I was excited when Season Two of "Somebody Somewhere" dropped (HBO Max). But I could barely watch the first two episodes. Season One had been all about alienation, exclusion, and then finding community. It was nominated for a plethora of queer and general television awards and scored 100% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer. As Rebecca Nicolson (Guardian) said, “This is television that asks big questions on the sly.”
In Season One, Sam (Bridget Everett) returns to her small Kansas town to take care of her sister who dies. She is left grappling with her ailing parents and a judgmental married sister. Sam feels alone and alienated until she hooks up with a gay workmate Joel (Jeff Hiller), who introduces her to his choir of freaks, characters, and queers of various ilks. She re-discovers that she can sing and builds a new chosen family with Joel and his friends.
I knew Season Two had lost its way when Sam and Joel attend a singing concert at the middle school, and laugh and snicker at the recital of an awkward adult male. This contradicts everything we have learned about the friends. These two – having been bullied and ridiculed all their lives – turn around and act shitty to another “different” person?
When they get food poisoning and we are treated to the two of them having loud and explosive diarrhea while they talk on the phone to each other, I turned it off.
My conclusion (completely made up out of thin air): The first season was written by saavy cool women. The second season was written by adolescent boys drinking their first six-pack.
Ken Burns, his daughter Sarah Burns, and her husband David McMahon, were not the right people to make the lengthy documentary on Muhammed Ali for PBS. I felt the long series had a subtly hostile tone to Ali and a more explicit hostility to boxing. Despite having the resources to access piles of stunning archival footage and despite having a massive eight hours of airtime, the entire work was devoid of emotion. Muhammed Ali was a passionate, emotional figure, but this was not reflected in the deadpan commentary, not the least by the guy they presented as the biographer of Ali, who seemed barely conscious.
This is not to minimize the insights of the brilliant writer and Ali fan Walter Moseley, the inside view of Ali’s brother Rahman, and the expert blow-by-blow from former boxer (and now actor) Michael Bentt. In fact, if it weren’t for Bentt, the series would have been stumbling around the ring helplessly.
If you have been a fan of Ali, as I have been most of my life, then there isn’t much new in this chronological series – other than wonderful clips and images. I appreciated that Burns allowed the women in Ali’s life to talk about his obsessive cheating and need for conquest after conquest, while they provided a home, a haven, and a family. But I was irritated that Burns acted like he had single-handedly discovered that people get hurt boxing and that Ali could be mean during a fight. Burns brought no real insight into Ali’s relationship to Elijah Muhammed and the Nation of Islam. We see his involvement, we see his betrayal of Malcolm X (which he regretted his whole life), and we see that his connection with the group’s leader was a bit of a roller coaster. But Burns provided no depth, no clarity, no understanding of Ali’s experience of Islam. And then there was the way Burns twisted Ali’s unique charisma into some sort of manipulation, when in fact Muhammed Ali widely inspired love. I adored him myself.
The most profound deficit was a total lack of appreciation of boxing throughout the series. We were shown the worst moments of every fight, the blood, the broken noses, the pain. Thankfully, we were also shown some of the spectacular conditioning and training the pros went through. But the filmmakers seemed to have only the most rudimentary grasp of the degree to which Ali brought rhythm, motion, and dancing to the fight. No one ever moved in the ring the way he did. Before Ali, no one ever imagined the sweet beauty a fighter could bring to such a brutal sport. Before Ali, no other boxer floated like a butterfly.
I grew up following Ali, starting with his 1960 Olympic win when I was 13 and was just becoming aware of the civil rights movement. He was only 18 and won all four of his fights in Rome. Over the years, I kept my eye on him, as if we were growing up together. His later struggle against the war in VietNam meant everything to those of us fighting the cops in the streets to protest that vile war. His ability to connect oppressions – “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong… No Viet Cong ever called me n****r.” – was an education for us, as was his example of civil resistance to the draft. And all the time he was the most fluid, graceful fighter we had ever seen.
