‘Designing Women’ Will Take On Weighty Issues

As a teen-ager, she won 18 beauty pageants. In 1975, as Miss Florida, she won the Miss America talent contest with a dramatic presentation.

But she was forever fighting extra pounds, and this television season it is obvious that “Designing Women’s” Delta Burke, although still beautiful, has grown heavy. Plump. Chunky. Stout. Fat.

Burke does not deny it. On a recent edition of “Entertainment Tonight,” she said that she had used so many diet pills and amphetamines that she has disturbed her body’s chemical balance and now gains weight even more easily.

So this week “They Shoot Fat Women, Don’t They?” is an episode that creator Linda Bloodworth-Thomason calls “our valentine to overweight people everywhere.”

But the CBS series looks at both sides of a coin: people who get fat and people who are starving.

In Monday’s installment, Burke, as Suzanne Sugarbaker, attends her high-school reunion and finds that her extra avoirdupois has become the topic du jour among former classmates.

In fact, she is rather cruelly voted “Classmate Who Has Changed the Most.” Her off-the-cuff acceptance speech reveals how much she has really changed.

Reportedly, Burke’s husband, actor Gerald McRaney, Marine-fit for his role on another CBS series, “Major Dad,” attended the taping of that installment.

Bloodworth-Thomason combines Suzanne Sugarbaker’s story with that of a 48-hour fast by her slimmer sister Julia (Dixie Carter) and tiny colleague Mary Jo Shively (Annie Potts) as part of the “Primetime to End Hunger” campaign.

The series will offer a clearinghouse telephone number to provide viewers with information on local groups participating in the campaign against hunger, homelessness and poverty.