Adult Education is the twentieth episode of the first season of The Golden Girls and the twentieth episode overall. Directed by Jack Shea and written by James Berg and Stan Zimmerman, it premiered on NBC-TV on February 22nd, 1986.
Summary[]
Dorothy is determined to get tickets to an upcoming Frank Sinatra concert, but keeps getting thwarted. Blanche takes a psychology course to get a promotion at the museum where she works. When she fails the midterm exam, she asks the professor for help and he offers to give her an A if she will sleep with him.
Plot[]
While Dorothy tries to get tickets to an upcoming Frank Sinatra concert, Blanche decides to take classes at the local community college to get a degree required for a promotion at the museum. While she's doing great in her two art courses, she ends up flunking the psychology midterm and is terrified at the possibility of not getting her degree. Despite the girls' attempts to help her study, Blanche continues to be completely unmotivated to learn about psychology. At Dorothy's insistence, she decides to speak with the professor to get the extra help she needs. At the next class, she talks to Professor Cooper about her struggles in the class, and the turns out to be very approachable. He tells Blanche that since she flunked her midterm, she'll need to get an A on the final in order to pass the class, and gives her his home phone number -- saying that if she really wants to pass the class, she'll use it. Blanche then realizes that Professor Cooper isn't offering to tutor her -- he wants her to sleep with him.
Later that night, Blanche tells the ladies what happened, and admits that she's been considering taking up his offer because she's worried she isn't smart enough for the class. Rose and Dorothy insist that Blanche take this matter to the dean, giving her their own experiences of being harassed by men to convince her to go. Blanche decides to take them up on this and goes to see Dean Tucker the next day. However, Dean Tucker turns out to be stressed and overworked due to having just started working at the college and is exasperated by Blanche's allegations against the professor. At Blanche's insistence, however, he realizes his insensitivity to the matter and immediately gets to work to help her. After going through the standard procedure, Dean Tucker is shocked at what Blanche had been put through and asks if there were any witnesses. Blanche replies that there wasn't, and Dean Tucker admits that he can't help her, as no witnesses to the encounter meant that it was Blanche's word against the professor's and there's no way to prove that Blanche herself isn't lying about the encounter. Blanche leaves the office in a huff, telling Dean Tucker that he can do what was on the form to himself.
When Blanche returns home, Rose, Dorothy and Sophia have all gotten good tickets to the Frank Sinatra concert -- Rose won four tickets from her favorite radio show, Dorothy scalped three tickets from a woman by telling her she only had weeks to live and always wanted to see the concert, and Sophia got three front-row orchestra tickets from a friend of hers who was related to Frank's daughter Tina. As the women share their ticket stories, they decide to scalp the extra tickets they have so someone else can enjoy the concert. Blanche is annoyed that they aren't listening to what happened to her at the dean's office. She decides the best thing to do is to study and pass the class on her own,
On the day of the exam, Blanche is the last person to finish her test and is once again alone with Professor Cooper. Cooper asks her if she's made her choice, and Blanche replies that she has. She informs Cooper that she won't sleep with him, and tells him that she chose to pass the class come Hell or high water. She informs him of how his behavior inspired her to study harder than she ever had in her life, and she is extremely confident that she has passed before giving him the test and leaving him alone in the classroom.
Later that night, the other ladies return home extremely late from the concert. A relieved Blanche admits she was about to call the police, and Rose says that she should have, because that's who they were with. Dorothy reveals that they missed the entire concert because they ended up scalping the tickets to an undercover cop, and they spent the night in the police station. As they argue about what happened, Blanche exclaims that they still have yet to really ask her what happened with Professor Cooper. She reveals that while she passed the class and got her degree, she won't be getting the museum's promotion as she lost it out to her coworker Sally Folgeson. While Blanche spent money on a college degree, Sally spent her money on plastic surgery to get the boss's attention. Though her friends try to console her, Blanche says she's not worried -- as she knows that one day Sally's butt will turn to mush, but Blanche will always have her degree.[1]
Tall Tales[]
Back in St. Olaf...[]
Rose tells the ladies about Nils Felander, the man who sexually harassed her when she was younger. Nils was the soda jerk at Lars Erikson's Drugstore and Tackle Shop, and she reminisces that Nils was also the town jerk. Every Saturday, Rose would go to the shop for an ice cream sundae, and Nils would arrange the ice cream scoops in an "obscene way". Unfortunately, Rose could never prove what he was doing, because by the time she would get the sundae home to show her father, the evidence had melted.