My exposure to the fight game began early. My parents were big on sports, almost any sport that involved our hometown Pittsburgh. Once we got a black and white TV, we would eat dinner sitting around a card table watching Studio Wrestling on Saturday nights. It originated out of Pittsburgh, and we were as familiar with Killer Kowalski and his main antagonist local boy Bruno Sammartino as we were with our relatives. My dad knew Referee Izzy Moidel, a local ex-boxer. Each of the wrestlers had a schtick and a script – it was fake fighting. Obviously. But I got a taste for the give and take of the fight from those weekly broadcasts. (And went on to become a Tae Kwon Do master for my first career, but that’s another story.)
When Muhammed Ali turned up, he had his schtick too, but he was for real. Boxing was for real. Ali gave shape and meaning to one-on-one combat, not only by being brilliant in the ring, but also by being brilliant out of it. He harnessed his charisma and his pronouncements to his beliefs and became one of the most influential athletes in history.
The Burns group seemed to think that Ali was “interesting,” a celebrity, entertaining. But I didn’t feel the love. Of course, they pointed out his athletic and political contributions, but I was left wondering if they had any feel for the depth of his influence. They stayed, it felt, on an unexcited, slightly aloof level of exposition, more interested in the count than the fervor: one, two, three – Ali won the heavyweight championship three different times.
There’s been a lot of discussion about why Burns (white/male/straight) has the total indulgence of PBS, which for 40 years has broadcast some 200 hours of his work! Meanwhile, there are generations of filmmakers who can’t get their toe in the door, not the least directors of color and women. A long-term Boston PBS tv host, the racist, reactionary Emily Rooney (yes, the daughter of –nepotism is becoming a theme in this piece), retired from her show after her disgusting dismissal of the very idea that a filmmaker of color could reach the heights of Burns. Over 300 film and TV professionals wrote a complaint letter to PBS asking “How many other ‘independent’ filmmakers have a decades-long exclusive relationship with a publicly-funded entity? Your commitment to diversity at PBS is not borne out by the evidence.” The privileged position of the Burns group impacts everything about their work – and in the case of Muhammed Ali, makes them the wrong group of people for the job.
Want to get an intimate sense of Muhammed Ali? Do yourself a huge favor and watch Billy Crystal’s hilarious, moving 14-minute tribute at Ali’s funeral. I’ve seen it a dozen times and have never failed to tear up. Eight hours of Burns’ presentation and I never felt much other than annoyance.
You have to feel for the election officials, for the TV commentators, and for those of us who want relief. No matter which channel you turn on – cable or broadcast – it is ballot results non-stop. Even when there are no results to report. There are digital boards and graphic displays and electronic gadgets of every sort, and even they are getting tired. When Steve Kornacki’s toys start playing up, then you know they’re being overused.
Even Anderson Cooper can hardly think of another thing to say – but that doesn’t stop the producers from examining each result and reiterating the status (basically unchanged) in a days-long stream of increments. This is not the first election that is stretched out over days. That’s just how it is.
Pity the sleep-deprived voting officials who have to drag their asses out frequently to report on 20 ballots – to a flurry of whirling updated numbers and percentages – and to be unable to predict when they’d actually be done and to defend the beleaguered counters and the election staff and to explain that they’ve never dealt with so many dropped-off or mailed-in votes. For gawd’s sake, we get it.
Meanwhile, you wouldn’t know that day after day we are reporting the highest number of Coronavirus infections than any country at any time. We are breaking these nasty records, just as Europe too is having surges, but there isn’t enough time to report that. Uncounted people are unemployed and hungry and on the verge of eviction. As individuals we can, of course, turn off the TV altogether – but the country is absolutely saturated with these details and it’s hard to demure.
Why can’t we have an hourly update? And go ahead and break into the other programming if there is a definitive result. This approach just raises the national blood pressure and makes us go cross-eyed with the ridiculous nature of American elections. And I know that in my lifetime I will not see the elimination of the foul Electoral “College” so that the candidate with the most votes wins; nor the fair distribution of Senate seats; nor the end of gerrymandering and voter suppression. This 24-7 minutiae just confirms what a screwed-up structure those slave-owning, land-owning, property-protecting, white-male-privilege-defending Founding Fathers bequeathed us.
