Just Do It

Golden Girls Gone Wild!

by Holly Otterbein

Wed., Feb. 18, 11 p.m., $1.99, Bob & Barbara's, 1509 South St., 215-545-4511, dumpstaplayers.org

The Golden Girls would make great contemporary reality TV. The lineup is perfect — there's the dumb one (Rose), the sex symbol (Blanche), the closeted lesbian (Dorothy) and the motherly figure (Sophia). But would Americans tune in when the four girls jumped into their Real World Jacuzzi, deflated gray perms and all? Ricky Paul, director of the Dumpsta Players, sure as hell doesn't think so.

"How hard is it now, once female actors have turned 40, to stay in Hollywood? The same isn't true with men," says Paul. "They can be 60 years old and still considered sexy."

In Golden Girls Gone Wild!, the Dumpsta Players take on these serious themes of celebrity, age and gender roles. But as you can glean from the title, they aren't very serious about it. Based loosely on The Golden Girls episode in which the women shop for a new roof, the parody brings Rose, Blanche, Dorothy and Sophia into the modern world — by placing them on Dancing with the Stars, Charm School, America's Next Top Model and even Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. (Except they call the latter, well, "Extreme Fuckover: Homo Edition.")

So does all this satire mean the Dumpsta Players hate reality TV?

"Every genre has its good and bad shows. I'm a big fan of Project Runway," Paul says. "But it's just like disco in the late '70s. At this point, most of it's bad, bad, bad."