Something spooky, and rather Sheena Eastonesque, has happened on this very site just in time for Halloween. Until a few days ago, I used a plugin called WPForms on the Contact page. This weekend it came to my attention that a mischievous ghost or malevolent spirit caused something to go haywire with that.
If you sent a message through the Contact form any time since October 4th, I have no record of it. I’m not sure what’s more frightening, that my “Thanks for reaching out!” auto-response wasn’t shown to anyone who submitted a note this month, or that a reader might’ve felt ignored after not hearing back from me.
Sincerest apologies for that snafu. For now, you can leave a comment directly on the Contact page (no WPForms involved) if you want to get in touch. While I can’t travel back in time and save or respond to lost notes, I can share with you conciliatory photos of pumpkins.
Kate Jackson, affectionately known here as Charlie’s Butchest Angel, celebrates a birthday later this month. If time permits I plan to look back on a few of her telefilms. First up will be Inmates: A Love Story (from 1981, the same year as Thin Ice), in which she again finds herself behind bars, this time in a co-ed institution with Shirley Jones as the prison superintendent.
Will sparks fly when the impossibly handsome Perry King shows up in a three-piece suit as a white collar criminal? Why is Tony Curtis loitering near the men’s showers dressed like a cross between a pimp, a cat burglar and the Gorton’s fisherman (by way of Johnny Cash)? We’ll attempt to answer all these questions and more next week, but I wanted to put this here now as a promise. Because, through a convoluted and predictably gay series of events, a few Jackson fans check in here almost every weekend looking for new Kate content.
Finally, an update on last week’s post about my anniversary. My wife and I don’t normally exchange gifts but since this was a milestone year I gave her a painting of the place where we got engaged. She gave me a Tom of Finland book that some of you will surely appreciate. Now the question becomes whether to leave it on the coffee table when her super-religious parents visit next week.
The next Golden Girls recap is long overdue and will be posted within the next day or two. Initially the delay was due to medical appointments, but then there was a technical issue pertaining to the Friends of Dorothy Z. page. That’s temporarily resolved for now but might require more fiddling in the future.
While dealing with that situation, I did other behind-the-scenes tasks, including image optimization and finally redoing the screen caps on some older reviews. Ebbie, My First Love and Just Between Friends are among the pages that were fixed, all from a period where I had two computer failures in quick succession that left me without decent images for those films.
Mommie Dearest not included, I just couldn’t resist using that photo.
Day #7: The final film in our Mother’s Day marathon is The Truth About Jane(2000), a Lifetime ditty about the inability of mother Janice (Stockard Channing) to accept the lesbianism of her teenage daughter Jane (Ellen Muth). Costarring James Naughton and RuPaul, The Truth About Jane contains many scenes set at a dining room table. Each and every time, without fail, I thought of late comedian Bob Smith’s Thanksgiving joke (“Please pass the gravy to a homosexual”) and laughed.
Day #6: Motherhood was often at the center of Rue McClanahan’s TV movies, whether she was in a starring or supporting role. We still have a few of those titles left to tackle, but today’s retrospective is of her most frustrating portrayal of motherhood: Baby of the Bride. The middle entry in her early ’90s Margret Hix series finds her unexpectedly pregnant at 53, and boy is her husband a rat about it.
Day #5: For today’s new review we’re looking back on My Mother’s Secret Life, a tawdry 1984 telefilm starring Amanda Wyss as a teenager in search of her birth mom following the death of her father. It brings her to the doorstep of a glamorous San Francisco call girl played by Loni Anderson. This was my greatest surprise of the week. It’s thoroughly ridiculous and that’s why it works in spite of itself.
Day #4:Mother, May I Sleep with Danger? is the mother of all TV movie questions, and today we’ll look back at that film, which was reviewed here last year. This one should be extra special to gay viewers not just because of the title and Tori Spelling (or costar Ivan Sergei, of The Opposite of Sex), but because the titular mother was played by the marvelous Lisa Banes. Banes, who was killed in a hit-and-run accident last year, was survived by her wife.
Day #3: We have a new review today, of Sins of the Mother. In this nasty little 1991 adaptation of a true crime book, Elizabeth Montgomery plays a manipulative mother unaware of her son’s violent secret life—and the role her abuse has played in it. Montgomery was one of the earliest (and busiest) queens of the TV movie, and later this year I’ll write about more of her work.
Day #2: Today we’re revisiting Mother Knows Best. We first watched this 1997 black comedy in January and were surprised by its hilarity. Joanna Kerns plays against type as the mother-in-law from hell, a socialite who consults a hitman when her daughter (Christine Elise) mortifies her by marrying a blue collar man (Grant Show).
Day #1: It’s May 2nd and our first post, a look at the 1981 Afterschool Special Please Don’t Hit Me, Mom, is live!
Mark your calendars! Unless my dog eats my computer, we’ll kick off a one-week celebration of Mother’s Day on May 2nd. Every day through the 8th we’ll feature a TV movie about motherhood, blending all-new content with some reposts of other mom-centric reviews.
It’s a rehearsal for a more ambitious project I might undertake later this year, so we’ll see how it goes. It’s definitely not kid-tested or mother-approved, but you can get in the mood ahead of time by listening to Lucille Bluth sing “Rose’s Turn.”
Beginning on the 2nd, I’ll “sticky” this post and update it daily with the appropriate link, and of course you can also subscribe to the site below (or track updates via RSS) if you’re a masochist.
Live footage of “Garbage Day!” guy taking a gander at this site.
While watching tennis earlier (it’s the opening days of the Miami Open), I created a new page that indexes all the reviews I’ve written under the Cranky Lesbian moniker. For this endeavor I created an accompanying graphic with the tagline “Garbage Day!”, a nod to one of the most ridiculous scenes in movie history. This perhaps cements that I’ll only ever write about trash here.
Just for kicks, when I was done with that I experimented with Canva and created this janky-looking graphic promoting a future post. Would it have looked better with tiny banjos on either side of the subheading? I was afraid of doing anything that might’ve made Burt and Loni look tacky.
