Mind you, I’m not bored enough to paint a gigantic penis on the roof of anyone’s house, but this has been a very uneventful day so far and we’re not even through the morning yet…
Cranky Lesbian is a disgruntled homosexual with too much time on her hands. Click for film reviews or to follow on Instagram.
Those of you who remember the way I bitched about Thanksgiving and New Year’s Eve might have expected me to write something dismissive or contemptuous of Valentine’s Day. Dear reader (I love it when columnists write “dear reader;” it always sounds so cloying), I will not. For somewhere today, probably in the Deep South, a redneck hid a cubic zirconia engagement ring in a bucket of KFC Extra Crispy and broke into a nervous sweat, hoping to God (or his favorite NASCAR driver) that his unsuspecting girlfriend wouldn’t accidentally swallow it.
And when that girlfriend found that ring, slathered in grease and rat droppings and whatever else those poor chickens are fried in after they’ve been decapitated by the ever-smiling Colonel, her eyes went as wide as they did that time in her junior year of high school when she peed on an EPT stick and got a false positive — and they filled with tears of joy as she accepted his proposal.
Yes, this is called our most romantic holiday for a reason, and for the sake of romance, which has given us so many great movies and songs, I’m willing to overlook the most preposterous things about Valentine’s Day. Take, for example, its crass commercialism, with all its stupid suggestions that women only care about jewelry and chocolate. I won’t say a word about that.*
Nor will I dwell on the fact that countless couples who are happy tonight will have acrimoniously split by this time next year. After all, that’s hardly unique to Valentine’s Day. (There are people who are single now who weren’t single on Columbus Day.) Instead I will wish you all a Happy Valentine’s Day, one I hope was filled with Preston Sturges films and old Drifters records, or whatever it is you like. (Maybe you’re more the Breaking the Waves and bondage type, which is cool. You might have to be a masochist to visit this site with any regularity.) Oh, and I hope you took care not to pass STDs to anyone, that should only be done at Christmas.
*I’m making a real sacrifice here because there’s a lot I’d like to say about the fact that Nights in Rodanthe, which was easily one of the worst films of 2008, is currently selling at a respectable clip on DVD simply because it was released to coincide with Valentine’s Day. If hell exists, a seat must surely be reserved there for Nicholas Sparks.
Cranky Lesbian is a disgruntled homosexual with too much time on her hands. Click for film reviews or to follow on Instagram.
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.
Cranky Lesbian is a disgruntled homosexual with too much time on her hands. Click for film reviews or to follow on Instagram.
On this day in history three of the great American women of the last hundred years were born: Ethel Merman, Susan Sontag, and yours truly. No need to send me a present, I don’t want anything and hate having to feign enthusiasm when opening gifts anyway. But if you want to bake me a cake, that’s fine, just wash your hands first. And no chocolate cake, please. No ice cream cake, either, because there’s just no reason for that. Oh, and no cheesecake. Cheesecake is fine if you’re on The Golden Girls, but until I’m in my sixties and have my own lanai, I’m staying away from it.
On second thought, let’s nix the cake idea altogether. Cake is overrated, in addition to being the name of a so-so band. The only thing it really has going for it, at least in my book, is its importance to the immortal Hole lyric “I want to be the girl with the most cake.” So let’s let Courtney have her cake, and we can have cookies and toast my parents for not aborting me or putting me up for adoption. That was very generous of them and something I’ll take into consideration when the time comes to choose their nursing home.
In honor of Ethel Merman’s birthday — she’d have turned 101 today — here’s a clip of her singing “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” from the film of the same name. When I was a kid I used to torture my dad by watching it every time it was on AMC, and in retrospect I probably owe him an apology for that. It’s a horrible movie, and 55 years later it’s still impossible to imagine why anyone ever thought it was a good idea to cast Mitzi Gaynor in anything, but I was fascinated by Ethel — and by Marilyn Monroe’s “Heat Wave” performance. Two early signs that I was a lesbian, but it would take a little while longer for me to realize that.
Cranky Lesbian is a disgruntled homosexual with too much time on her hands. Click for film reviews or to follow on Instagram.
