“Designing Women’s” been off TV for ages, so there’s gotta be a big reason for Julia Sugarbaker to come roaring back.
A yuge reason.
"I'm Julia Sugarbaker and I have a personal message for presidential candidate Donald Trump," Sugarbaker — aka popular Atlanta playwright and actor Topher Payne — says at the start of a hilarious video that's going viral. Tricked out as the 1986-93 character nicknamed "The Terminator" thanks to her withering monologues, Payne slams Trump's nasty 'tude toward women in general ("It appears you have a huge problem with any woman not wearing a bikini and a sash and the name of her home country on it") and his use of one particularly offensive bit of slang for female anatomy to put down his male opponents.
We’d rather not repeat it here. Nor would Julia/Topher, given her druthers:
“I prefer the word my grandmother used ,” she drawls in her Southern syrupy way, “‘Miss Pretty.’”
(You can go here to watch the five-minute video).
This isn't Payne's first go-round as Sugarbaker. He's part of the insanely popular "Designing Women Live" production that sells out like that each year at OnStage Atlanta in Decatur. It's pretty much a word-for-word reenactment of a couple of the Atlanta-set CBS series more popular episodes — with a talented quartet of male actors portraying the big-hearted and bigger-haired female denizens of the Sugarbaker Design Firm.
Early on, Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, creator of the real “Designing Women,” became aware of what Payne et al. were doing and essentially gave them her blessing to use the show’s scripts. And, apparently, when The Donald started his unreal IRL presidential campaign this year, she couldn’t resist resurrecting Julia to go designing-woman-a-mano with him.
As our former AJC colleague Richard Eldredge explains it on his excellent web site, Eldredge ATL, Bloodworth Thomason wrote the monologue and emailed it to Payne in advance of next week's so-called "SEC primary" in Georgia and six other southern states. "With Donald and his bag of misogynist comments marching toward Atlanta, it was just too irresistible not to have Julia greet him," Bloodworth Thomason told Eldredge.
Payne originally planned to work the monologue into the next DWL, which runs April 1-10 at Onstage Atlanta. But then he decided (again with Bloodworth Thomason's approval) to film it so anyone who doesn't live here or who can't get snag one of the precious tickets to the show can see it.
And if you’re a certain presidential candidate headed this way, “Julia” has a final bit of advice in the video:
“Here’s the bottom line: You need to do better. You need to talk better. You need to act better, especially where women are concerned. You’re in the South now. This is not the land of big balls, this is the land of steel magnolias.”
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