Cultural Reference Points Will Set You Free

A large retailer recently faced controversy when it included among its online catalog what was supposed to be a motivational poster featuring German wording over a gate that translates to "Work Will Set You Free" ("Arbeit marcht frei"). The problem was that the gate was the entrance to Auschwitz, the notorious German Nazi concentration camp where hundreds of thousands of Jews were exterminated during World War II. 

It's an inexcusable mistake, but my guess is that it happened because most people today under the age of 40 lack a sense of cultural reference points -- they have no sense of, or interest in, events that have shaped the world they live in. (Which is ironic, considering the vast encyclopedia of information instantly available at their fingertips.) 

So probably, some young graphic designer was asked to create a motivational poster about the uplifting benefits of hard work. Then he or she googled related images, saw a photo of the gate that was unrelated to any content linking it to the source of one of history's most shocking atrocities, and that was that. Then someone else at the retail site with an equally serious deficiency in cultural history thought nothing about adding it to their online shelves. It's more than just a matter of forgetting about the Holocaust -- it's having no sense of important events taking place in the relatively recent past. 

Which brings me to an item the fashion retailer Zara recently pulled from its shelves. It's difficult to believe that the design of this children's shirt didn't set off alarm bells for its resemblance to the striped uniforms issued at concentration camps. Yes, the stripes are horizontal rather than vertical and yes, it says "Sheriff" inside the yellow six-pointed star -- but when did an old West sheriff ever wear a striped jersey? It's another flagrant example of chillingly obtuse historical ignorance -- and a cautionary tale about the importance of staying aware of the past so as not to repeat it.  

Actually, God Loves Fags

The world is full of graphic examples of how religious extremism foments violence and unrest, but one of the most puzzling is the Westboro Baptist Church.

The Topeka, Kansas congregation, if you can call its 40 ragtag members that, announced most recently that it planned to stage a protest at comedian Robin Williams' funeral here in San Francisco. But what exactly is there to protest about the unexpected death of one of the most gentle, beloved and generous entertainers of the last thirty-five years?

The church, which is in no way affiliated with the actual Baptist Church, also doesn't bother to affiliate itself with reason. Since 1991, they've protested the funerals of author Randy Shilts, who documented the early days of the AIDS crisis in And the Band Played On, along with those of soldiers who were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and even celebrated the violent deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans on 9/11. They even threatened to protest at the funerals of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings and the victims of the Boston Marathon bombings.

Church members, most of whom are extended family members of its now -- thankfully -- dead leader Fred Phelps, post hate videos on Youtube and Vines on Twitter with the sort of smirking confidence exhibited only by people with unshakably misguided world views of superiority. The Washington Post pointed out that when they tweeted a threat to protest Steve Jobs' funeral in 2011, they did it using one of his iPhones. Who do they think isn't going to hell?

I can only think that they choose to interpret these tragic events as targeted harbingers of God's wrath, striking down sinners or smoting those who don't live to the now-irrelevant letter of the ancient biblical texts. But it's still hard to believe that anyone, for whatever wrong-headed reason, would deliberately add to the sadness and despair of families in mourning. Shouldn't you go to hell for that?

Leak No More

With the aging of the baby boomer population, I suppose it was inevitable. But it wasn't until someone actually brought the product to my attention that I learned there was enough of a public outcry against anal leakage to market a tampon to staunch the problem. There's even a handy acronym to discreetly refer to the condition: ABL, or Accidental Bowel Leakage. As opposed to Deliberate Bowel Leakage. 

I love the predictable track the ad agency followed to address this issue: 1) assign the product a gentle, nature-inspired name like Butterfly. 2) Show not-too-decrepit middle-aged people so pleased to be vouching for the product that they're actually smiling about it, and 3) house the whole messaging effort in an inoffensive, carefully-worded "everybody does it eventually" format. 

I'm reminded of a campaign I worked on years ago for a potato chip that contained a chemical called Olestra. While the chip promised a lower level of cholesterol, Olestra was a synthetic that the human body just couldn't retain. I remember writing the fine print for the packaging that warned the consumer of inevitable "anal leakage." If only we'd been able to sell the chips in a value bundle that included Butterfly butt plugs. 

Anybody Got a Match?

The death, yesterday, of the legendary actress Lauren Bacall was overshadowed by Robin Williams' suicide and the national dialog it triggered about depression and the innate, embedded sadness of comic performers. 

But Bacall's seven-decade career warranted more attention than she's getting. It's hard to think of an actress from Hollywood's golden age who remains with us -- only Olivia de Havilland, 98 and residing in Paris, comes immediately to mind, and she represents an even earlier era. 

Permanently linked in the public's mind with her first husband, Humphrey Bogart, she spent the next 57 years forging a career that leveraged her coolness and slim sartorial style in equal measures until it evolved into worldly old broad roles that included playing Barbra Streisand's mother in The Mirror Has Two Faces. Along the way she made a lot of memorable films, including How to Marry A Millionaire with Marilyn Monroe and The Shootist, in a subdued performance that managed to humanize late-career John Wayne. Eventually she mastered the stage and won two Tonys. 

I met her just once, in London, in 1979. She was appearing at Harrods department store to sign copies of her autobiography By Myself. I was a 22-year-old exchange student in love with the movies, and as I approached the store entrance I saw her through a storefront window that faced out onto the Brompton Road. She'd been placed at an elegant desk with her back to the street, and I was fascinated by how expertly coiffed she was, her shoulder-length hair a shiny study of blond and honey-colored hues.  

When the line snaking through the store finally brought me to the great lady herself, I told her that I couldn't actually afford her book. She laughed that deep, throaty laugh and said how poor she and her mother had been before she'd been discovered by Howard Hawks' wife. She signed some pamphlet or scrap of paper for me, asked where I was from in the states, and then was on to the next person. 

