My birthday is coming up, so I’ve been thinking about Sally Rogers. Funny Sally, with her blonde hair bobbed and curled, a black bow affixed on the left side, flowered dresses that cinch at the waist and billow over the hips. She’s the type of woman who wears a single strand of pearls that settles just above the collarbone when she goes out for the evening.

My birthday is in late February and hers is in early March and “Where You Been, Fassbinder?” is the most depressing example of what it’s like to be a single woman, dateless, on your birthday.

First aired in 1962 (The Dick Van Dyke Show’s premier season), “Where You Been, Fassbinder?” begins in the suburban living room of Rob and Laura Petrie (Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore), who are having a small dinner party. They’re joined by Rob’s coworkers, Sally (Rose Marie), Buddy Sorrell (Morey Amsterdam), and Buddy’s wife, Pickles. Rob and Laura’s six-year-old son, Ritchie, tries to stall his bedtime by asking Sally questions.

“How old are you?”

Laura interrupts. “We don’t ask ladies how old they are.”

“Why not?”

“They won’t tell ya,” Buddy says.

“Do ladies tell their birthday?”

Sally tells Ritchie her birthday is the next Friday. “Which birthday will it be?” he asks before changing the subject and asking if Buddy and Pickles are married. He turns back to Sally. “Where’s your husband?” When she says she doesn’t have one, he asks, “Why don’t you get one?” at which point Rob and Laura grab him from either arm and carry him out of the room.

The conversation’s not over, though.

Pickles: “You should get married.”

Sally: “Everyone’s after me to get married. What’s so bad about being single?”

Pickles pushes more, but Sally keeps her stance. “Being single isn’t a disease.”

Sally makes a joke of the conversation, as she frequently does (she, Rob, and Buddy are comedy writers for the fictional Alan Brady Show). Laura would sooner believe that Sally is devastated over spending her birthday “washing, ironing, and crying,” than to accept her comment as a joke as Rob believes. After the party ends, Laura explains to Rob the horror of being an aging single woman, though she married Rob when she was all of nineteen. Rob makes a joke and they lovingly embrace. They are the couple who makes us believe in and want the goodness of marriage, as Sally insinuated as she left the Petrie’s house. (Buddy and Pickles are the mismatched pair who makes us wonder if it wouldn’t be better to be single.)

At the office the next day, Buddy reveals that Sally cried on the drive home. “It was like watching a man cry,” he says. The two decide to throw her a birthday party. Sally declines, saying she’ll find a date with one of the many men she sees now and then. But no one’s available for a Friday night in and some homemade lasagna. Shortly thereafter, she’s contacted by Leo Fassbinder, a man she went to high school with. They set a date, but the background music is too depressing to be anything but foreboding.

I want the episode to not go down this road at all, but, even more so, I desperately don’t want to see what we see when Sally’s date turns out to try to sell her insurance – it’s not a date after all. Grave, awful music swells in the background. It doesn’t even matter what actually goes on for the rest of the scene, the music is so heavy-handed. Sally is better than this in every single other episode of the five-season series. But, for now, she blows out the candles on the table and slumps in defeat, only for Rob and the gang to bust into her apartment with party hats and the works. She starts to cry and sends them out, saying she’s waiting for her date. Sure, spending all of your time around couples when you’re single isn’t always great, but I want Sally to look past that and realize that her friends want to give her the fun birthday celebration she deserves.

In the great feminist television lineup, Marlo Thomas’s Ann Marie and Mary Tyler Moore’s Mary Richards stand at the center. Most people seem to divide between the two, and I’m firmly a Mary Richards kind of girl. (Ditto Bewitched in the Bewitched / I Dream of Jeanie debate.) Mary Richards is the wholesome Midwestern girl next door who takes a job as a television news producer in dreary Minneapolis (there’s gray snow in the opening credits if that tells you anything). Mary, of course, is what sometimes seems like the city’s – and her workplace’s – only optimistic spirit. Even so, she remains single after seven seasons of delightfully bad dates. (Her frumpier best friend Rhoda both marries and divorces in the spinoff show Rhoda.)

I like to think that Sally Rogers makes a space for characters like Mary Richards. Excepting the horrendous birthday episode, Sally is a strong presence on The Dick Van Dyke Show. Her singlehood is used for comedic value – each passing man’s name is sure to be followed by Sally’s inquiry about his marital status. In this space, she’s both part of and in defiance of the early ’60s. She nods to the undesirable status of being single, but with the dresses and the pearls she doesn’t look like the stereotypical spinster. She also has a career that is one of clear success. In the birthday episode, we see Sally’s exquisite apartment, which she shares with her cat, Henderson.

Most of all, Sally is one of three writers on what is supposed to be a successful sketch comedy show. It’s also known within the show’s world that she’s a more dependable and harder worker than Buddy (Rob, as the protagonist is, of course, both the head writer of The Alan Brady Show and the moral center of the sitcom as a whole). According to the Writers Guild of America West, women accounted for twenty-eight percent of television writers in 2008. As of November 2009, no women wrote for network late-night shows, and the numbers only get marginally better for the cable equivalents – The Daily Show, for instance, was started by two women and currently has two female writers. The one big exception is Chelsea Handler’s show; five of her ten writers are women. Male writers for the same shows cite that, statistically, there are fewer women in comedy in general, thus leading to fewer women becoming comedy writers.

As one-third of a comedic writing staff in 1961, Sally Rogers is still faring better than women in similar positions fifty years later. As Rose Marie said of her former character, Sally was the “first women’s libber.”