I watched the entire Democratic National Convention – all four nights, start to finish. Electoral politics has never been my gig but, like Angela Davis says, we all must vote for the Democrats this time. Absolutely must. I voted for Al Gore in 2000, literally 10 days after I returned from 24 years abroad. And was mortified to see the Democrats politely submit to Repug manipulations because they were just too genteel for a street fight. I remember friends from Europe writing to ask if America needed them to send an independent body to manage the USA’s chaotic and inconclusive elections.
I write this piece as someone who identified as a revolutionary as long as that was a relevant title in the USA: the 60s and 70s. Those were the days when one would introduce herself as an anarcho-socialist queer feminist anti-racist class-conscious activist. Now, in my dotage, under a proto-fascist administration during a pandemic, I find myself forced into dependency on an opposition Democratic Party that is Wall Street and Big Pharm funded, and that is impotent and weak, stuck with worn out leadership and resistant to the energy of the women (and men) of color who are unseating their friends. I write this as someone who is going to vote for the Democratic ticket and is going to encourage everyone else to do all we can to get rid of tRump.
Here are my Highlights and Bummers in no particular order
HIGHLIGHT The music was often wonderful. Billy Porter wrapped up the first night in dazzling style. Billie Eilish accompanied the premiere of her new song with an incisive speech. John Legend is, I believe, the Frank Sinatra of our times. His performance of “Glory” with Common was strong and gripping. Prince Royce was spectacular as he strolled that long wall of graffiti. If I have to listen to the national anthem, then at least The Chicks did an interesting version.
BUMMER What don’t the Democrats understand about the separation of Church and State? All four nights we had wrap-up religious benedictions that mentioned Jesus. Jesus! And the Trinity! The final night they threw in a Rabbi and an Imam, but piled on the God Blesses at the end of speeches. Jews were present throughout, but not named. However, Muslims had been absent, except for a couple of seconds of Khizr Khan, the father of a fallen soldier viciously attacked by tRump. The whole emphasis on Biden’s “faith” was, if not pandering to tRump’s audience, massively inappropriate to the ears of this non-Christian.
HIGHLIGHT I was transfixed the second I saw elevator operator Jacquelyn Asbie, who wore her tie proudly as she delivered the first nomination of Joe Biden. Check her out here:
BUMMER I hated the inclusion of anti-choice campaigner John R. Kasich, and Colin Powell, a military general whose public lies to the United Nations in 2003 cost untold lives, both American and Iraqi. All this emphasis on “traditional” Repuglicans was irritating and unlikely to move many people. Absolutely worst of all was the prominent spot given to Michael Bloomberg. This oinker, who failed to buy the presidency, seems unable to recover from his disappointment in not being the arrogant narcissist who gets to replace the present arrogant narcissist.
HIGHLIGHT Bernie’s speech on the first evening was the most practical, policy-based presentation of the Convention, in contrast to the usual patriotic pablum and platitudes.
BUMMER While we were forced to listen to too many Repugs, Julian Castro – the only Latinx candidate in the primaries – seems to be the only former candidate (other than Marianne Williamson who surely has more fans than Kasich) who was not invited to speak. Why? And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had 90 seconds in which to nominate Bernie – and then no other mention. This was a grave mistake. With well over 3 million social media followers, with stunning primary victories over Wall Street-funded establishment Democrats, she is the voice of the present many of us are listening to and the star of the future. Snubbing her was a slap in the face to her many constituencies: progressives, young people, Latinx voters, anti-capitalists, etc.
HIGHLIGHT Michelle and Barak are clearly aghast at what is going on under tRump. I just wish they hadn’t waited till now to be speaking out and getting involved – although some say their timing is just right for strongest impact. I don’t see the point of elegance and restraint in their non-response to all these years of public abuse by tRump.
