John and Abigail Adams in Heaven

A brief sketch based on the fact that Rush Limbaugh's new fourth wife is a direct descendent of John and Abigail Adams.

Scene: Heaven.

Characters: John and Abigail Adams

John: Abby, take a look below, our great-great-great granddaughter Kathryn is marrying some fat lub of lard named Rush Limbaugh.

Abigail: Oh my God! Isn't it bad enough I'm going to have to spend eternity with Barbara Bush because we're the only two women who have been both the mother and the wife of an American president. Now we'll have to share space with that slimeball.

John: Evidently he's addicted to cotton.

Abigail: What? How can you be addicted to cotton?

John: They've made it into some kind of drug now and combined it with some product of oxen. It's called oxycotton and this Rush character is hooked on it but good.

Abigail: Well, John, what can we do? One of our own sons was a drunkard and died penniless.

John: yes, but at least he wasn't a nutjob like this loser.

Abigail: What does Kathryn do anyway?

John: She's a party planner. How can you make a living planning parties? I despise political parties. They are the root of all of America's problems. And this is Rush's fourth marriage. Can you believe that?

Abigail: His fourth? Disgraceful. And doesn't he go on and on about the importance of traditional marriage.

John: They even had Elton John, a known homosexual singing at the wedding.

Abigail: Now, John, homosexuals are alright these days. They call them gay. They can even get married now in Massachusetts.

John: Our own home state? Really? Well, we were always more tolerant than most of the other original colonies. Remember our son John Quincy defended those rebelling slaves on the Amistad and they made that movie of it.

Abigail: The one with that sexy Matthew Maconaughnay? Or however he spells his name? His career has just gone downhill lately. I hear they make the newcomers in hell watch Sahara that he was in.

John: It's a different world I guess. But I can't bare the thought of this hypocritical Rush person sharing the Adams section of heaven. Is there a way to keep him out?

Abigail: We always have Barbara Bush sit on him.

"What I Should Have Said Was..."

Earlier this week I saw Ruddigore performed by the New York Gilbert and Sullivan Players (review on Back Stage here) with my friend Lydia. At the curtain call, I told her I had to go to the can and would meet her in the lobby. She thought I said I would meet her outside the theatre. Anyway, we missed each other for a few minutes and she came into the lobby where I was waiting. She told told me while she was waiting outside for me that David Letterman came out with his wife. Lydia didn't say anything to him, their eyes did meet and he realized she recognized him which probably happens all the time. We joked how the wife was forcing him to go to a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta because he humiliated her on national TV by admitting his numerous affairs with staffers.

Anyway I probably wouldn't have said anyting to Dave either or asked for an autograph, but I would have liked to have had the presence of mind to say "Crush Leno when he returns to 11:30." I hope Dave does destory Leno. I can't understand why NBC thinks Leno will get all his viewers back and beat Dave when Leno's 10:00 show has been such an utter and dismal failure. Maybe because fewer people watch late night than prime time and they don't need as many viewers? I never thought Leno was funnier than Dave. Jay just lucked out because Hugh Grant happened to have sex with a prostitute (whatever happened to her, by the way?) and he was booked on Leno's show immediately afterwards. Why did those people stay with Jay? And why did they desert him when he went to prime time? I never watched him and don't think he was ever funny, so it's all a mystery to me. I just hope Leno is crushed when he returns. Maybe he made a pact with the devil like Haiti and is now reaping God's vengeance. (I will have to do a separate blog on the hatefulness of Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh.)

Just missing Letterman reminded me of the times I encountered a celebrity and later thought of the perfect witty thing to say. Like the time Jerry and I were visiting friends in Park Slope and Senator Chuck Schumer was walking towards us. I said "Good evening, Senator." And he said "Hi, fellows." That was pretty good. But I should have said, "When you see the President, please tell him he can have my $300 back if that will help." The then-Republican controlled Congress had just passed a law at W.'s insistence giving everyone a tax refund of said amount which was supposed to stimulate the economy.

Another time even longer ago, I saw MacBeth at the Public Theatre with Alec Baldwin and Angela Bassett. Afterwards I saw Johnny Cochran, OJ Simpson's defense lawyer, leaving the theatre. On the subway ride home, I suddenly realized I could have said "So, do you think you could have gotten Macbeth off?"

