BLAME IT ON NEW ORLEANS

Designing Women
Season 5 (1991)

Travel-themed episodes of Designing Women were always among the show’s best (we’ll be getting to some more of them once when we hit “Summer Vacation” month on the blog), and this New Orleans-set episode is no exception.  True, it’s not technically set during Mardi Gras, but it might as well be considering the debauchery that the women of Sugarbakers Design Firm engage in while in the Big Easy.

The gang heads to New Orleans for a design conference, but the four women are all forced to room together after realizing that they never booked Anthony his own room. Julia is all business, Mary Jo contemplates having a fling with a business associate, and Suzanne and Charlene are just running around doing every New Orleans-related activity they can think of.  I always liked the various pairings that the show presented, with Suzanne and Charlene’s friendship a particular highlight.  And drunken Suzanne and Charlene is that much better!

Seriously, there is so much New Orleans going on this episode (though most of it is talked about rather than seen).  Make a scorecard and check things off as you watch: beignets, Hurricanes (the cocktail), a jazz band funeral, a voodoo shop that doesn’t open until midnight, and a female impersonator named Lolita LuPage.   Watching this episode will expand your New Orleans IQ:  when Charlene and Suzanne drunkenly burst into the hotel room late one night Charlene brings “takeout étouffée” with her; a little googling revealed that it’s a type of seafood gumbo.  Who says sitcoms never teach you anything?

Betrayal: pairs well with coffee.

Mary Jo takes the plunge, sowing her “one wild oat,” and sleeps with the rather dweeby-looking guy.  All seems well until the next morning when he casually tells her not to answer his phone in case it’s his wife. A shell-shocked Mary Jo makes her way to the group’s presentation, where the microphone is malfunctioning and Charlene is totally hungover.  After Julia vainly attempts to deliver a speech to a room of carousing podiatrists (who stumbled in from the wrong convention), Mary Jo blurts out her secret—just as Charlene manages to get the microphone working again.

The episode ends with an appearance by Miss Lolita LuPage herself.  Charlene brings her to confront Suzanne, who suspects that Lolita is pulling a Victor/Victoria and is actually a woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman.  After both Lolita and Suzanne tear off their wigs Suzanne drags her to the bathroom to end the debate once and for all, only to come running out moments later yelling at someone to call the police—there’s a man in the ladies’ restroom.

A good ole fashioned wig-off

There are no elaborate floats or costumes or cheap bead necklaces but I defy you to find another episode that is more New Orleansy than this!

Mardi Gras Quotient: As I wrote above, this isn’t technically a Mardi Gras episode, but it’s positively dripping in New Orleans ambience, so I’ll average it out to a 3.

See It, Skip It, Own It?
All of Designing Women is worth owning and watching—again and again and again.