Storming The Stage With Sylvia Fowler

Sylvia Fowler: motormouth and rubberneck.

“Take a good grip on yourself; you are going to DIE! Stephen Haines is stepping out on Mary!”  With this juicy salvo, Rosalind Russell spits out the verbal spark that ignited “The Women.”  It was one of the highest grossing films of 1939, a whip-smart comedy lampooning the intrigues of the privileged class, featuring a veritable army of female talent.  Much has been said about Rosalind Russell’s performance in “The Women”, and rightfully so: its brilliance is undeniable.  Russell’s portrayal of ruthless gossip Sylvia Fowler is a mad gallop across the gamut of what’s funny:   lethal one liners executed with rat-a-tat-tat rapidity, coupled with ferocious physical comedy, all in service of an unforgettably daffy character who easily carries away the entire film.  Sylvia Fowler, with her eager ears and unstoppable mouth, would be the last person anyone would want to see sitting across from them at a gathering of friends.  Yet the crazed charisma of Russell’s performance transforms this ruthless scandalmonger into a lovable lunatic.  She simply cannot help herself.  Her condition, as summed up by her best friend Edith Potter (Phylis Povah) is congenital and chronic: “It’s just her tough luck that she wasn’t born deaf and dumb.”  We love her best of all the women in the film, even those whose lives she destroys.

Jive Turkey Thanksgiving

We’re having Thanksgiving dinner today, but it’s not Thanksgiving. This is a totally bogus holiday, culminating in the partaking of the jive turkey.   Today we celebrate the Totally Bogus in all its many vestiges, from the deviously “counterfeit”  to the flat-out “wiggity-wiggity-whack.”   Jive Turkey Thanksgiving is so Totally Bogus, it’s the Courtney Love of holidays: a holiday that stands before us in tattered evening wear,  confronting us with face smeared out of focus with streaked makeup and multiple plastic surgeries, a holiday that declaims from the top of its rattling lungs: “I fake it so real I am beyond fake.”   Jive Turkey Thanksgiving is, in fact, the only real way to celebrate Thanksgiving, a holiday that is in itself notoriously jive-ass from top to bottom.

The Lost Genius Of Robin Gibb

This is a story about alienation and beauty.  It is a story of thoughtless cruelty and heartbreak.  It’s the story of tempestuous youth in 1979.  It’s set on a school bus, mostly, and it has actual villains.  It is at its heart a story that is laughably sad, and sadly laughable.  (We are talking about puberty, after all.)  But it’s mostly about the voice of Bee Gee Robin Gibb: its haunting desolation, its exquisite ache, the hope despite hopelessness it conveyed.  It’s about how I came to find solace within the voice of Robin Gibb when I was young and the inspiring legacy he left behind.   I hope to do it justice.

The Misery of Dark Shadows

Last week, I watched Tim Burton take one of my favorite TV shows, “Dark Shadows”, crack it open, gut it of nearly all of its original charms, stuff it with seventies jokes and sex until it was as bloated and corrupt as Last Gasp Elvis, and then he sent it roaring across the silver screen like the leisure-suited horror show monster it was—killing beloved characters, and leaving the original narrative landscape a charred wasteland.  I was horrified.  I was angry.  I was in misery: misery with a capital “M”.  That’s right: I was in Misery, specifically the part where Annie Wilkes, outraged by the shabby script of a cliffhanger, totally flips out right there in the theatre.  As Burton puppeteered the mouth of  Barnabus Collins to recite “I’m a picker/I’m a grinner/I’m a lover/And I’m a sinner”, I was right there with Annie, yelling “Barnabus Collins never quoted a cockadoodie Steve Miller song!!!”

Key Lime Cove Chronicles: Part Three

I’m taking you with me.

Toukey’s Big Deluge: The Reckoning Prelude: Paradise Lost Propers

Sundown.  Expressway.  The sky is a murky post-pink peach.  Indigo clouds smear up from the western horizon, appearing very much like the monsters that awaited us at the edge of a world we once considered flat,  bringing nighttime in the hems of their gowns.  In the darkness below, snaking chains of alternating red and white lights coil around the I-94/134 cloverleaf .  They slither  this way and that across an unseen landscape.  From the lower deck of a preposterous aquatic amusement contraption, a bottom-heavy Eve regards this rush hour serpent and the darkness outside the cathedral-sized water park windows through her water-speckled Buddy Holly glasses.