GO HEF!: There’s nothing like being smothered in luxury in Vegas. |
An unexpected chamber of sympathy opened in my heart this week for Hugh Hefner. It was the sight of the aged swordsman dancing among hired nymphs on his 81st birthday, on GIRLS NEXT DOOR (E!, Sundays at 10 pm), shifting stiffly but gaily while a galaxy of barely tethered artificial breasts bobbed around him. His long mouth was set in a distant grin, his eyes were down, he appeared to be calling on private reserves of enjoyment. Go Hef! The Hefner entourage — the three girlfriends, the meaty handlers, the creaking brother with his nubile date — were in Vegas, smothered in luxury in a villa at the top of the Fantasy Tower. “All aboard!” said Hef, raising his canvas deck shoes as the rotating bed wheezed through its cycle. The girlfriends preened and fluttered, but Hef’s real “wife” — that is, the women closest to him in spousal tolerance and weathered good humor — is his secretary, Mary. “I felt like a nag yesterday,” she said as they boarded the glass elevator. “I’m glad you brought your jacket.” “Oh, me too,” said the equanimous Hef.
Last Thursday night the Discovery Channel went on a Bruce Parry binge: back-to-back repeats of GOING TRIBAL, the 2006 series in which the amiable former British Royal Marine exposed himself to the initiation rites of various indigenous peoples. And I do mean exposed himself: Thursday’s highlight was an attempted penis inversion performed on Parry by a giggling member of the Kombai tribe of West Papua. His hosts had already forced a six-inch thorn through his septum and hung a garland of pig’s teeth around his neck (“the simple adornments of a Kombai man,” as Parry forgivingly put it), but now they really had to get that penis back inside his body. Etiquette demanded it. The mood altered: in an absinthe-colored jungle spinney, a tribesman knelt to his work, and Parry, wide-eyed with shock, began to mutter and sway. “I’m feeling faint,” he said. ‘They’re trying to wrap it up and stick it back in . . . ooooh — no. No, no, no, no, no . . . ” He had endured ritual scarification by the Suri people of Ethiopia, and eaten rats in the Himalaya with the Adi, but this was too much. Parry staggered sideways and, shielding his partially furled member, lurched off between flat dinosaur leaves. “I nearly fell over. I still can’t quite hear my own voice . . . ” Season 3 will arrive in the fall.
The final episode of ESPN’s THE CONTENDER CHALLENGE aired last Tuesday, and Cornelius “K-9” Bundrage, one of six US boxers selected from the first two seasons of The Contender, levied large taxes of pain upon a gritty, chaotic Scotsman named Colin McNeil. In truth, this was post-reality: no group house dynamics, no whispered enmities or “Who stole my milk?”, just the stink of the ring and the thick, injured Staten Island cadences of commentator Teddy Atlas. K-9, having made a ponderous invasion of the center of the ring, held his guard up rather daintily, offering the bulbs of his gloves in a sort of leather bouquet. Expressions of bemusement and distaste crossed his face as McNeil landed small, squabbling blows. But wallop, wallop, and wallop again — there was no answering back to K-9’s big right hand. “Yer chin’s hanging oot!” screamed McNeil’s cornerman. McNeil burrowed raggedly into K-9’s left armpit; K-9 switched to body shots and, after calmly burying his glove beneath McNeil’s ribcage, saw the Scotsman go down. In the commentator box, the air turned metaphorical: “Colin McNeil just eroded away under the crashing waves of K-9!” said Joe Tessitore.
