Hooray For Hollywood
The Snark Remark of the Week comes from Paul Kelso in the British Guardian Weekly, regarding soon-to-be La-La-landers Becks and Posh, a.k.a. soccer star David Beckham and his wife Victoria, the erstwhile “Posh Spice.” (Beckham is moving from Real Madrid, where he has played for the last three years and had some problems learning to speak Spanish, to join the LA Galaxy in Major League Soccer.)
While Hollywood is going topsy-turvy over a metrosexual about whom they know nothing, and his career-deflated spouse, the Brits are getting their last boot in. Said Kelso of Becks, “He is about to become possibly the highest-paid sportsman in the US — a remarkable statistic, given that he will ply his trade in a minority sport played primarily by teenage girls.” Oooh, mee-oww!
Kelso follows this by writing: “For this most Hollywood of footballers, Los Angeles is the logical place to end up. The weather is lovely, the fans will adore him, the beach is a free-kick away, the shopping is terrific, he and his wife, Victoria, already speak the language, and the kids can keep up their Spanish with the pool guy.”
Kudos & Congrats . . .
. . . to Eugene Lee, Vo Dilunduh and world-class designer, who was the subject of a large and glowing January 21 profile in the Boston Sunday Globe. There’s a great photograph of Gene in full “Mad Professor” mode, with hair every which way. Since Eugene could care less if his hair is perfectly coiffed, this is a very cool picture.
On the other hand, your superior correspondents came across a reference in an Associated Press story that suggested a truly frightening visual. The story was about Prince Charles and wife Camilla’s visit to New York City. They went to Harlem, not to have lunch with Bill Clinton, or to try and score some fentanyl-laced smack — but to “stop at a charter school where they answered children’s questions and the prince took some time to shoot hoops with the basketball team.”
You can pretty much bet that the prince’s people kept all cameras out of the area as the visual imagery of Jug Ears “shooting hoops” with the homeys could cause a server meltdown at YouTube.
So Long, Barbaro, Gump, And Renay
Casa Diablo is saddened by the demise of Barbaro, the Kentucky Derby winning colt who was horribly injured two weeks later in the Preakness. The love and affection that Barbaro inspired in so many was remarkable.
Interestingly, we found an unusual connection between Barbaro and Gump Worsley, the Hall of Fame goalie for a string of great Montreal Canadiens squads, who passed away on Saturday in Beloeil, Quebec.
Veteran hockey fans will recall the Gumpster as a crew-cutted tough guy, one of the last goalies to play without a face mask. This meant that he was either an unparalleled icon of “Mr. Man-hood” or a complete lunatic. The jury might still be out on that except for this excerpt from the New York Times obit: “In the seventh and deciding game of the 1965 playoffs, he had a knee injury so bad that he did not appear able to play. He was injected with a horse serum never before used on a human and went on to shut out the Chicago Blackhawks, a team that included Bobby Hull and Stan Mikita.”
Meanwhile, it’s not every stripper, sexploitation film star, and mob moll who gets a one-third page obit in the Times, but Liz Renay elevated slutdom to a whole new level. She did (as they say) a three-year bid for perjury, for lying about how her boyfriend, a legendary West Coast mobster, laundered money through her checking account.
Renay also co-starred with Divine in an early John Waters film (Desperate Living) in which her character, Muffy St. Jacques, kills her babysitter by suffocating her in a bowl of dog food. She got busted for streaking in L.A., “acted” in Blackenstein (1973), wrote a memoir, entitled My First 2000 Men, and, we can safely assume, was never invited to the White House (unless Clinton slipped her in the back door).
