Sarah Palin Has Thoughts 'N' Stuff About Umbrellas

You may recall that nearly five years ago (!) I posted the above picture of La Palin, accompanied by a headline which read  What's So Great About Being Nominated for the Vice Presidency? Having Somebody Hold Your Umbrella for You, for One Thing. 

So have Sarah Palin's attitudes about umbrellas changed over the last few years? Evidently so:

Scandalous Hat TrickMr. President, when it rains it pours, but most Americans hold their own umbrellas. Today in... fb.me/zAZryzjj
— Sarah Palin (@SarahPalinUSA) May 17, 2013

Well, duh, if Obama can "evolve" on gay marriage, can't Sarah Palin evolve on umbrella use?

Robert Downey, Jr.: I'm So Green

I'm happy for Robert Downey, Jr.. I'm a fan.

And this is so random, but I do have an amusing story about his not-totally-illustrious past. In 1996-97, during what was surely the low point of my professional career, I worked for a buy-sell-trade used and new clothing store in San Diego near the beach.  The shop attracted quite a cross-section of Pacific Beach types, from college students and tourists to housewives and gutter punks, from cash-poor trust fund babies selling their Gucci bags for beer money to meth heads trying desperately to trade decades-old pleated jeans for spare change.*

It also attracted, for some reason, Robert Downey, Jr., who at the time was also suffering through the nadir of his career. This was when he was constantly in the tabloids and on Entertainment Tonight owing to his enthusiastic relationship with substance abuse, and he had apparently "escaped" to San Diego to get away from the paparazzi and reporters. He must have come into the store a dozen times over the period of two months or so, usually with his skanky girlfriend, a blatant mismatch if I ever saw one, a bony, tattooed and ratty-looking walking billboard for the dangers of opiates and speed.

It's always a bit unnerving to see a celebrity, but even more so to see one during a scandalous period in his or her life. What kind of small talk do you make? "Oh, hi! What have you been up to?" when you were literally just hours earlier hearing the lurid tales of their latest drug busts and court appearances. Awkward.

This wasn't an issue with Mr. Downey, however, because he was simply and utterly delightful, friendly and polite, jokey and fun. He was hardly discreet: he ran around the store looking at everything, talking to everybody. We also liked him because he'd buy every single pair of second-hand expensive designer sunglasses (Gucci, Prada, etc.), items which were often a risky buy for us, and all you'd have to do was hold up a garment and say, "Look at this insane disco shirt," and he'd beam and add it to his pile. And all this was when he was going through utter hell.

And here's another thing that might surprise you: Robert Downey, Jr. is a total goofball, absolutely ridiculous and dorky, completely unselfconscious (at least back then). One day he came in, and we were startled to see that he was dressed head-to-toe in green: green shirt, green shorts, green shoes, and to top it all off, a green vinyl Sanrio bag covered with "Keroppi" the cheerful frog (see illustration above).

Was he high? I'm so bad at telling that, but it didn't seem like he was wasted when he came into the store. He just seemed like an affable, nutty funboy. Over the next couple of years, his comeback came and fits and starts, and he was still in and out of trouble. Some may have wondered why people kept giving him another chance, but I knew why: the guy is just magnetic, and so much fun to be around; who wouldn't want to work with him?

I wonder if he's still like that? I like to think so. I prefer to think that he was weird and fun not because he was on drugs, but because he's just a weird and fun person. So it's been gratifying to see him regain his place on the A-list. I liked him in Tropic Thunder, loved him in Zodiac, and enjoyed the Iron Man movies immensely, even the second one, which would have been unendurable without him in it.

So I guess the moral to this story is... hooray for Robert Downey, Jr.? Or something?

*Side note: oh, wow, I HATED that job. It was my lowest low, the worst retail job ever, mitigated only by the fact that the manager was one of my favorite old high school friends. Anybody reading this who has had to deal with dressing rooms knows that that is the depths of despair. Working at the buying table, where people brought garbage bags of unwashed clothes, hot from the car trunk, in desperate want of cash, was, I believe, my least favorite thing I ever did for a paycheck. Ugh.

Real Food: Tastykake

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Poetry Corner: "Danse Russe" By William Carlos Williams

Yesterday my boss asked if I had ever read William Carlos Williams' poem Danse Russe.* I've never been much of a poetry person, but I've always enjoyed WCW's work, so I took a look:

If when my wife is sleeping
and the baby and Kathleen
are sleeping
and the sun is a flame-white disc
in silken mists
above shining trees,—
if I in my north room
dance naked, grotesquely
before my mirror
waving my shirt round my head
and singing softly to myself:
"I am lonely, lonely.
I was born to be lonely,
I am best so!"
If I admire my arms, my face,
my shoulders, flanks, buttocks
against the yellow drawn shades—

Who shall say I am not
the happy genius of my household?