HIGHLIGHT & BUMMER Three out of four of the moderators hit just the right note, staying in their role as MCs and moving things along: Eva Longoria, Tracee Ellis Ross, and Kerry Washington, all women of color. Only on the final (and arguably most important night) did moderator Julia Louis-Dreyfus display her tin ear to give us a discordant “jokey” tone. It was an odd decision by the convention organizers.
HIGHLIGHT The many clips of everyday people talking about their lives were powerful, not the least Mexican-American Kristin Urquiza, who lost her dad to Covid. She said, “His only preexisting condition was trusting Donald Trump.” Here’s the clip:
There were also stories of Joe Biden’s compassion – many many many stories – including the special speech by 13-year-old Brayden Harrington, a kid who stutters and who was encouraged by Biden, a former stutterer himself.
BUMMER Three themes became excruciatingly repetitive: 1. Biden listens and cares 2. Biden is a man of “faith” 3. Beau Biden was a saint who continues to guide Joe Biden “from above” in all he does and thinks. The ghoulish focus on his dead son, over and over and over and then some more, became fetishistic. I was squirming. Biden’s other two children, themselves forced to speak about Beau when we finally saw them, must feel a certain way.
HIGHLIGHT I had been complaining over the first days about the absence of spokespeople with disabilities – even in the midst of a strong commitment to diverse images – at least in the first days. So I welcomed the piece about Ady Barkan’s struggle for health care around his ALS. It was odd, though, that as a fierce campaigner for Medicare-For-All, that phrase was not included in his presentation.
HIGHLIGHT It is widely agreed that the roll call (on night two) was the most brilliant chunk of the Convention. I was absolutely captivated at seeing so many different kinds of presentations from the States and territories, not the least Native people in their own clothes and settings. Let me finish on a high note by posting it here.
I have been watching almost every Olympic sport, finding that by living in the bubble of 8 to 10 hours a day of winter competitions, I am having my first break in over a year from 8 to 10 hours of tRump. I don’t have the news on; I’m infrequently on Facebook; I’m immersed in bobsleds and ski jumping and luge and even the biathalon. I am certain that were I just a kid, I would want to become a snowboard cross racer or a big air trickster.
But the sport that truly touches my heart is figure skating, most especially ice dance. And I want to talk about a breakthrough that is not getting enough attention. The American Shibutani siblings won a Bronze Medal in a partnership that smashes through the traditional narrative.
Ice dance is all about passion, romance, and the elevation of heterosexuality. This is quite literally the case. When the brother and sister decided that they would commit to partnering each other, many people in the game tried to dissuade them, pointing out how incestuous it might appear. Said Alex after their win, “For all the people who think it’s a deficit to skate as siblings, we’ve made it our strength.”
The Shibutanis have challenged that absolute hetero-love narrative. And in winning Olympic medals, they have shown that passion comes in many forms and that passion for the dance, for the ice, for other kinds of love must be a legitimate story to tell at the highest levels. Alex noted their broader vision for the sport, beyond just the idea of romance. “That’s not fair to ice dance, and probably hurting ice dance’s feelings. Ice dance wants to be whatever it can be.”
I’ve been astonished at how little discussion this amazing achievement has prompted. People in the skating world do not seem to know what to do. The Shibutanis’ free program was magnificent; their connection is unparalleled; but few talked about them at all after the medals were won.
Now it is time to take further steps to enhance ice dance. We need some relief from the hetero-dominance and from the strict man/lead - woman/follow prescription. This applies to the new emphasis on tricks and jumps and tosses – where there could be far more role switching than we now see.
We also need to allow same sex couples to compete and we need to welcome role switches. Right now the International Skating Union (ISU) punishes skaters who participate in the Gay Games by ice dancing with a same-sex partner. (Check out the clip below from the Gay Games.) Worse still, the ISU constitution calls for "one Lady and one Man" in each pair. I was thrilled to see an open discussion in mainstream media and a petition calling for the end of the use of the ridiculous terms “lady” – while men are men. Here you have these courageous ski/snowboard women toughing it out in dangerous, astonishing contests that are called “Ladies” events. They’re dressed in these puffy hardy sports gear, not pearls and twin sweater sets. Enough already. More than enough.
