Scandal’s Fitz on Designing Women
With just 5 days until the premiere of Scandal’s 4th season, imagine my delight when I found a clip of Fitz, er Tony Goldwyn, guest starring on Designing Women in 1987 as a young man dying of AIDS. Check him out in all his 80’s preppy glory with the highlights, flips & the navy blazer. He looks like quite the Young Republican here and had a real James Spader pre-Blacklist yuppie vibe happening. Revisiting past looks can be dicey business for many of us, but he does not look bad considering that this was the decade of acid wash denim and fluorescent colors. Well played sir.
Julia Sugarbaker Vs Mellie
Discovering this episode makes me happy because it combines one of my current tv obsessions – Scandal – with one of my favorite characters of all time Julia Sugarbaker. There are few things I love more than a devastating read and no one did it better than Julia and my other shero of life Claire Huxtable. If you don’t know about Julia Sugarbaker you’ve been missing out because this woman routinely broke fools down to their lowest common denominators effortlessly with a smile on her face. I have been known to curse people out when provoked – I ‘m not proud of that and it really is something that I have been trying to stop- but there is nothing like letting someone have it eloquently with nary a profane word defiling your lips. It is downright poetic.
In this episode, Julia lets a friend have it for her ignorant views about AIDS and tells her “If God was giving out sexually transmitted diseases to people as a punishment for sinning then you would be at the free clinic all the time!”
Just imagine Julia getting into it with drunk Mellie. Julia could be the matriarch of Mellie’s hillbilly clan who is totally unimpressed by the shenanigans in the White House. If Dixie Carter were still alive I would start a letter writing campaign to Shonda Rhimes to make this happen. Now that I think about it, Mellie’s side of the family has not been fleshed out at all, so giving her a female relative is not a bad idea. Surely she must have a feisty grandmother or a salty aunt somewhere waiting in the wings. Mellie could have her very own Daddy Pope.
Fitz was on Season 2, Episode 4 “Killing all the Right People,” which was pretty bold at the time because AIDS was still a taboo topic in many circles. His character was dying and asked the Sugarbakers design firm to plan his funeral. He doesn’t have much screen time, but here is the episode if you want to watch the whole thing.