Did any of you realize this lame-ass website turned one year old earlier this month? I’d forgotten all about it until I saw an ad for The L Word the other day (its reign of ridiculousness is almost over: an abbreviated final season starts on Sunday) and remembered that I’d started this blog in January of last year with the intention of using it to complain about the new episodes that were about to air.
As it turned out, the fifth season of The L Word was so execrable that it wasn’t worth watching, much less commenting on, and so I found other things to complain about instead — everything from the religious right to Rivers Cuomo’s awful mustache. Now, as I look back on a year of posts (something like 30% of them had to do with my thinking Thandie Newton is attractive, so I’ll try to mix things up a little in 2009 and drool over a wider array of actresses), it occurs to me that as far as personal blogs go, this one hasn’t been very personal at all. With that in mind—and because there’s been nothing going on in the news to talk about here and I don’t want this page gathering dust in the meantime—I’m going to reveal ten things about myself that most of you don’t know.
You might want to prepare yourself before reading these. They’re the kind of explosive, emotionally devastating revelations normally found in a Tennessee Williams or Edward Albee play. You’ve been warned.
1.) Marie was my favorite Lubbock sister on the late, lamented Just the Ten of Us, which seems an unlikely choice until you consider the fact that I’ve always been partial to nerdy characters. That’s why Elizabeth was my favorite Wakefield twin (though I’ve never understood what she saw in Todd, a massive tool), and Mary Anne my favorite member of the Baby-Sitters Club. (Speaking of the BSC, was anyone else annoyed when Kristy dated Bart? That character was so dykey that her last name might as well have been McNichol. Pairing her with a guy made no sense. Same with Stacey having that boyfriend who was always on Fire Island. Why didn’t Claudia ever pull her aside and tell her she was dating a queen?)
2.) Sometimes, just to keep myself amused, I like to pretend I’m a character from an old film noir whose every move is accompanied by preposterously hard-boiled voice-over narration. You know, something like: “I never saw her in the daytime. We seemed to live by night. What was left of the day went away like a pack of cigarettes you smoked. I didn’t know where she lived. I never followed her. All I ever had to go on was a place and time to see her again. I don’t know what we were waiting for. Maybe we thought the world would end.” That’s from Out of the Past, which also has the classic line: “Build my gallows high, baby.” Everyone should say that at least once in his or her life. Next time you’re at the grocery store and the bagger asks paper or plastic, just ignore the question and put on a Robert Mitchum voice and say “Build my gallows high, baby.”
3.) I hate the words “snark” and “dawg,” and love the words “kerfuffle” and “obstreperous.”
4.) For some reason, I don’t know why, I’m fucked up about my pillowcases. I want to sleep on a freshly laundered pillowcase every night, and by now my pillowcases are so sick of being washed that they start sobbing like Meryl Streep in Silkwood (or Amy Poehler in Baby Mama) every time I throw them in the washing machine.
5.) If I were a member of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, I would want to be Black Mamba. Not because she’s the last one standing, but because she has the coolest name.
6.) The single biggest regret of my life is that I wasn’t alive and working as a Hollywood screenwriter in the 1930s, because back then I would’ve maybe, just maybe, had a shot with Greta Garbo. It sounds crazy, I know, but if Mercedes de Acosta and Salka Viertel stood a chance, who’s to say there wouldn’t have been hope for the rest of us as well?
7.) I’m uncoordinated and frequently spill, drop, and walk into things. I also have enough difficulty walking in a straight line that my dad has been known to warn me, “You’d better hope you’re never pulled over on suspicion of drunk driving…”
8.) It is my fervent belief that blue M&Ms are hideously ugly and should never have been introduced into the M&M family.
9.) The most listened to song on my iPod is Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness,” but the song I spend the most time trying not to break into in public is the Fifth Dimension’s cover of “Wedding Bell Blues.”
