Betty White to receive the gift of postal immortality

Providing a brand new answer to the classic trivia question “What’s the common connection between Betty White, famed record producer Allen Toussaint, and the luna moth?” the U.S. Post Office announced today that all three will featured on upcoming stamps in 2025.

As pop culture nerds and not lepidopterists, we’re mostly interested in the former two, especially White, a legend of American TV and comedy who died in the final minutes of 2021. Now, though, her image will live on forever, by which we mean she’s being put on a Forever stamp. Which will, barring the complete collapse of American postal infrastructure, be able to guarantee postage for nearly as long as the span of White’s TV career, the longest continuous one in the history of the medium. (Also, we just found out that when the Post Office puts out preliminary pictures of stamps, it puts a line through the “Forever” part, presumably to screw with mail pirates; it really just looks like they’re being sarcastic, though.)

For the curious, the stamp features a digital illustration of White by Dale Stephanos, based on a 2010 photo by Kwaku Alston, thus putting the U.S. government’s personal Betty fandom in the “guest appearances on Community” period. (A.k.a., “It’s warming up, but is not yet hot in Cleveland.”) We might have gone for a ’90s White ourselves, landing somewhere mid-Golden Girls—and would never take issue with those who believe they should be able to send in their rent checks with envelopes graced by Sue Ann from The Mary Tyler Moore Show—but we’ll grant that it’s still a very “classic Betty” image. (The luna moth, meanwhile, looks terrible, but what are ya gonna do?) All of the featured stamps will be released some time in 2025. Meanwhile, we regret to inform you that White is only the first member of the Golden Girls cast to get such an honor; take that, the Rue McClanahan estate.