’ve been trundling through YouTube this past weekend watching clips of Bea Arthur’s best moments from All in the Family, Maude, The Golden Girls, and Broadway. But the one below easily takes the prize for the most wonderfully strange video I’ve seen this year, Bea Arthur-related or otherwise.
Watching it is like entering some gay bizarro meta-verse where carefree socialites harmonically chortle about amyl nitrate, and U.S. television networks broadcast it into your home. Except evidently at one brief, brilliantly weird point in history, this world actually existed. It’s but one more example of just how singular a figure Bea Arthur cut into the pop culture firmament, and why she’ll be so deeply missed. What do you make of it, PopWatchers?
"I think I’ll be the thimble." –Gossip Girl‘s Jenny Humphrey (Taylor Momsen), whose motivation to be a totally bitchin’ 15-year-old fashion designer has seen better days. New episode tonight. (8/7c on The CW)
Somewhere in the middle of catching up on a backlog of Brothers & Sisters episodes this week, a strange and unexpected thing happened. I realized I’ve stopped giving a flying fig about a show I’ve loved and cherished for almost three whole seasons.
Bea Arthur and Rue McClanahan rank among TV’s all-time great comic matchups, first on the groundbreaking ’70s sitcom Maude, and later, during seven seasons of the Emmy-winning ensemble comedy The Golden Girls. (Check out a couple of embedded YouTube clips at the end of this Q&A.) EW.com phoned McClanahan at her Manhattan home this morning to get her memories about her long-time friend and co-star, who died yesterday in Los Angeles at age 86. McClanahan described Arthur as a gentle, almost timid person who changed America’s perception of what it meant to be an older woman, who finally achieved her greatest career goal at age 79, and who could tell a dirty joke with the best of ‘em. 
It’s American Idol season, which means that most of my conversations with family and friends get short-circuited with outbursts of "Why was Allison in the bottom three!?" or "How come the judges won’t call Kris Allen a front-runner?!" or "J’enough with this fourth-judge business!" To help stave off these ugly incidents — not to mention my bastardization of French contractions — I’ve been on a particularly voracious reading kick, ripping through eight or nine books over the last six weeks. Currently sitting on my nightstand — while I try to find room on my heinously overcrowded bookshelves — are completed copies of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (unbelievably good, and unbelievably harrowing), Armistead Maupin’s More Tales of the City (a breezy chaser to McCarthy’s tale from the post-apocalypse), Lee Child’s The Hard Way (action-packed jaunt that kept keeping me up past my bedtime) and Michael Palmer’s The Second Opinion (trashy-ish, crowd-pleasing medical thriller), as well as my current project, Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black (I’m 90 pages in…and it’s pretty hard to put down!). Which brings me to my question: What’s sitting on your nightstand right this second? All must be revealed, people! And no substituting Shakespeare if there’s a Harlequin romance novel next to your alarm clock: Nightstand Inspection is a judgment-free exercise! 
We were just as relieved when Universal revealed its new Bruno poster today as when we got our first look at the movie’s 
All you Idol fanatics came out in force this week, commenting on pretty much anything related to the current home of Glambert and the pink-haired rocker. Who knew disco still had some pull? I’ll have to break out my bell bottoms and take it to funky town. But, before I brush up on my jive talkin’, let us Enter the Fray:
