When “Designing Women” came out, I was in high school.  I didn’t really start to appreciate the show until college.  By that point, I never missed a single episode.  Monday nights were dedicated to the unbeatable “Murphy Brown/Designing Women” combo.

When I saw that Dixie Carter passed away yesterday, a little piece of me died too.  See, I cherished her character on “DW”.  She was brassy, sassy and an unapologetic liberal.  In most shows, Carter’s “Julia Sugarbaker” would unleash one of her signature scathing soliloquies.   It was a raging rant against the establishment, tackling everything from vanity to foreign policies, AIDS awareness to religion.

Every tirade was so well written, so eloquent that I actually started VCR’ing the shows and memorizing them.   And while I never had the chance to use them in every day conversation, it was comforting to know I had that diatribe in my arsenal.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tikaHHRIWM&feature=related

As a young neophyte writer, I hadn’t quite found my voice yet.  I found it in Julia Sugarbaker.  Well, technically, I found it via the show’s writer/producer Linda Bloodworth-Thomason.  She wrote a majority of the shows for the first few seasons and was responsible for crafting Julia’s tirades.

On the show, Sugarbaker was known for her liberal political views.  But in real life, Dixie Carter was a die-hard Republican.  Who knew?  And even though she disagreed with many of her character’s left-of-center commentaries, it still made for uproariously good TV.

The 70’s had right-wing zealot Archie Bunker.  But Julia owned the late 80’s and early ‘90’s.    If there’s been another character so engagingly Democratic (and polarizing) besides Julia Sugarbaker, I’ll eat my hat.  I mean, BESIDES Bill Clinton.