Must we always have to fight inch by inch, over and over, about gender restrictions in each individual sport, in each individual sub-culture? It is all so counter-productive. As we saw in the Shibutanis' extraordinary Olympic performance, breaking the limitations and challenging the assumptions leads to a richer art.
Here is Maia and Alex Shibutani’s Bronze medal-winning dance (although it’s an unsatisfactory video).
And here are Birgit Aust and Bettina Keil skating at the 2010 Gay Games (Cologne). I think their dancing and their outfits are both lovely.
I am returning your fund-raising appeal and this is why.
To be clear, I am a long-time loyal fan. The only monthly donation that I have ever committed to is to Democracy Now! You are number one on my list. I watch Amy on my local town TV community channel every morning at 8:00am.
I’m a 69-year-old life-long activist and writer. I was involved in the civil rights movement from my early teens, and was on the ground floor of both the women’s liberation and of the lesbian liberation movement in Boston. I am committed to justice in the Middle East and am now an activist around the special circumstances of LGBTQ elders, focusing my latest novel on the love affair between an 84-year-old woman who comes out when she falls for a 79-year-old lesbian in senior housing.
What I am NOT is a “family.” So why did you address your fund-raising letter to “The Katz Family”?
I am so friggin’ sick of the Democratic Party (“middle-class families”), of the labor unions (“working families”), and now of you, of all people, using the term “family” when you mean people. My bio family was marked by homophobia and I have almost no contact with them. I have no children. I am not married. I am not a family.
This is an excessively conservative, hetero-normative way to address your fund-raising letter to me. In addition, it is inaccurate.
I will never forget the acting Governor of Massachusetts, an hour after the attack on 9/11, saying on TV that she would protect “Massachusetts families.” It was like a slap in the face to the many, many people who are not part of a family.
And please spare me the “chosen family” option. That’s not what she meant and that’s not what you meant. I have been donating monthly. Not my non-existent family. Your assumption is rude and full of 1950s sentiment. Here, have your appeal back. It was clearly not meant for me.
I finished Rebecca Skloot’s mesmerizing best-selling book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks two days ago, just in time for all the hype surrounding the HBO film of the book being shown last night. Here is imdb.com’s brief summary of the film: “An African-American woman becomes an unwitting pioneer for medical breakthroughs when her cells are used to create the first immortal human cell line in the early 1950s.”
(Practical tip: I don’t get HBO so I called Comcast. I was assured that I could sign up for HBO and cancel after one day and only pay for that day - which I have done.)
The most gripping narrative thread in the book (I listened to the audiobook in my car) is the element of forensic detective work by the tempestuous partnership between the author/narrator and Henrietta Lacks’s daughter Deborah. Together they teach themselves enough cell science to really figure out what happened to Henrietta’s cells. It is that journey of self-education, their exposure of shady ethics and insidious racism among many scientists working with the cells, the role of profit and exploitation in science, and the clarification of obfuscating scientific concepts that make the book so riveting. I thought it was fitting that HBO premiered the film (probably unwittingly) on the same day as the Science March.
It is through that journey that Rebecca and Deborah build an alliance and then a close friendship, which in turn brings Rebecca further into the Lacks family where she can both increase and share her knowledge.
HBO, however, decided to use their distinguished cast – Ophra Winfrey as Deborah, Rose Byrne as Rebecca, Courtney B. Vance, Leslie Uggams, and others in supporting roles – to focus on the human emotions by filling in so many family narrative gaps that the film seems to fictionalize a non-fiction book. Although the acting was excellent across the board, HBO chose to shortchange both the science and some of the context in favor of the drama. They did so in a superficial way, as well.
