In this good Advocate interview by Ari Karpel, Wanda Sykes is mostly serious, like when she talks about her seven-year marriage to a man:
“I actually made the choice to be straight as a kid,” she says. “Early on I knew [being gay] wasn’t gonna fly. No way. And from the teachers and church and all it was, This is wrong! What’s wrong with me? And you pray and ask God to take it away, and you bury it and bury it, and you shut that part of yourself off. Then you try to live the life that you’re supposed to live.”
But she also gets in a few good jokes, the best about the media coverage devoted to her coming out at a marriage equality rally in Las Vegas last year after the passage of Proposition 8 in California: “I was like, Damn, whatever happened to ‘What happens in Vegas…?'”
My sister alerted me to this. I believe her exact words were “Kelly Clarkson says she isn’t gay,” followed by maniacal laughter. So there you have it: My sister is skeptical. As for Kelly herself, it’s true that she recently told the web site PopEater she isn’t gay, explaining: “I could never be a lesbian. I would never want to date [someone like] myself, ever. I’m a crazy person. I need some kind of stable, quiet man.” (No word on whether that means she’s bisexual…)
I’ll admit that I’m not quite sure I buy what Kelly’s selling here, but I get why she seized the opportunity to elucidate her heterosexuality. A simple Google search shows that a lot of people think she’s gay, and she has a new album to promote. What I don’t get is why she thinks that being a lesbian means she’d have to date someone like herself. It’s not like one woman is every woman (unless she’s Chaka Khan), so her logic underwhelms. Her comments about feminism weren’t much better, which is why I suggest forgetting all about the PopEater interview and taking a gander at this picture of Kelly that was snapped at the Playboy Club a few months ago instead. She’s posing like fucking Papi from The L Word, people. Wake up and smell the flannel shirts.
*About the headline: I don’t really think Kelly Clarkson sucks. (Anyone who sings “Crimson and Clover” in concert without changing the lyrics is all right with me.) It was just really hard to pass up using a headline like that.
As if to make up for last month’s ill-advised Ricardo Montalban marathon, Turner Classic Movies is showing The More the Merrier tonight as part of their 31 Days of Oscar: Urban Housing block of programming. Besides featuring one of Jean Arthur’s best performances, this George Stevens comedy about the housing shortage in World War II boasts one of the most romantic scenes I’ve ever seen in any movie, as a woozy Arthur tries to resist her attraction to one of her boarders (played by the always brilliant Joel McCrea). The scene is on YouTube — everything ever recorded in the history of the universe is apparently available on YouTube — but you have to see it in the context of the movie to get the full effect.
A few days ago, someone asked if I’d wear Jeanne Moreau’s veil again if Roger Federer lost to Rafael Nadal in Sunday’s Australian Open final. The answer was maybe, depending on the match. The Wimbledon loss had been a heartbreaker and required a period of mourning. The Australian Open final turned out to be different. By the time it was over, Federer was crying like his name was Stella Dallas, but for me it was less a heartbreaker (there was no good reason for him to have lost this time) than a head-scratcher. And so the veil is staying put — for now. Hopefully nothing will happen later this year to change that.
In happier, non-tennis news…
Cherry Jones digs Golda Meier and uses the word “goyim” in this interview about her work on the new season of 24. I don’t watch 24 (its creator, Joel Surnow, donated $2,000 to Rick Santorum in 2006 and I’d feel dirty doing anything that might help line his pockets), but in the wake of Tammy Lynn Michaels going nuts about Rick Warren and misspelling “yarmulke” all over the place in December, I was dreading the next shout-out a lesbian celebrity gave to the Jews. Thank you, Cherry Jones, for not making strange comments about matzo ball soup. You’re a mensch.
You might think this description of life in a lesbian community sounds like the work of David Sedaris — I know I hoped it was — but alas, it’s a real article from the Times:
BEHIND the gate at Alapine, about five miles from the nearest town in the southern Appalachian mountains near Georgia, the women live in simple houses or double-wide trailers on roads they have named after goddesses, like Diana Drive. They meet for potluck dinners, movie and game nights and “community full moon circles” during which they sing, read poems and share thoughts on topics like “Mercury in retrograde — how is it affecting our communication?”
I would sooner kill myself than live in a community like that (the first time someone asked me how Mercury in retrograde was affecting our communication, I’d snap “Are you fucking kidding me?”), but I guess it takes all kinds.
ESPN2’s live broadcast of the women’s final of the Australian Open doesn’t start until 3:30 a.m. ET, and having just finished listening to the audio commentary Diane Lane and Laura Dern provided for the DVD release of Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains (who knew Diane Lane said “Bless” so much?), I’m running out of things to do in the meantime.
