Birthday Girl: What a Character

There is never not a good reason to visit this little moment of TV insanity...

But on what would have been dear Miss Alice Ghostley's 87th birthday, it seems even more the right thing to do.  Designing Women, of course, was only the crown of a career that got off the ground in New Faces of 1952 and rarely slackened.  We don't have enough of her kind of actress these days - the welcome familiar face, typecast but usefully (in her case as nosy neighbor, sex-hungry plain jane, or wacky relative) - but then again there are really aren't so many of those kinds of roles.

The big surprise?  Ghostley was happily married, and for fifty years.  He was even kind of a looker.  He predeceased Alice by a few years (I'm shocked she was only 81 when she left us in 2007 - I thought she was older than Betty White (which begs the question - is anybody older than Betty White?).  Oddly, while they're buried together, he's apparently kind of an afterthought, a plaque tacked on to an ornate stone celebrating "The Ghostley Girls" (which sounds like a Wilkie Collins title), Alice and her sister, Gladys.  It might be a surprise that Alice Ghostley had a hunky Italian husband called Felice; that she had a sister called Gladys, though, seems wholly inevitable...