For example, Deborah’s changing moods, her jubilance and her despair, were functions (according to the book) not only of the tragedies and barriers she experienced in her life, but also of the pills she took when self-medicating. Poverty kept the Lacks family in the wretched category of the medically uninsured – despite the uncounted millions of dollars scientists and industrialists made off Henrietta’s immortal cancer cells. Even Deborah’s grandchild understood the correlation between one drug or another and the resulting mood. Another example is the absence of the back-story of Deborah's troubled brother Zakariyya (played brilliantly by Reg E. Cathey), who was brutally abused as a boy. By airbrushing the story, HBO’s film delivers a somewhat distorted and unclear emotional picture - one in which this Black family appears inexplicably dysfunctional.
My recommendation is that you read the book first – of course that is always my recommendation. Form your own sense of the key relationships and of the central themes. I’d love to hear from others who knew the book before they saw the film. Was this a somewhat missed opportunity for HBO?
I watched the whole thing. And really dug it, although The Wiz Live! is scarcely my usual kind of fare. I’m not big on children’s literature, on musicals, on camp icons. But I am big on watching talent onscreen and there was an abundance of that in this production.
The show opens with Dorothy (Shanice Williams, 18 years old) sulkingly uncooperative with her Aunt Em (Stephanie Mills, the original Broadway Dorothy), with whom she is living after losing her parents. Mills has a beautiful voice and Aunt Em is remarkably loving and patient. Shanice Williams presents Dorothy as an older, up-to-date (plaid, pleated mini-skirt) healthy teenager who seems a bit awkward as she develops into her young adult body. While Williams holds the stage with dynamic maturity and luscious singing, and provides the glue for the three others in her posse, I don’t find her quite as endearing or charismatic as I had hoped.
Her three friends, though, are powerhouses. Elijah Kelley conveys explosive energy as the Scarecrow who has no brain, and his dancing and singing negate the quite creepy make-up he is given. David Alan Grier plays the Lion who, while he may lack courage, certainly doesn’t lack candor. I had no idea Grier was such a proficient singer, and his acting flawlessly conveys lovability. Finally there’s Ne-Yo’s Tin Man. Where there should be a heart, there is fantastic dancing and singing, and a heap of cool. I could not take my eyes off of him.
Good Witch Addaperle is played by the gifted Amber Riley, who was clearly underused in Glee. Here she’s commanding and sweet. Mary J. Blige overacts the Wicked Witch of the West, just as she should. Uzo Aduba (Orange Is The New Black) has too small a part as Glinda (her gown is a knock-out), and sings with a surprisingly lovely, deep voice.
I felt a tinge of disappointment in the performances of Common and Queen Latifah. Common seems uncomfortable trying to butch it up as the Bouncer, and perhaps is unsure of his lines. Queen Latifah, with her rocker white and green pompadour wig, is The Wiz, and what could be better than all the other characters addressing Latifah as Sir? However, there is something distracting about her brilliant costume, which gives her the odd look of pregnancy. Worse, her singing is a bit sketchy. When she is later caught in her con as The Wiz, she is much more appealing in her bathrobe.
I’m not familiar with the original script, but I certainly felt the hand of Harvey Fierstein, who adapted the script. He injects mahhhvellous campy references galore (from the Spice Girls and Eddie Murphy quips to a whole flock of voguers), and gives Dorothy a good deal of power over her own decisions. Most of all, Fierstein allows the characters to cop as much attitude as they can grab.
The Cirque du Soleil adds acrobatic oomph to the various monsters and flying creatures Dorothy encounters. And costume designer Paul Tazewell displays genius throughout, from the Lion’s mane of dreadlocks and furry vest to Common’s jagged security-man garb to the Tin Man’s inflexible patchwork of metal plates. And of course there is the music – much of it triumphant. Out of the many remarkable songs, for me Dorothy and her three friends kill it with “We Got It,” an anthem of solidarity.
Three things bothered me.
1. If you have to have 7 gazillion commercials, then bundle them together and keep the interruptions down to two or three. The continuous copious short commercial breaks ($330,000 to $350,000 for 30 seconds) were disruptive, at best.