10.) I’ve had an irrational fear of being buried alive ever since it happened to Carly on Days of Our Lives in the early ’90s. My mom watched that and Another World every afternoon (Linda Dano’s shoulder pads and dramatic rouge-streaked cheekbones still haunt me), and while Marlena’s demonic possession story line never freaked me out, I was so shaken by Carly’s plight that I left a note marked “Read This If I Die” in my top desk drawer instructing my parents to have me cremated. I was ten at the time, and my plans haven’t changed in the intervening years; I still shudder at the thought of Carly being trapped in that coffin every time I hear the word “burial.”
Cranky Lesbian is a disgruntled homosexual with too much time on her hands. Click for film reviews or to follow on Instagram.
And much like Death Cab for Cutie’s navel-gazing, flannel-clad frontman Ben Gibbard, I don’t feel any different. My height, my weight, my sour disposition, they’re all exactly the same now as they were at 11:59 p.m. last night. (And it’s a good thing, too, because I’d hate to have to update my wardrobe or start being pleasant to people just because it’s 2009.)
Or has the new year changed me already? My neighbors added a twist to their boisterous New Year’s Eve revelry last night when a family across the street spent much of the evening encouraging their children to play brass instruments outdoors, for all of us to hear. The results, which it would be generous to say were something less than musical, frequently sounded like the ignoble, pleading moans of an elephant in the throes of death. But rather than take to the porch, megaphone in hand, and bellow something like, “Hey, kid, take that trombone and shove it up your ass,” I chose instead to remain quiet.
This decision was partly influenced by the regrettable fact that I do not own a megaphone, and mostly by my belief that the kids weren’t really at fault; their parents were the ones who, without any regard for the eardrums of the rest of us, allowed this weirdly avant-garde concert to go on (and on, like Celine Dion’s heart or the Energizer Bunny) like that. I suppose I could have changed my message to, “Hey, kid, take that trombone and shove it up your parents’ asses,” but that didn’t have quite the same ring to it.
Cranky Lesbian is a disgruntled homosexual with too much time on her hands. Click for film reviews or to follow on Instagram.
I could take this opportunity to mention that, being a consummate fuddy-duddy, I’ve never understood why people get so excited about ringing in the new year — they do realize that nothing has changed and they’re all still going to die, don’t they? — but instead I’ll just be nice and brief and wish you all a happy New Year and remind you not to drink and drive.
Oh, and none of you plan on wearing ridiculous party hats and holding noisemakers like you’re little kids at a backyard birthday party tonight, do you? You’re adults now; it’s time to worry a little less about being loud and having fun and a little more about nuclear proliferation and global water shortages and Israel’s uncertain future.
My greatest New Year’s Eve to date was spent watching Fatih Akin’s Head On, a Turkish-German movie that makes you want to kill yourself (in the best possible way, of course) for two hours. It leaves you as bruised and battered and emotionally depleted as its lonely, displaced protagonists, and when it’s over you’ll feel more like jamming your hands in your pockets and going for a long walk by yourself than clanging pots and pans and setting off fireworks. I wish my neighbors would watch it tonight; maybe then they wouldn’t be so goddamn annoying at the stroke of midnight.
Cranky Lesbian is a disgruntled homosexual with too much time on her hands. Click for film reviews or to follow on Instagram.
Neither did an evil fetus, if you thought that was a possibility. I’ve just been busy lately, as everyone is this time of year, and unfortunately (or perhaps very fortunately, depending on how you look at it) it has kept me from posting all manner of nonsense here.
You can imagine the mental anguish this caused when, the week before last, I read that Miranda Richardson — who still hasn’t called me, I’m sad to report — apparently expressed her desire to play a Calamity Jane type role in a Western-themed hypothetical fifth season of Blackadder. (If you guessed my response was going to involve some kind of speculation that Richardson might have sung “Secret Love” to an audience of pillows in her bedroom once or twice during her formative years, you know me all too well.)
Or the way my fingers have itched to write, enthusiastically and at great length, horrible things about Mike Huckabee every time he opens his yap about “the gays” and violence and our terrible oppression of Christians and whatnot. (If you guessed my response was going to involve some kind of link to this photo of his family, you — well, you know the rest.) It has been exasperating to me that I haven’t had time for any of that.
