"It's like we say in St. Olaf, Christmas without fruitcake is like St. Sigmund's Day without the headless boy."
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Beauty and the Beast is the third episode of the seventh season of The Golden Girls and the one-hundred and fifty-seventh episode overall. Directed by Lex Passaris and written by Mitchell Hurwitz, it premiered on NBC-TV on October 5th, 1991.
Blanche signs her granddaughter Melissa up for the Little Miss Miami Pageant, but she becomes so focused on winning that it makes Melissa miserable. With Sophia reliant on a wheelchair, Dorothy hires a nurse to take care of her. Not only does the nurse's bossiness anger Rose and Blanche, but when she and Sophia bond, it makes Dorothy jealous.
Plot[]
With Sophia dealing with two sprained ankles, Dorothy decides to hire a nurse to take care of her since she will be busy with an Education Conference. Blanche is worried that she doesn’t know how to entertain her visiting granddaughter Melissa whom she eventually decides to enter in a beauty pageant, even though Rose and Dorothy think it's a bad idea. The nurse that Dorothy hired used to work at Shady Pines, a retirement home that Sophia once lived in. Reluctant at first, Sophia agrees to let Nurse DeFarge stay. To the other girls surprise, Sophia and the Nurse get along almost too well, to the point where they are becoming an annoyance around the house. Dorothy attempts to fire the Nurse but Sophia claims she’s the only one that can take care of her. The nurse says she will leave once Sophia is able to walk again but the girls don’t know that Sophia plans on milking out the injury for a while. Meanwhile, Melissa is not happy with the pageant, and gets stage fright after Blanche pushes her on to the stage. Sophia gets caught walking and the Nurse leaves.[1]
Betty White, Bea Arthur, Rue McClanahan, and Estelle Getty autographed the sun backdrop used in the episode and gave it to Alisan Porter as a gift.
Production[]
In Golden Girls Forever, Edie McClurg said she hated running over Betty White's foot in the scene where she wheels Estelle Getty between the couch and the coffee table. The coffee table had been moved away from the couch during rehearsals, but not on tape night. Edie said she tried to get through as best she could, but added that Betty did a good job improvising, which allowed the take to still be of use in the episode.[2]
Melissa is said to be seven, but Alisan Porter was ten years old when this episode aired.
Cultural references[]
The episode's title is a play on the title of the 1991 Disney animated film Beauty and the Beast.
The book Melissa reads from is The Illustrated Treasury of Children's Literature by Margaret E. Martignoni, famous for its publication of Alice in Wonderland..
Nurse DeFarge is a reference to Madame Defarge from Charles Dickens's novel A Tale of Two Cities. Similarly to Nurse DeFarge, Madame Defarge is an antagonist in the novel.
Goofs[]
When Blanche is trying to get Melissa to sing at the pageant, you can clearly see that Melissa is trying not to laugh.
The boom mic is visible several times in the episode.
↑The Golden Girls, Season 7, Episode 3, “Beauty and the Beast”. Cherry, Marc and Wooten, Jamie (writers) & Passaris, Lex (director) (October 5th, 1991)
↑Colucci, Jim. Golden Girls Forever: An Unauthorized Look Behind the Lanai. Harper Collins Publishers Design, 2016.