2. If you’re going to do a live show, then have a live audience. The lack of an audience was peculiar and counter-productive. There were jokes, there were crescendos, but there was no corresponding reaction, making for a discordant flow.
3. Am I the only one who felt that the several LED screens that provided the sketch-pad for production designer Derek McLane’s backdrops were oddly present, occasionally affecting my ability to suspend belief?
Overall, considering that I have no special feeling for either kiddy lit or musicals, this production won my attention and my admiration. It is sensational, spirited eye candy that melds music with a great story, along with the thrill of seeing favorite stars in new kinds of roles. Well done!
There is something wrong with me. I can’t get over class rage towards individuals. About twenty years ago my friend Nicola – a working class English girl – told me that seething all the time only hurts me; it doesn’t affect anyone of privilege.
I have kept a series of little TVs in the corner of the counter in my tiny kitchen. When one TV dies, I usually find another for free as they’re the old-fashioned tube TVs and no one wants them. The picture on my present TV, given to me by someone who wanted it out of their basement, has started to shiver.
Someone we’ll call XY advertised a 14” set on Craigslist. He lives just a few miles from me. XY was asking $30 and when he admitted that the TV was from 2001 - i.e. a couple years past its bar mitzvah, I asked if he was flexible about the price. He gave an emphatic no. I went to see it today. He and his wife – we’ll call her XX – live in a disconcertingly fancy gigantic apartment with vaulted ceilings about four stories high. The flat is one of a number constructed inside an old stone church as part of the gentrification of the area. XX told me their bedroom was upstairs along with several other rooms – “two or three,” she said, “I’m not sure. We don’t really use them.”
XY was transferred here to Boston by his company – one of the biggest corporations in the world.
I just could not bring myself to give him $30, even though I need the TV. I should have said that. Instead I said I didn’t realize it had such a huge rear-end (the truth) and I didn’t think it would fit my tiny kitchen counter (not the truth). I should have said, “You are disgusting for charging for something that only a person without many resources would need.”
His wife tried to be helpful. “Why don’t you just buy an iPad and use that? If you don’t have much counter-space you could set it up on a little table.”
If I could afford an iPad for my kitchen, would I be scrambling around Craigslist, asshole? I didn’t say. Instead I said, “There’s no room for a table in my kitchen.”
All that happened to these wealthy people was that they wasted 15 minutes. I’m sitting with a stomach full of acid and a heart full of resentment, and I know that Nicola was right.
I’ve gotten cozy with a TV channel with the rather obnoxious name of Cozi TV because each day they broadcast re-runs of the award-winning show “Marcus Welby, M.D.,” perhaps my favorite TV show of all-time. I often tape it for later and find it a perfect background when I’m on the computer doing Facebook or surfing. It’s both soothing and interesting, as cozy things often are.
It has been running 169 episodes from 1969-76, years when I had a black and white television in various studenty apartments. Back then it tackled all the issues of the day – most of them unfortunately as relevant today. Marcus Welby (Robert Young – formerly the dad in Father Knows Best) was a man of principle who would fight for what was right. The stories were often courageous. There was the woman whose fiancé dumped her after a diagnosis of leprosy and the woman surgeon who broke that glass ceiling but whose alcoholism brought her back down. Welby battled prejudice against people with mental health issues and might have had the first show about early onset dementia. He reassured men embarrassed by sexual problems. And he defended immigrants and spoke out against racism.
As I watch these shows today I’m pretty amazed at how right-on their approach was. Nothing’s perfect, though. The writers twice screwed up when it came to queer issues – in one episode conflating homosexuality and pedophilia – leading to one of the first successful protest campaigns by the gay liberation movement against a media representation. On the whole, though, I give a big a shout-out to the three writers of the series Max Hodge, Jerome Ross and Jerry de Bono (who was "survived by his partner, Cliff Berry").