The poem has an immediate appeal: the spectacle of a grown man prancing around with gleeful abandon, unknown, as the members of his household sleep, unaware of this ridiculous private moment. It struck me as funny and touching, and even a little brave as the writer, a physician, exposes himself to the readers and then haughtily throws it in their faces as he "turns to the camera" and confronts us with the final two lines. Bravo!

But then, like all great poetry, the deceptively simple words started to expand, to telescope out in my mind.  Just because he is a married man, a scholar, a physician, the poet seems to be saying, don't expect him to behave a certain way. But was Williams really only talking about himself? Somehow I doubt it.

The poem made me think of, for instance, the infamous Star Wars Kid (see photo above) twirling around in his reverie, only to be crushed by mockery and ridicule as his private moment was stolen and made humiliatingly public. It also made me think of all those bullied teenagers in high school, hated by their peers for the crime of not fitting into the roles society has assigned them. It made me think of "slut shaming," of fat shaming. It made me think of the casual cruelty which has become so dominant in this post-privacy era.

So is Williams' Danse Russe really about tolerance and the celebration of diversity? Of how narrowly we define others by their apparent roles in society? Maybe it was and maybe it wasn't at the time, but it stands as a useful and beautiful reminder of those subjects today.

*He was reminded of it by our upcoming show on Russian ballet.

Here We Go Again With The Anna Wintour Ambassadorship Rumors

Last December there were a bunch of rumors that Obama was going to give Anna Wiintour a plush reward for her support, namely an ambassadorship to either France or the UK. At the time, I pointed out that these rumors were manifestly ridiculous:

The source of this silly rumor (Why not David Geffen? one wonders) is a majestically cheat-sourced gossip piece from Bloomberg, an item lovingly crafted to dovetail with every possible permutation of conservatives' favorite Democratic Party caricature, that of the elitist limousine liberal:  Jane Fonda, aglitter, emerging from her town car upon arrival at a premier for a multimillion dollar anti-poverty film. This Anna Wintour fake story is just so on the nose, isn't it?

LOL, she "may be" nominated. Other people who "may be" nominated, but also won't be: Guy Fieri, Marilyn Manson, Tom Cruise, Marie Osmond, the guy you used to play Barney the Dinosaur, etc. 

And now it's happening again! This time it's –surprise!– The NY Post touching off the rumor with an item which is even less sourced than the old Bloomberg piece, and we're talking completely, utterly spun out of thin air.

And wouldn't you know it, Al Kamen in the Washington Post, who used to be savvy before he turned 200-years-old, totally fell for it and picked up on the rumor with utter credulity. This offers a great look at how stupid rumors (like our beloved Condi Veep Rumors) gather steam in Washington. Wintour, Kamen says, "had been talked about for either London or Paris early on." Technically this is true: it was talked about "early on" in gossip columns and the Drudge Report, but not by anybody serious and certainly not by the Obama administration. So, in other words, Kamen is using old rumors which turned out to be totally, completely false to lend credibility to the new rumors which also will turn out to be totally false.

By the end of today, these rumors will have jumped from the NY Post's total guess, to the Washington Post's starry-eyed and glamor-starved repeating of the story, to, no doubt, Fox News, where it will metastasize into a tale made-to-order for the conservative outrage machine.

So I'll repeat it once again: don't be ridiculous. Of course Anna Wintour isn't going to be named the next ambassador to Paris, to London, to anywhere. Come on, now!

Surprising 100-Year-Old Drag Queen-Themed Comic Strip By "TAD" Dorgan

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Here's another instant favorite from my stack of over 800 Hearst-brand "TAD" comics clipped from the Memphis News Scimitar: a "Silk Hat Harry's Divorce Suit" from just a few months shy of 100 years ago. Did you know that female impersonators were called "female impersonators" in 1913? Well, now you do.

I'm having a lot of fun scanning and reading all these old comic strips. I've already gotten through all 577 "Indoor Sports" panels, and now I've moved on to the somewhat less rewarding "Silk Hat Harry" (later titled, depending on the paper, "Judge Rummy", "Judge Rummy's Court", or "Old Judge Rumhauser") strips. Tad's philandering dogs make for fun, classic "plop gag" strips, but the slice-of-life "Indoor Sports" panels with their detailed realism and penetrating look at urban manners are much more accomplished and seem more "modern."

More to come!

Tad Dorgan Plays Nice, May 23, 1917

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I've looked at thousands of Tad's "Indoor Sports" cartoons, and as varied as they are, they all have one consistent theme: Everybody is awful, and everybody is laughing behind everybody else's back.

So it should come as no surprise that Tad would get letters like the one reproduced in the above panel:

Dear Tad –

Why don't you draw an Indoor Sport showing the good side of people instead of roasting them for a weakness or two. There are a lot of good people in the world show us some of them occasionally.

Yours truly
a fan for Indoor Sports

And so, as you can see, Tad proceeded to follow his fan's advice, and produced a cartoon where nothing happens and the characters stand around awkwardly, inanely complimenting each other.

I'm going to go ahead and call this the first "anti-gag" cartoon.