Clinton Avenue Memoirs[]
While trying to get Frank Sinatra tickets, Dorothy talks about the first two times she went to see Frank Sinatra. The first time, she went to go see a concert with Gloria and Sophia at the Paramount Theatre. However, Sophia fainted when Frank came out onstage, and Gloria and Dorothy spent the concert in the bathroom trying to revive her. The second time, Stan bought Dorothy tickets to another concert for their anniversary, but they divorced two weeks before the concert. Stan ended up getting the tickets in the divorce while Dorothy got the house and the children.
While Blanche is having trouble with her studies, Dorothy encourages her to talk to her teacher by telling her about her elementary school teacher Mrs. Lenoff. Dorothy was made fun of due to her speech impediment, and it took her three months to work up the courage to ask Mrs. Lenoff for help. Not only did Mrs. Lenoff help Dorothy overcome her impediment, but she inspired Dorothy to go into the teaching profession.
After Blanche tells her and Rose about Professor Cooper harassing her, Dorothy insists that Blanche go to the dean about him and relays her own story of a principal harassing her at her very first teaching job. After reporting him to the Board of Education, Dorothy discovered that while she wasn't the only woman he had harassed, she was the first and only woman he'd harassed wearing a corset and high heels.
Tales from The Old South[]
Blanche reminisces about how she was overshadowed by her sisters in their youth. Charmaine and Virginia were allegedly very talented, until Blanche discovered that she also had a talent -- the talent to drive men crazy with a body "that many said should have come with a warning label".
Cast[]
Main Cast[]
- Bea Arthur as Dorothy Zbornak
- Rue McClanahan as Blanche Devereaux
- Betty White as Rose Nylund
- Estelle Getty as Sophia Petrillo
Guest List[]
- Jerry Hardin as Professor Cooper
- James Staley as Dean Tucker
Notes[]
- This is the first time Rose mentions St. Olaf by name, though she pronounces it as "oh-leff", whereas in later episodes she pronounces it "oh-loff".
Production[]
- Jerry Hardin (Professor Cooper) and James Staley (Dean Tucker) both appeared in later episodes as characters with ties to Blanche. Hardin plays Blanche's boyfriend Gary in "Little Sister",[2] and Staley plays Dr. Manning in "The Accurate Conception".[3]
Cultural references[]
- Dorothy's story about the Paramount Theatre was likely a reference to the Columbus Day Riot, a Frank Sinatra concert that took place on October 12th, 1944. The main issue was that the fans who flocked to the concert refused to leave after seeing the show they originally paid for, and an astounding 35,000 fans ended up showing up to the theatre to try and get a ticket to the show. A riot broke out among the many teenage girls there to see Sinatra, and the police were eventually called to diffuse the situation.
[]
References[]
- ↑ The Golden Girls, Season 1, Episode 20, “Adult Education”. Berg, James and Zimmerman, Stan (writers) & Shea, Jack (director) (February 22nd, 1986)
- ↑ The Golden Girls, Season 4, Episode 21, "Little Sister". Lloyd, Christopher (writer) & Hughes, Terry (director) (April 1, 1989)
- ↑ The Golden Girls, Season 5, Episode 3, "The Accurate Conception". Parent, Gail (writer) & Hughes, Terry (director) (October 14th, 1989)