Archive for April 11th, 2010
Julia Sugarbaker Moments
Here in Boystown, we can always count on our guy Sebastian to “have a Julia Sugarbaker moment” whenever some jackass out there crosses the line of decency and needs to be shut up and put in his place. Panda lives for these, and carries around snacks in his pockets on the merest hope one will happen whenever we’re out.
“You just like snacks, admit it,” Joaquin tells him, but Panda insists there’s nothing like watching Sebastian channel Dixie Carter while munching Raisinettes and seeing the look on a drunk idiot’s face when he’s been berated by someone running on all cylinders, cooking with gas.
These events are rare, because Bast is a quiet guy who doesn’t like being bothered any more than he enjoys bothering or getting into it with others. He likes going out, enjoys watching the videos playing overhead or bebopping along to the music. Sometimes, the lot of us have a crossword puzzle with us in a bar and spend the night solving it, in between discussions about whatever’s going on that day in the news (which are the bits that usually make it into our posts). None of us has ever seen him start anything with anybody, but man alive, if a jackass out there brings it, Bast stands up for what’s right and makes sure it’s been BROUGHT.
Most memorably in recent years, this has involved standing up for little Trig Palin whenever guys here in Boystown make fun of him for being special needs, or say vile things about Sarah Palin. None of us take umbrage if someone doesn’t like Palin, just as we don’t come down on anyone who doesn’t like Hillary Clinton. You can dislike anyone you choose. It’s still America. But, if you cross a line and start talking about how much you want to see Palin raped (the way an Australian guy named Simon did at Sidetracks a few months ago) or you laugh hysterically like hyenas ripping apart a baby for being born different, Sebastian’s grey eyes flash red, his spine stiffens, and you find yourself on the receiving end of 100% of his personal attention.
And it kind of looks a lot like the “Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia” speech above.
So, it’s crushing for us that actress Dixie Carter is gone today — but we can assure you Julia Sugarbaker will live on forever in Boystown.
In case you haven’t noticed, sassy, opinionated, strong, determined, and feisty female characters are great inspiration for all of us, and the LGBTQ community in general. The Golden Girls and Designing Women are favorites of Comedy Night at Sidetracks, where clips of Bea Arther, Estelle Getty, and Carter delivering the verbal kung-fu make the audience roar. It is beyond ironic the gay community’s indoctrinated hatred of Republicans keeps it from embracing Sarah Palin, because reading Palin’s Facebook posts, and watching her duck and weave and deliver crushing blows to the Left is honestly, to us, like watching Julia Sugarbaker or our own Sebastian when they are both on fire telling it like it is.
There is, thus, no reason to wonder why we so quickly embraced Palin and why we support her so much in all that she does. She’s one of “us”, with the “us” being a cross-party-lines breed of American who won’t be told to shut up, who will not allow others to be bullied, and who will never, ever be bullied ourselves.
You betcha.
One of us here worked at the Ritz in Cleveland in the mid-90s while in college, and Dixie Carter came to town performing in some play. She stayed for a week or so and was an absolute delight to everyone, even spending some time in the hotel’s lounge singing songs by the fire for other guests, as if she was the lounge singer. Some of these people had no idea who she was, and seeing an empty glass nearby, tossed some dollars in it. Carter thought it was an absolute laugh riot, and after the people left she threw her head back and laughed one of the most marvelous, joyous, and loving-life laughs we’ve ever heard. The woman was an absolute stunner, and though we never saw her, in real life, channel Julia Sugarbaker herself — and, quite the contrary, our encounters with her always cast her as a sexy, vivacious, yet demure Southern gal — she’ll always be a part of us, and Boystown, for creating one of the most memorable characters on TV.
If you’re ever bullied, or you see someone being bullied, you best have that “Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia” speech running loops in your head.
It’s scary to go up to a pack of hyenas and inform them how cruel they are being, to ask them to step it up and be men and stop attacking a little baby, and to chide them for not having a damn clue in Hell why they hate a woman they’ve never met and a baby who never did anything to anyone, but Sebastian did just that, and the looks on those Brendens’ faces were similar to the blond ditz post-Sugarbakering.
