News: Long Island Welcomes Betty White
(Long Island, N.Y.) The eighty-nine-year-old television legend known as Betty White was seen yesterday at the Smith Haven Mall in Lake Grove. As the first stop in her book signing tour, Long Island was the place to welcome White with nearly a thousand screaming fans who had waited hours to get a glimpse of the star. True to her nature, the Golden-girl did not disappoint her audience and stayed long enough to satisfy the demands of the bulk of the crowd.
White was scheduled to visit the mall’s Barnes & Noble, which is located next to the Cheesecake Factory. She allegedly made a calm entrance from an elevator into a mob of claps and cheers while she went on to promote her new book. Released on Tuesday, the book, called “If You Ask Me (And Of Course You Won’t),” is the fifth to be published by the star.
The book deals with White’s lifelong commitment to charity work and the saving of animals, as well as her television career and personal views on aging. The book is also said to explore her romances and flesh out the rumor that accused her of having a crush on actor Robert Redford. After receiving good reviews, the book is said to employ White’s trademark humor and straight-forward wit into getting her message across to readers.
The next stop on White’s promotional journey is the Fifth Avenue Barnes & Noble in Manhattan where she is scheduled to arrive around noontime today. The eighty-nine-year-old starlet has been on television since 1949, and has attracted everyone from teens to senior citizens to her Long Island appearance. Teens testified to having cut class to see the star while adults claimed to skip out on work, and whether by wheelchair or walker, White’s oldest demographic of fans attended the showing.
Reports stated that the manager of Lake Grove’s Barnes & Noble announced on the megaphone that White was overwhelmed at the support she received for her Long Island visit. The Lake Grove stop was the first of many for White, who gained a recent influx of esteem in Hollywood. Between the months of January and March over 500,000 Facebook fans successfully campaigned for White’s acceptance of Saturday Night Live’s offer to have her as the oldest host the show has ever seen.
White’s fans waited in line for hours to get a numbered ticket to see her during her Lake Grove visit. The line began in the wee hours, and an estimated five hundred people were waiting during the cold, cloudy morning an hour before tickets were scheduled to be handed out. The first four hundred were granted a meeting with star, and the rest waited on standby to see if White was able to extend her guaranteed hour-and-a-half visit.
White is a seven-time Emmy Award winner who turned down Saturday Night Live three times before accepting the host offer, which wound up boosting the show’s ratings to the highest they’ve been since 2008. She appears on a variety of sitcoms, and even on re-runs of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Attesting to her timelessness, it’s apparent that few celebrities could conjure such a diverse group of fans.
White is best known for her role as ‘Rose Nylund’ on the popular eighties sitcom series called “The Golden Girls.” White, along with Estelle Getty, Bea Arthur, and Rue McClanahan, starred in the sitcom, which some say served as the template for more modern female-cast series like “Sex and The City.” Though the oldest member of the cast, White is the sole survivor, as her co-stars passed consecutively between the years of 2008-2010. What has shocked some fans of the show is that Getty, who played Arthur’s mother, was not actually the oldest.
