This weekend, you will have many a chance to see Private Benjamin on TV Land PRIME and I highly urge you to do so, if for nothing else, to see the single best editing moment in movie history.

Goldie Hawn is Judy Benjamin, a privileged Jewish woman (some may say princess) who joins the army after her husband dies on their wedding night (he's played by Albert Brooks – could this movie BE any more 1980-fabulous?). Later, after the requisite transformation from pampered to semi-kickass (think G.I. Jane at a Long Island bat mitzvah), she meets a man in a bar: Armand Assante. She asks him to tell her a little about himself: He’s French, he’s a doctor, he’s Jewish. Cut to: her experiencing the unicorn rainbow in bed with him.

That, my friends, is comedy.

I love the movie and this pearl of a moment, I dunno, maybe because I watched it on cable on the Monday night after my bar mitzvah? Maybe it’s because I was amazed that Goldie Hawn was actually a Red Sea pedestrian like me. Growing up, I never assumed any blond person was Jewish, but lo and behold, Goldie (um, have you ever met a non-Jewish Goldie, Sammy?) was born to a Jewish mother and a Presbyterian father who is a descendant of the dude who sang "Molasses to Rum" in 1776. Well, I mean, the actual dude – the youngest to sign the Declaration of Independence.

In the early '80s , I swear HBO was the Hawn Box Office channel. I cannot tell you how many times after that fateful rugelach-infused night that I must have watched Private Benjamin, not to mention other Goldie films: Seems Like Old Times, with a bit of Foul Play thrown in for albino fans, and a dash of the Hawn-Burt Reynolds-Audra Lindley classic, Best Friends.

When I moved to New York, my first boss reminded me of Goldie (and strangely, her daughter reminded me of Kate Hudson). I started working for her right around when The First Wives Club came out. Her character in that movie has a classic Goldie paradigm: a woman transforms from pampered to self-sufficient. Just like Judy Benjamin – AND the chick Goldie played in Overboard, and in that weird thrillery movie Deceived, made at a time when it was a city ordinance that John Heard was supposed to play your shady husband. Goldie embodied a whole era of women becoming self-sufficient (sans the pampered part) in Swing Shift.

As the years have gone on and I have abandoned my compulsive HBO-watching (mainly because they canceled The Comeback), I still have a memory chock full of Goldie Golden Moments:

In Seems Like Old Times, Goldie reunited with Foul Play co-star Chevy Chase. He’s the ex-husband set up as a patsy for a crime he didn’t commit and hiding out in her garage. Best part is watching Goldie pass off a streak of grease on her face as a dab of barbecue sauce.

You must watch her in Protocol, her pre-Reese Witherspoon DC-set blondfest, when she shows up at a stuffy state picnic with a lawn chair, boom box and in short shorts.

You have not truly lived until you sit through her rapping the word “football” during the closing credits of the Woody Harrelson-Nipsey Russell epic Wildcats.

I nearly died when she donned a fatsuit and ate frosting from the can, personifying my every fear of loneliness, in Death Becomes Her.

And come on – she flies on the Seine and sings – and is married to Alan Alda after being married to Woody Allen – in Everybody Says I Love You.

She's had a pretty amazing career – and even an Oscar® for her role in Cactus Flower. There really is nothing she can't do. Well, except marry Kurt Russell.

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