Panda might seize these moments for snack time excuses, but we think they do serve a greater purpose — in that, the fewer people out there who allow sexism, misogyny, and cruelty to the defenseless the less boors and jackasses will engage in the behavior, for fear of all the Julia Sugarbakers out there, whatever age, shape, form, or gender they come in.
We don’t share our society’s urge to put actors and actresses up on pedestals, and we don’t take the time to chime in on every death in Hollywood, but Dixie Carter was special. We have a brief personal connection to the actress herself by way of Cleveland, but owe a greater and lasting debt to the character she played on TV because there is just no ignoring the fact she had a tremendous personal influence on us.
Sunday Open Thread: April 11th, 2010
What’s on your minds this Sunday?
What are people talking about in your part of the country?
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We definitely don’t want to sound like Oliver Stone with this, but we can’t help but say how suspicious it is that the pilot flying the plane carrying Poland’s most important leaders ignored air traffic control’s orders and barreled the craft into the ground — despite being specifically told by everyone in the control tower to abort his approach.
If we were Vladimir Putin, and we wanted to severely weaken Poland, we’d have a Russian agent act as the pilot on a flight like this, and deliberately drive the plane into the ground in a kamikazi mission like this. Russians are extremely adroit at making things like this look enough like an accident that people laugh at conspiracy claims…but for some reason, they seem to like having what they did detectable enough so that they can possibly sit back and laugh, shouting “Fooled you!” over endless vodka shots.
Putin did this a few years ago when he had that man poisoned, and instead of using any old poison, he used a rare radioactive isotope that could never be traced back to the former KGB, but was totally KGB style.
Everyone “knows” Putin did this, but no one can prove it and Putin won’t ever come clean.
It’s like when David and Sebastian were together, and David would stupidly cheat on him all the time, making up excuses like “I was in the library”, to explain why he didn’t come straight home after work. ”Really, because you smell like coffee, and the library doesn’t serve coffee.” ”Oh, well, I got a cup of coffee on the way home after I got off the train”. ”Really, where is it?”. ”Uh, I finished it.” ”Really, because you usually take an hour and a half, on average, to drink a hot coffee, and you have never once in my presence bought anything smaller than a medium, so there’s no way you could have finished a scalding cup of coffee from the train station to the apartment, which is a five minute walk”. ”Well, I bought the coffee, but I saw a homeless person who asked me for change, and I gave him the coffee instead”.
David would never just admit he went to either Cariboi or Cruiseaboo (the two Caribou Coffees in Boystown, which are really just gay meet-markets that don’t serve alcohol) with his tattered copy of “Infinite Jest” by David Foster Wallace, which he would pretend to read while sitting by the fire trying to bait old guys into hitting on him by asking him what he was reading and telling him how smart he was to be reading such a big book (1,200 pages).
Sebastian just KNEW what David was up to. All of David’s clothes, and his bag too, smelled like they had been sitting in Cariboi for hours. Infinite Jest was indeed in his bag. David did that thing he does when lying, which is to avoid all eye contact and stare at the floor pretending he is so bored with the conversation he can barely focus.
But, without video surveillance, David would not admit what he was really up to. Even then, if there wasn’t audio, he’d try to narrate the events on screen differently than the way they happened and innocently explain whatever was going on.
He never fooled anyone, but would never own up to what he was up to either. He learned all this from his mother Louella, in the way Vladimir Putin learned all his tricks from his service in the KGB.
So, as we’ve said, and will probably say forever to come, we believe Putin ordered that plane down. We think it’s all part of something big Russia’s up to that involves the Crimea and the Russian naval port that’s about to fall under Ukrainian control soon…before Obama’s term in office is up in 2013…and Putin wants this business taken care of to Russia’s benefit before a stronger American president is elected and sworn-in who won’t let Putin get away with whatever his ultimate endgame is.
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We’re going to run the Polish Embassy in Washington’s contact information for a full week, in each daily Open Thread, because we’d like as many people as possible to send the embassy a postcard expressing your profound sympathy for their loss. It would be a marvelous thing if they received cards with images of every city in America, with at least one person in every state chiming in to tell these people how deeply we regret this tragedy.
Do you think you could not only do this, but maybe ask your friends and relatives to do so as well? It won’t cost you much, but we are certain the embassy will appreciate it.
Please send the embassy a postcard with a condolence message so they know how much Poland is loved in this time of their national grief.