Hopefully I’ll be back to making all of you roll your eyes and murmur, “Christ, what an idiot,” within the next few days. Until then, I leave you with one of the greatest clips in the history of movies. Nary a week goes by that I don’t find the opportunity to work “Is this the Cocksucker residence?” or “Listen to your filthy mouth, you fucking whore!” into a conversation. Preferably with my grandma.
Cranky Lesbian is a disgruntled homosexual with too much time on her hands. Click for film reviews or to follow on Instagram.
Well, okay, that’s a bit of a sensationalistic headline, but I wanted to make sure I have your attention. Just moments ago, as I was looking at this, my very own website (which I only peek at through my fingers, like I’m watching a horror movie or a live Liza Minnelli performance), an advertisement caught my eye. It said something like: “Are You a Lesbian? Take This Test and See!”
I had a few minutes to spare, so I thought I’d take the test and find out. Even though I consider myself to be pretty obviously gay, others aren’t always as convinced. My siblings, for example, didn’t believe me when I came out to them. It took my sisters several months to realize I wasn’t kidding. Even after I got my parents to vouch for my gayness (I remember it like it was yesterday, calling them into the room so I could wave towards my sisters and impatiently demand, “Will you tell them I’m gay?”), they regarded me with skepticism, convinced I was secretly dating a male friend.
Cranky Lesbian is a disgruntled homosexual with too much time on her hands. Click for film reviews or to follow on Instagram.
NOTE: This FAQ is from 2008. A newer one can be found here.
The answers are every bit as boring as you ever hoped they’d be. If you think something needs to be added, let me know — but remember, I don’t discuss the time I spent in Vietnam.
Why don’t you accept reader comments?
Sometimes people get a little hot under the collar when you call their favorite celebrities gay or criticize them for being closeted, and I’m not particularly interested in providing them with another platform for their endless bitching — they already make themselves heard all over the Internet, and I kind of wanted a place where I could get away from that. A possible solution would be to use a moderated comment system, but I’m not keen on that idea because who am I to judge what someone should or shouldn’t be allowed to say? I do value your opinions and am happy to address your questions or comments via e-mail (my address is listed in my profile).
How much traffic do you get?
More than an isolated country road and less than a Southern California freeway, if that’s any help.
Are you “The Cranky Lesbian” on other websites?
No, it’s a moniker I only use here. I’m sure there are several of us on the Internet — cranky lesbians are a dime a dozen — but I can only take credit for this blog. (I have to say, I kind of shuddered when I wrote that.)
BTW, since this question apparently derives from there having been a “crankylesbian” on Xanga, I’d like to take this opportunity to clarify the following: I am not unemployed, I do not drink Budweiser, I don’t listen to James Blunt or No Doubt, I still have my gallbladder, and my favorite game is Scrabble. I am a Capricorn, though, so that crankylesbian and I do have something in common.
Any chance of you posting a recent photo?
If you were me and you wrote some of the completely ridiculous things that I write, would you want your image associated with it? You can use your imagination: I’m of the short and slight variety, have dark hair (worn long), hazel eyes, and I have always, from the time I was born, looked sleep-deprived, even when I’m well-rested. Altogether, nothing special. You’d pass me in a bookstore without noticing me, and if you did take notice — if my jacket was on fire or something — you probably wouldn’t say anything because I have an “I hate people and want to be left alone” air about me. It’s one of those things I can’t control, like my devastating charm and rapier wit.
Why are some of your posts so incredibly long?
I wish I knew the answer to that.
Do people really ask why your posts are long?
Only people who know me away from the Internet, but I wanted a fifth question — I don’t like even numbers — and was trying to avoid bringing up the one I’m probably asked most often (which kind of defeats the purpose of having an FAQ, but like Norma Shearer in that Mick LaSalle book, I’m a complicated woman), which is “Are you a writer?”
My inability to compose even the shortest of sentences without breaking every rule of punctuation known to man (and probably a few rules that haven’t been invented yet) should answer that for you. But if it doesn’t: Well, exactly.
Cranky Lesbian is a disgruntled homosexual with too much time on her hands. Click for film reviews or to follow on Instagram.
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