On Extra Wednesday night, Jenny McCarthy revealed an arcane secret known only to a handful of ancient Mayan priests and Hugh Hefner: "Being good in bed" is good for a relationship. Coming soon, her research on whether having lots of money helps you avoid poverty.
Christmas shopping for guilty consciences
"If I had two wishes I could make this holiday season, the first would be for all the children of the world to join hands and sing in the spirit of harmony and peace," Steve Martin once said on Saturday Night Live. "And the second would be for 30 million dollars a month to be given to me, tax-free, in a Swiss bank account."
It's the central contradiction of the holidays: saving the world vs. looting the malls. The second half of the equation is powerful even to the most humanitarian-minded of us, which is why you're reading a holiday gift guide right now instead of a book by Gandhi or St. Thomas Aquinas.
But these days it's not necessarily an either-or proposition: There are a growing number of gifts that multi-task, serving avarice and humanity at the same time. As Greyston Bakery's Joanne Jordan says of her company's Do-Goodie Brownies: ``With the purchase of one brownie, you can not only gratify a chocoholic who you love, but help out people who really need it, all for one low price.'' Read the rest of my story in Sunday's Miami Herald gift guide.
Shake your Katie, er, booty
Ahhhh, the horrifying power of the Internet in full malicious bloom: Both Gawker and The Huffington Post, among other culprits, have pictures of Katie Couric celebrating her debut as anchor of the CBS Evening News in 2006. Poor Katie -- after a certain number of martinis at CBS parties, Walter Cronkite infamously used to do a striptease he'd memorized from youthfuI evenings he spent in Kansas City burlesque clubs. But nobody was around back then snapping pictures with cell phones.
How Dracula would have run the war on terrorism
As part of the Herald's coverage of the Miami Book Fair, several critics and reporters were asked to do single-shot Q&As with visiting authors. As a television critic, of course, I regard reading as not merely a waste of time but a threat to everything that makes America great. Nonetheless, a job's a job. So I spoke with Sid Jacobson, co-author (with Ernie Colón) of the graphic novel Vlad The Impaler: The Man Who Was Dracula (Hudson Street Press, $25.95).
Q:The 15th-century Wallachian prince Vlad Tepes (Vlad the Impaler), the historical model for Count Dracula, headed what we might call these days a front-line state, wedged between the Muslim Ottoman Empire and the Catholic kingdom of Hungary. He was battered by both sides, but is remembered in Romania (of which Wallachia is now a part) for repelling several Muslim invasions with notorious brutality. One Ottoman army retreated when it ran into a forest of 20,000 Turkish prisoners that Vlad had impaled on massive stakes. And when Ottoman ambassadors refused to take off their hats in Vlad's presence, he had them nailed to their heads. When it comes to the present-day confrontation between the West and the Islamic world, are there any lessons to be drawn from Vlad?
A:Yes, definitely. The big one is that the troubles of Vlad's time can't really be drawn as a strictly split confrontation between Christianity and Islam. Vlad and his family were Christians. But his father gained the throne of Wallachia with the help of the Ottoman Turks, and then he was murdered by Hungarian Christians. Vlad regained the throne with the help of the Turks, and then was deposed by Christians.
Later he did help Hungary against the Muslims. But I really think he just took help from wherever he could get it. And that's important to remember today, that it's not a simple matter of Muslims against Christians. It's a lot more complicated than that.
The brutality, well. Well. I met a couple native-born Romanian women living in America while I was writing the book -- my wife knew them -- and they said, oh, ``Vlad is a big hero in our country, we learn about him in school and he's greatly admired.'' I said, um, what about all those people he impaled? ``Oh, he had to do that,'' they said. ``That's what kept us free and independent.'' I was a little, ummm, surprised. But I guess whatever helps you, you accept, and that's very much like today, too.
I think ABC's got a hit on its hands
Here's a photo from Thursday's rally in Washington to protest the Democratic health care bill. (Pointed out to me by my TV buddy Kate O'Hare, I should add.)
Elvis, Terry and me
Here's a story I wrote for the Herald a couple of years ago at the suggestion of my pal Terry Jackson. Terry would have been 58 today.
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We argued about it for hours, whether it was worth an extra two and a half bucks for the best seats at the Elvis Presley show. "You really think a concert could be worth $15?" my friend Terry Jackson asked skeptically. "Come on, the guy's a legend, " I argued. "Who knows when we'll get a chance to see him again? By then, it might cost $25."
The conversation seems comical now. If we'd had it last year when Barbra Streisand came to town, we would have been arguing about whether to buy the $350 tickets or the $750 tickets, instead of $12.50 and $15.
But it was 1977, when a dollar went a lot further. My apartment in Austin, Texas, rented for less than $200 a month (utilities paid!), gasoline was still 60 cents a gallon and our newspaper salaries barely kept us above eligibility for surplus government cheese. (That part hasn't changed.)
More to the point, Terry and I were Beatles babies. I Want To Hold Your Hand and Sgt. Pepper's rocked our world, not Heartbreak Hotel and Hound Dog. Our interest in Elvis was historical, not hysterical -- we wanted to see the guy who invented rock 'n' roll, or at least rock 'n' roll stardom.
