Bacon, Lettuce, and Potato Sandwiches
S2 E3: Take Him, He’s Mine
The Golden Girls, 1985.
Season 2, Episode 3 of The Golden Girls opens with what every American small business dreams of: two women standing in their kitchen at midnight, inventing the bacon, lettuce, and potato sandwich.
Rose and Sophia, propelled by optimism, hunger, and a casual disregard for standard supply-chain logic, decide to sell these sandwiches to construction workers at dawn. The fact that the sandwich contains potato instead of tomato is treated as both an acceptable substitution and a triumph of linguistic persuasion (“Just say it fast, Rose. Baconlettuceandpotato.”).
Meanwhile, Blanche is preparing for a date with Geoffrey the Commodore, a man who is either in the Navy or in a Lionel Richie-adjacent singing group, depending on who you ask. Dorothy, on the other hand, receives an unexpected visitor: her ex-husband Stan, newly bankrupt and emotionally fragile, with the particular fragility of a man who will eventually ask someone to “take him, he’s mine” without irony.
Dorothy, who had been planning a night of romance, instead ends up emotionally chaperoning Stan. But Blanche, sweet, unguarded Blanche, agrees to take him out instead. And then, against all natural laws and the core principles of Blanche’s personal brand, she actually enjoys herself.
Dorothy responds with an emotion she cannot fully name but which Blanche helpfully defines: magenta. Not quite jealousy, not quite sadness, not quite fear. Just the whole volatile spectrum of feelings you experience when your glamorous best friend is suddenly spending quality time with your deeply unglamorous ex-husband.
All the while, Rose and Sophia discover that their sandwich enterprise yields no profit, because construction workers keep handing them hundred-dollar bills and Rose keeps handing back sandwiches instead of change. They also learn they’ve inadvertently encroached on territory held by a man named Johnny No-Thumbs—an individual widely regarded as “sweet,” which is troubling news for anyone familiar with organized crime.
Dorothy and Blanche finally reconcile once Dorothy realizes that Blanche is not sleeping with Stan but that Stan is, predictably, sleeping with someone far younger than both of them. Blanche names the feeling—magenta—and Dorothy accepts it, because this is what friendship is: the ability to say “I’m sorry,” mean it, and then immediately pivot to discussing why on earth you married Stan in the first place.
In the end, the girls abandon the sandwich business, Blanche keeps her dignity, Rose keeps her innocence, Sophia keeps the mob at bay, and Dorothy keeps the knowledge that even when a relationship is over, the emotional territory surrounding it is still full of unexploded mines.
And somewhere in Miami, a forgotten bacon, lettuce, and potato sandwich slowly wilts on a construction site sidewalk, a small starchy testament to dreams that were beautiful, impractical, and doomed from the start.