Truth and Illusion, George, You Don't Know the Difference.

The title of this blog is a quote from Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and applies to too many people these days. Some mix up the two--truth and illusion--in search of fame. The father of the balloon boy perpetrated a hoax in order to gain publicity and has probably damaged his son's perception of reality in order to get on reality TV.

Another example is Fox News' resident whacko Glenn Beck who can't tell TV images from real life. Or at least his television persona can't--I don't think he believes half of what he says. In a recent segment of his show, he called on America to harken back to the days when we all got along and believed in the same basic principals. To illustrate his point, he showed two TV commercials from the late 60s-early 70s when he was a boy: the Coke ad with Mean Joe Green taking the beverage from a young fan and then rewarding the kid with his sweaty, stinky jersey; then the Kodak commercial with Paul Anka singing "Good morning, yesterday/You wake up and time has slipped away..." while home movies of Christmas and other holidays unspool.

There is something basically screwy about using TV commercials to illustrate an ideal past. They're advertisements used to sell a product. They create an idealized, unreal image in order to get you to associate that warm fuzzy feeling with the product so you're plunk down your two dollars and get the soda or the film (now obsolete) or whatever. Plus, it wasn't that ideal a time anyway.

Beck is about my age, maybe a little younger. I can remember that era and America was torn apart by Vietnam and Watergate. We weren't all holding hands and singing "Kumbaya" (except for my younger brother who liked to croon that tune because he knew it annoyed the hell out of me). Also, blacks, Hispanics, women, gays and other minorities groups weren't exactly dancing a jig over how wonderfully and equally they were treated.

Beck then proceeded to tell a long convoluted metaphor about America being like a teenager who disobeys his parents' curfew and is now at a party where everyone is drunk and he knows he's going to be punished. He'll have to spend the next Saturday night grounded (read be more fiscally responsible). Okay, I'll concede it's a legitimate point, but it's corporate America that's been overspending, not the average citizen whom Beck was addressing. Then he actually began to cry (again!) I can tell he's acting when he tears up like that. He's almost as bad an actor as Spencer on The Hills.

This goon has also compared the Obama administration to Mao's China for advocating volunteerism with the cooperation of Hollywood. So volunteerism is evil all of a sudden? That's a bit of a leap. And here's another one--Obama is giving too much power to these psychos by launching this "war" against Fox. He should just ignore them. By targetting them and freezing them out of certain stories he's driving up their ratings and giving Murdoch and Ailes a legitimate beef.

Late Night Ramblings: From Politics to Continuity on the Golden Girls

I despair of civil discourse in this country. Corporate lobbyists and radical right wingers are encouraging people to riot at town hall meetings--filling their heads with lies about health care reform. ("It will kill your grandpa, and your daughter will be forced to have an abortion.") They are employing the tactics they deplored 40 years ago when kids protested the Vietnam war. Limbaugh compares Obama to Hitler every chance he gets. Olbermann and O'Reilly have broken their truce and are ratcheting up their attacks.

For every piece of good news--Sotomayor is confirmed, the two journalists are released from North Korea thanks to Bill Clinton--there's more bad: health care reform is in danger, crazies are getting into the mainstream media.

It's so much easier to watch Jonny Quest at midnight on Boomerang and the Golden Girls 24-7 on the Hallmark Channel or WE. Did you ever notice Blanche, Dorothy, Rose, and Sophia never mention their children, grandchildren, siblings, etc. except on the episodes where said relatives appeared. It's as if they vanished from mind when they weren't present. Let's see, Blanche had a sister (played by Barbara Babcock and Sheree North on separate episodes) and a gay brother (Monte Markham). But her father Big Daddy (David Wayne and some other guy in another episode) never mentioned his other children when he would visit Blanche. Meanwhile Dorothy also had a sister played by two different actresses (Doris Bielack and Dena Dietrich, Mother Nature on those margarine commercials) and a brother Phil who was into cross-dressing. Yet when Blanche had a tough time dealing with her brother's sexuality, Dorothy never mentioned her experiences with her sibling's transvestitism. Neither did Sophia. Strange.

Jonny Quest is a different story. Jonny's mother is dead before the series starts and she's only mentioned briefly in the first episode. She never comes up again. I guess Dr. Benton Quest is having too much fun with Race Bannon.