The standoff was eventually broken by our pal Lee Kelly, whose paycheck was bigger and birth certificate slightly more yellowed. Lee, a former religion writer whose imperious manner hinted that she had God's unlisted number and wasn't afraid to use it, was still nursing a grudge against the U.S. Army for drafting Elvis in 1959 and pushing him into the arms of Priscilla. Her dreams of matrimonial bliss, she informed us, were not going to be dashed a second time by our petty concerns about rent money.
"We're getting the best tickets we can, " she informed us, "which means one of you guys is spending the night in line."
The guy who wound up sleeping outside the ticket booth was me. I arrived at 6 p.m. on a frigid winter night, figuring that 14 hours before tickets went on sale would put me near the front of the line. Not even close, and it only got worse when I slept through the start of the sale.
Despite all that, we had good seats near the stage a month later when Elvis performed. The evening didn't start auspiciously. First there was a hopelessly misplaced comedian cracking jokes that he learned at Catskill supper clubs 25 years earlier. Elvis himself arrived an hour late, a bloated caricature of himself; peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches, not Ed Sullivan, were hiding his hips. As he sang, a little man in a tuxedo stood beside him, handing him scarves to mop the sweat from his neck, then toss into the rabid pack of overstuffed trailer-park ladies mobbing the base of the stage.
But when he opened his mouth -- that was something else. After all the years I've been piecing words together, I still can't tell you how his voice swooped and soared, how far it carried us from that creaky old Municipal Auditorium.
"When he first came on stage, I was so grossed out, " remembered Lee, who still lives in Austin, when I called her the other day. "He was fat and sweaty. Then he started singing, and by the time he finished, I was begging you and Terry to take me to his hotel." We did, but in the end she chickened out and didn't go inside. You can take the girl out of the religion beat, but. . . .
She wouldn't get another chance. We saw Elvis on March 28, 1977. Three nights later, closing a show with Can't Help Falling In Love in Alexandria, La., Elvis ad-libbed a new verse: Wise men know/when it's time to go. That began a string of canceled concerts and hospital dryouts that ended with his death five months later. His voice lingers, though, on my stereo; that chilly night in Austin, I became a fan, and his albums fill a shelf of one of my CD racks. And I'm glad we spent the extra $2.50.
Ellie Greenwich (1940-2009)
If you ever watched Shindig, Hullaballoo, or American Bandstand, you've heard dozens of songs written by Ellie Greenwich, who died Wednesday of a heart attack. For that matter, you've heard them on plenty of other TV shows -- not just period pieces like The Wonder Years and American Dreams, but everything from Miami Vice to Ally McBeal to Guiding Light, because they're an integral part of the soundtrack of American life the past 50 years. The camp motorcycle operetta Leader of the Pack, the wall-of-sound teen romances songs Then He Kissed Me and Be My Baby, the love-so-grand-it's-got-me-speaking-in-tongues gibberish of Do Wah Diddy Diddy and Da Doo Ron Ron -- they all came from the pens of Greenwich and her then-husband Jeff Barry. They even wrote the song that became what many critics believe is the greatest rock'n'roll record of all, Tina Turner's thundering River Deep, Mountain High.
Greenwich and Barry were among the so-called Brill Building songwriters who merged lush pop strings with lascivious R&B cadences during the early 1960s. Their songs were delicious confections of teenage romance. Sometimes they ended in giddy happiness (the Dixie Cups' Chapel of Love), sometimes in wistful longing (Lesley Gore's Maybe I Know). Sometimes they were laced with rock'n'roll's first faint echoes of social conscience: The Shangri-La's Leader of the Pack, for all its loopy soap-opera trappings, is a song about young love thwarted by class warfare.
Leader of the Pack and another Greenwich-Barry composition that belatedly became a classic -- Darlene Love's Christmas Baby (Please Come Home) --certainly proved that they could write songs of shattering heartbreak. But they were always at their best singing about how wondrous life is when you'reyoung and in love and you've got a handful of 45s. Today I'm thinking about I Can Hear Music, a Greenwich-Barry tune recorded by both the Ronettes and the Beach Boys:
I can hear music
I can hear music
The sound of the city, baby, seems to disappear
I can hear music
Sweet, sweet music
Whenever you touch me baby
Whenever you're near...
So long, Ellie. We'll leave a radio on.
Biology 101 with Anna Paquin
The fleeting and usually idiotic interviews at Hollywood media parties almost never yield anything amusing, much less useful, but the show-biz TV tabloid Extra managed to draw a great wisecrack from True Blood's Anna Paquin Monday. When Extra reporters asked Paquin about the rumors she's pregnant, Paquin replied: "My uterus is really flattered that everyone cares, but sorry, no occupants." I'd tell you about the tight dress she was wearing, but then you'd have no reason to tune in to Extra Tuesday night. Well, except for the stuffabout Lindsay Lohan and space aliens.
Sizzling fashion. Literally.
Project Runway is taking a new direction this season.
