i am sassa

You knew I was going to. I couldn’t not paint her and finish off the badass group of Golden Girls.

Estelle Getty was a tiny lil badass, whether in or out of character. She was born in New York to Jewish immigrants from Poland. Her family lived in an apartment attached to the glass shop her father owned. Every Friday, Estelle’s father took the family out to listen to live music and watch vaudeville acts in a local theatre. She said she was instantly hooked, and knew she had to become an actress.

Estelle supported herself after high school with secretarial work while she worked as many small theatre roles as she could. Even after she married and had two boys, she still managed to keep finding roles. She cared for her kids before school, went to auditions on her lunch break from job #1, and performed as she could after putting the kids to bed. I’m completely exhausted just thinking about it. Estelle worked theatre gigs this way for over TWENTY FREAKING YEARS until she finally got a big break. She met Harvey Fierstein when he was a young playwright, and he was so enamored with her he wrote a part just for her in his controversial play Torch Song Trilogy. The play’s themes of homosexuality, AIDS, and the drag queen lifestyle were all new and quite shocking, and New York ate it up. It was so popular it went to Broadway. And like the tiny turtle who slowly and steadily won the race, Estelle FINALLY AFTER OVER TWENTY YEARS OMG got to quit that second job. Her middle name should have been Grit.

When the AIDS epidemic took Estelle’s nephew and many of her theatre friends, she was completely devastated. She became an AIDS activist, and though her career moved her from theatre to television, she remained a warrior for the cause for the rest of her life.

When the play took her to LA, Estelle met a bunch of big shot TV peeps who were smitten with her role. She auditioned for the part of Sophia Petrillo in Golden Girls, a character that was not originally intended to show up in every episode. This tiny Jewish sixty year-old not only convinced the producers that she could play an 80-something Italian woman, but she did it so well that her character became a staple on the show.

Estelle’s painting wraps up my mini-series (within a series) of the Golden Girls. I absolutely loved the show as a kid, but revisiting it as an adult has been so much fun and so enlightening. It is a HILARIOUS show, and it was so far ahead of its time. Now that I’ve learned about these four women, I am not at all surprised that it was so powerful and progressive. And in all the interviews I watched where the women spoke of each other, there was not one harsh word. No dramatic crap, just love and admiration. Women empowering one another, and supporting each other to become the very best version of themselves. I think this is what happens when we let go of the competitive relationships we were conditioned to have with each other. It reminds me of Lizzo’s lyric, “If I’m shining, everybody gonna shine”

Thank you, Estelle Getty.