In Memoriam: Blossom Writer Racelle Rosett Schaefer

Remembering Racelle Rosett Schaefer

In 1991, the first episode of “Blossom” aired on NBC. I was 14 years old. Created by Don Reo, “Blossom” was a sitcom about a teenage girl whose mom had left her and her two older brothers to be raised by her single musician dad.

In the first episode, “Blossom Blossoms,” Blossom gets her period. It is the episode people most commonly ask me about.

“Blossom Blossoms” was written by Racelle Rosett Schaefer z”l. Racelle was, at the time, the only female staff writer on our show. In fact, there were not many female writers at all in those days, and it was not an easy gig to get. Racelle was young and she was a mom of two little boys. She was 30. She was sharp and sarcastic and beautiful and awesome. She had gorgeous thick black hair she wore in a bob. She was like the big sister I never had. Sometimes, Blossom dressed a lot like Racelle did: floral dress, denim jacket, clunky shoes. And sometimes a bold vampy lip. That’s how we rolled in the early 90s.

Racelle remembered well the angst of teenage girlhood and wrote about it with a beauty that sometimes didn’t seem to fit on a family sitcom. Don Reo - who ran the writer’s room as our EP and showrunner - always made it fit. Racelle knew intimately well the challenges of being too smart for your own good, of being ambitious but not wanting to come across as pushy, and just being a teenage girl wanting to fit in but also really not being able to help standing out.

Racelle was my voice.

She was laid to rest a few weeks ago, taken to heaven far before it was time.

For the first two seasons of “Blossom,” before Racelle said goodbye to our sitcom and went on to create so many other beautiful things, she continued to be my voice, holding her own in a room full of delightful rowdy men, most of whose names are on our roughly 200 episodes. Five of those episodes hold Racelle’s name. You can find them at the end of this piece.

In “Blossom Blossoms,” Blossom is without a mom to explain puberty to her, and she’s left to buy tampons by herself in a hilarious scene where she imagines the box of tampons is comically enormous. The cute cashier - played by a young Giovanni Ribisi - recognizes her from school and she nearly dies from embarrassment. Blossom dreams that night that the perfect mom, TV’s Mrs. Cosby (in a stellar cameo by Phylicia Rashad herself) bakes a cake decorated with fallopian tubes and a uterus so that Blossom can learn all about becoming a woman. It’s perfect. That was Racelle.

(BTS fact about this cameo: “Blossom” premiered after “The Cosby Show,” hence the tie in which was intended to draw viewers to watch a new show.)

Racelle was an award-winning TV writer (“thirtysomething”) and she also wrote short stories. She wrote several delightful articles a few years ago for my then-website, including this one about how to talk to people who have had cancer. She wrote it after her first bout and insisted her bio pic be her in a spectacular wig, a blue bob. Check it out and listen to her voice.

Racelle wrote a gorgeous collection of short stories about modern non-religious women engaging in the ancient ritual of mikveh, called Moving Waters. It’s beautiful.

She was a lover of peace and poetry. Here is her reading Yehuda Amichai’s “Wild Peace” if you want to hear what her voice actually sounded like and literally listen to her voice.

Racelle was a wonderful, persuasive and passionate writer. She was a loving mother. She was a woman of valor whose worth was, as our tradition holds for righteous women, “far beyond rubies.”

Without her voice, the world is a quieter place. It is a little more restless and a little less whole.

May her memory be for a blessing and may her soul rise up eternally.

Here are the other episodes besides the pilot of “Blossom” that Racelle is credited as head writer on:

• Season 1 Episode 7 - “Thanks for the Memorex” - Inspired by old home movies Blossom transferred to video, the family goes to the cabin by the lake.

• Season 1 Episode 13 - “Love Stinks” - Blossom is devastated after being dumped by a former boyfriend who had recently returned from college and met someone else.

• Season 2 Episode 1 - “Second Base” - Blossom reminisces in her diary about boyfriend Jimmy and the possibility of going to second base.

• Season 2 Episode 12 - “This Old House” - Fearing that he will not be able to meet the next mortgage payment, Nick convinces the kids that they would be better off moving somewhere else.