Welby’s younger protégé Dr. Steven Kiley was played by James Brolin, the actor who, twenty years later, went on to marry Barbra Streisand. He was the tall, dark, handsome hip young thing – riding around on his motorcycle and all – but politically he was more conservative and personally more stilted than Welby. He was supposed to bring in some sex appeal pizazz, but frankly I was more into nurse Consuelo Lopez (Elena Verdugo). She was the third key character: she ran the office with competence and wit, using her prodigious people skills in her role as the practice’s anchor. We never did find out if she and Welby were getting it on.
No wonder there were enough patients to fill up all those episodes. Not only did Welby et al make house calls, they seemed to work with just one patient at a time. They visited at their patient’s home, hung out all night long if someone was having a spell, and drove hither and yon to find a missing parent or take a weepy sick person to a nostalgic location. They intervened when a spouse had it all wrong or a child was being misunderstood, and helped figure out how to get the costs covered when the patient was poor. Welby, Kiley, and Lopez all lived together – until Kiley got married in the final season – which made it convenient for the patients who were always turning up on their doorstep – one patient per episode.
Cozi TV knows who is watching Marcus Welby M.D. Or at least their sponsors do. It’s all life insurance, stair lifts, arthritis drugs, and reverse mortgages. It’s a channel specializing in black and white re-runs, but the others hold no appeal for me: Maverick, Lassie, The Real McCoys. I love Welby because I can watch it while folding the laundry or cutting up a fruit salad. I also love it because it’s a stroll back in time to the GP medical practice of this mushy, involved, emotional team. I’m old enough to remember family doctors and their house calls when I was a sick kid. Dr. Welby wasn’t my doctor, but a Jewish version of him was. Oh yeah, that reminds me: one Welby episode even deals with anti-Semitism. He really embraced us all.
When I lived in London I had a Eurovision party every year. For you Americans who don’t know, the Eurovision Song Contest is a cheesy pop music competition that takes up a lot of oxygen each year. Its most famous winners were Abba in 1974 (for Sweden). Their “Waterloo” really was the quintessential Eurovision finger-snapper. Julio Iglesias (Spain) and Celine Dion (Switzerland) were the other two names that are still remembered. Last night I was able to follow it via livestream.
This year featured a mighty cold-war battle between good and evil and I was cheering for the good. Austria’s entry was Conchita Wurst, a queer bearded beauty in a ball gown. She sang “Rise Like a Phoenix” with some strong and appealing pipes and, on every level, gave the best performance. She also represented the forces of progress, saying after accepting the trophy, “I felt like tonight Europe showed that we are a community of respect and tolerance.” People around the world knitted and wore beards in solidarity, including the official representative from Austria. Here’s Conchita's performance.
And here’s an interview with her in which she discusses her sense of identification – not as a trans person, as many assumed, but as a drag artist:
Hungary’s singer, András Kállay-Saunders, on the other hand, wrote a song about child abuse and domestic violence, with a couple of dancers acting out the violence behind him as he sang. Eurovision was a truly unsettling setting for such a thing. It should have come with a trigger warning for all the women trying to have their usual Eurovision night of silly ironic cheer. It was disturbing. I’ll skip the video, even though he meant well.
The evil I referred to earlier was Russia. Every time their strange act got some points (the voting is largely political and each country awards the big points to their patrons and allies), there was an uncharacteristic but massive booing from the crowd. Russia was represented by twin sisters Anastasia and Maria Tolmachevy, former Junior Eurovision winners. At 17, one can’t really blame them for the bizarre staging. They started out attached by pony-tail hairpieces, then sprung free only to land on either side of a see-saw. Pathetic, yes. But clearly the audience wasn’t pissed off at them, but rather at Putin. Eurovision is Europe’s campest annual event and there were apparently a lot of gay audience members feeling out of sorts with Russia. Here's their video, but I wouldn't bother.
Finally, in order not to end on a downer, my honorable mention goes to Denmark’s Basim, whose danceable “Cliché Love Song” was all very Bruno Mars, without Bruno or his choreography.
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