Goodnight, Johnny

January 24: Welcome to the most depressing day of the year!

I don’t know why I should be so worked up over the death of Johnny Carson, but I start to tear up every time I think about it. I was not a particular fan of him OR the Tonight Show, though I did watch it every now and again, especially when I was a post-college young adult and it made me feel urbane to do so. I haven’t watched it since Johnny left, however, as the sound of Jay Leno’s voice makes me want to smash his face in.

I DID have a fantasy-life, starting at about age 9 or 10, which involved me being a precocious child star and making requisite appearances on The Tonight Show. My spot always followed either Shelley Winters, Hermoine Gingold, or a cast member from It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. (Only once did I fantasize following Robin Williams, and the subsequent predicament of how to make him keep his mouth shut during my interview).

I suppose I mourn more for what Johnny represented – the last true vestige of the Borscht-Belt entertainment of my parents’ generation, which I always thought I would be quite good at had I been born forty years earlier. I can do a slow burn with the best of them, but there’s not much call for it nowadays.

I also nursed imaginary lives as a singer on Lawrence Welk, a cast member on Hee Haw, and a star of a Beach movie, so you can see my love of cornpone pop culture of the past is longstanding.

In other news….

- My sanity is saved. Liberal talk radio that I can hear at work!

- The emperor with no clothes? YOU be the judge (WARNING: may not be appropriate for the workplace!)

- Jet and I DID make it to see Kate Mulgrew play Katharine Hepburn. Amazing. Not just amazing acting and script, but a remarkable physical and vocal impersonation of Ms. Hepburn at age 31 (Act I) and 76 (Act II) - though Ms. Mulgrew is, in our opinion, far prettier than Hepburn ever was.

I’m sure you’ve heard that Fundamentalist kook James Dobson, who as you recall is of the devil, has come out swinging against beloved star of stage and screen, SpongeBob Squarepants, for being a subversive homosexual.

PLEASE give us some credit. Oh, sure, we radical homosexuals, along with the Jews, have been busy taking over Hollywood for the past fifty years PRECISELY so that we could subversively homosexual characters in children’s programming and recruit children to our deviant lifestyle. But we’re not so foolish as to use such OBVIOUS agents like SpongeBob, Tinky-Winky, Vanity Smurf, the Pink Panther, and Bugs Bunny in a dress. No, our secret weapons are much more insidious.Now that the cat’s out of the bag, I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to give you a sampling of some of our success stories;

Archie
Black Vulcan
Mr. Magoo
Jem
Goofy
Yosemite Sam
Schleprock
Captain Planet
The entire cast of Scooby Doo, including Scrappy

I could literally go on forever, but I don’t want to give away ALL our secrets. If this sort of thing upsets you, I encourage you to drop a line to Dr. Dobson right away and ask him why he’s been so slow on the uptake. Children’s programming is teeming with secret queers!

Before I go, a couple MORE things about Dubya’s prayer meetin’: I’ve had several reports that, indeed, Dubya was NOT prepared to contribute to the collection plate, but that Daddy slipped him a twenty. I can’t vouch for it, as I only saw Dick ante up, but I suppose if it was on TV, then it’s so.

Also, I forgot the excitement witnessed as I was driving home after the service. Lining Massachusetts Avenue were abortion protestors, with giant placards displaying photographs of bloody, dismembered fetuses. So they took their obviously expensive protest materials and set up shop:

a) outside the VATICAN EMBASSY;
b) on a strip of Massachusetts Avenue traveled primarily by BUSLOADS OF REPUBLICANS coming back from the inaugural prayer service

Ummm….isn’t that kind of preaching to the choir?