The question, I suppose, is whether it’s worth staying up for the match, which will re-air at a more reasonable time later in the morning. Dinara Safina and Serena Williams are thrilling to watch when they’re in control of their heads, but what if only one of them shows up mentally today? It could make for a terribly boring one-sided match, and who wants to lose sleep to watch one of those — especially with Federer/Nadal coming up tomorrow night. I’m conflicted.
P.S. You know the only thing Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains was missing? Some Times Square-esque lesbian overtones. That the screenplay made that impossible by having all the band mates be related was kind of lame. Aren’t girl bands always better when one or two members give off a queer vibe? That’s the only reason I ever watched a Spice Girls music video: to gauge who fit the bill.
Woody Allen and Tony Roberts never filmed a scene like this.
Shame on you, Allan Stewart Konigsberg, for being so stingy with the Scarlett Johansson/Penélope Cruz scenes in Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Don’t get me wrong, the movie was good, your best since Sweet and Lowdown. It’s just that a lot of us are still upset about Scoop and Cassandra’s Dream, and you could have tried a little harder to make it up to us.
Significant ice accumulation is expected in my neck of the woods tonight, which I’d normally welcome because I love horrible weather*, but I just saw The Ice Storm for the second time a few months ago when it was re-released on DVD and now I’m worried that my parents might be at a key party and my brother might accidentally drug Katie Holmes with sleeping pills intended for someone else.
The Katie Holmes thing is troubling because she’s probably already being drugged by Tom Cruise or someone on his payroll, and if the pills mix and they’re not supposed to she could break out in hives or grow a second head. (On the upside, having a second head might expand her dramatic range.) The key party possibility is especially disconcerting because, c’mon, they’re my parents, and just thinking about that makes me want to throw up more than anyone has ever thrown up in the history of the world. I’m not sure where I’m going with this, I think the moral is to never watch The Ice Storm if you live anywhere that might experience severe winter weather.
*When driving conditions are difficult everyone becomes anxious, and when people are anxious they’re more likely to be terse than chatty. Since I hate when people say things like “Good morning!” and “How are you?”, I wish everyone was terse all the time.
Mia Kirshner (seen here in The Black Dahlia) tearfully asks God, “Why can’t I catch a break?”
Does anyone else find it a bit odd that the L.A. Times is questioning whether killing Jenny Schecter on The L Word will drive viewers away from the show? As much as I hate to defend any of the decisions made by the hackety-hacks (don’t talk back!) who write for The L Word (assuming it isn’t written the way I’ve long suspected: by putting typewriters in front of oversexed zoo animals and handing the resulting drafts to the criminally insane for polishing), aren’t they finally, after five long years of mind-boggling mediocrity, giving the viewers what they want by killing Jenny, one of the most widely loathed central characters in the history of television?
Mind you, I watched Big Love last week instead of the season premiere of The L Word, so I can’t comment on the particulars of this “Oh my God, they killed Jenny! You bastards!” plot development yet. It just seems obvious that the viewers who have faithfully watched (and almost as faithfully complained about—not that it ever stopped them from watching) this train wreck for the last five seasons aren’t tuning in for the storytelling.
Grouse as they might at the prospect of Jenny’s death spurring a season-long game of Clue, these viewers come from hardy stock, having suffered through missteps including but not limited to voyeuristic roommate guy; drag king Ivan; the Max debacle; the Betty invasions; Jenny turning into a self-harming stripper/Talmudic scholar when repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse came to the surface (she wasn’t really a Talmudic scholar, but I still laugh when I think of her breaking out the Hebrew); Dana’s death; Alice fucking a vampire; Tina’s ill-fated return to man-cock; Kit getting pregnant at the age of 87; Shane having sex with every woman she meets (and not seeming to care when it’s hinted that one of them is an arsonist); and freaking Papi.
In other words, the people who watch this show—and I know because, sadly, I’m one of them—have no respect for their own intelligence. They don’t care about decent writing or acting (if they wanted quality actors, they wouldn’t have spent so much time complaining about Mia Kirshner and Marlee Matlin on message boards over the years and they wouldn’t have been so invested in the Tina/Bette pairing), and they only watch The L Word because lesbian characters are almost impossible to find anywhere else.
Hell, the writers could probably kill off several more characters and while viewers would complain, they’d keep tuning in as long as the occasional hot actress appeared and, to borrow a phrase from an SNL sketch, hugged another woman with her legs in friendship. No, the real crime in all of this (if the character is actually dead) might actually be that Jenny wasn’t killed off years ago, which would have served the dual purpose of pleasing viewers and freeing Mia Kirshner to pursue more work with directors like Brian De Palma and Atom Egoyan instead of visionless goofballs like Ilene Chaiken.
Because my nerves are going to need a day to recover from those Safina and Federer matches.
(Yes, this was a paltry post, but I’m still too jittery to write anything else. Give me a few hours to calm down and sleep a little, and then I’ll try to scrounge up something to complain about.)