I long ago lost whatever it was she autographed, but I never forgot that voice. 

Have an Ego, Mr. Goldstone

It's a foregone conclusion that actors have massive egos. And if you've been famous for more than five decades, like Barbra Streisand, it's been a long time indeed since someone tried to steer you away from a vanity project that hinges on improbable casting. 

But the news that Babs is finally set to star in and direct a new version of Gypsy, the biopic treatment of stripper Gypsy Rose Lee's life and rise to fame, strikes me as a bit desperate. Streisand is 72, after all, and at the start of the story the part requires her to play the mother of a child under the age of ten. Rosalind Russell was about 55 when she croaked and brayed her way through the Mama Rose songbook in the 1962 version, but she only got that part because she was married to the producer. At least Bette Midler was a more reasonable 48 in the 1993 version. 

Granted, Streisand did pull off playing a young girl pretending to be a young male Talmudic student in Yentl, 31 years ago at the age of 41. And I'm pretty sure her first Instagram post this week, showing her looking, er, refreshed, was intended to address critics like me who might call her out for being too long in the tooth for the part. I don't doubt for a minute that she can still sing the hell out of the role. But should she? 

Size Doesn't Matter

There's no question that the story of King Kong is enduring. That's why it's been remade twice since the 1933 original (including the 1976 version that has Kong tumbling off the World Trade Center, making it a bit hard to watch today), and spawned dozens of cultural spin-offs. 

But in every version, there's always been the uncomfortable question -- the big gorilla in the room, if you will -- sure, Kong loves Ann Darrow (well-played in the latest version by Naomi Watts). But what exactly is he supposed to do with her?

The Peter Jackson reimagining, which I watched again late one night recently, tries to answer that question. When Kong breaks out of his chains at the theater and lopes through Manhattan smashing cabs and movie marquees, he's looking for Ann, grabbing every blond he sees and tossing them away in disgust when he sees they're imposters. Suddenly his obsession appears to him on the street, walking toward him through the chaos of crowds fleeing in horror. 

While every frame in the film has a painterly sheen and the CGI recreation of Depression-era New York is exquisitely detailed, the reunion of the two star-crossed "lovers" is moving. And to celebrate it, Kong and his girl enjoy a charming skating session on a frozen pond in Central Park, twirling and spinning on the ice before their revelry is shattered by cruel gunfire. 

So now we know: love conquers all, and size doesn't matter. 

Word wizards

If there's a lesson to be learned here, it's to never second-guess one's creative instincts. 

About a six weeks ago, I was reviewing a campaign one of my copywriters had written for a summer Outdoor Living promotion. It featured patio furniture meant to transform the customer's outdoor spaces into pleasant warm-weather entertainment areas.

"Can't we have a little more fun with this headline?" I asked, looking at the rather flat line she'd written.

"The truth is these chairs are not all that special," she answered. "We don't want to over-promise anything."

Believing that retail should always be aspirational, I thought for a second. "I know, what if we did a short, punchy headline that was a play on words. Something like 'Lounge wizards.' Because they're simple, affordable ways of making your patio or deck into a nice place to hang out."

"I don't know," she said, "Will people get that it's a play on 'lounge lizards'? Maybe that's too archaic a term."

If there's a way to get me to back down on a creative concept, it's to call out that my personal demographic may not be in touch with a modern mindset. I let her run with the more literal headline she'd chosen and forgot about it until I was having lunch at a Japanese noodle house in Vancouver about a week later. I opened the local newspaper to the Home Decorating section and saw this headline anchoring the section on patio furniture.

Lesson learned: listen to your instincts. 

Dodging a Solar Bullet

In just the last 20 or so years, we've become so technology-dependent that it's hard to imagine life without WiFi hot spots, GPS and smartphones that shape and inform our every action and interaction. What would happen if someone pulled the plug?

In July 2012, we almost got a chance to find out. A massive coronal ejection surged up from the surface of the sun, shooting a pulse of plasma straight into earth's path. Luckily, it was an indirect hit, because it would have knocked our entire satellite grid out of commission for months or years and fried every transformer on that side of the earth. In a world where people can't disengage from their phones long enough to eat dinner or drive to the corner, it would have been the equivalent of an electronics nuclear winter. 

We only have to look to the Carrington Event, a solar storm in 1859 that may not even have been as strong, to see how close we came to disaster. Throughout North America and Europe telegraphs, the nascent telecommunications system of the day, failed spectacularly, in some cases giving operators severe electric shocks and throwing sparks from pylons. Aurorae lit skies the world over to such an extent that gold miners in the Rockies, believing it was dawn, started making breakfast in the middle of the night. People in the northeastern U.S. were said to read newspapers by the Northern Lights, which dropped as far south as Hawaii and Cuba. Our atmosphere was so charged that even telegraphs that were unplugged from their power source continued to send and receive messages.

It's hard to even imagine the chaos and disruption an event of this magnitude inflict on our modern world. But why am I a little disappointed that it didn't actually happen?

Some Contents May Have Shifted During Flight and May Contain Sharks

In the eighth season of the acclaimed comedy series Seinfeld, Julia Louis-Dreyfus' Elaine Benes tries to convince a date to see a frothy, light-weight comedy called Sack Lunch instead of the oppressively pretentious The English Patient. "So do you think they got shrunk down, or is it just a giant sack?" she asks. The date marches off to see the more acclaimed film, and Elaine enjoys a good low-brow movie wallow by herself. 

There's something wonderful about fully surrendering to a low-concept film, as I was thinking last night when I saw a trailer for Let's Be Cops. Yes, I definitely would have spent a little more effort on that title. And while on the surface it seems as mouth-breathing and misogynistic as a lot of the usual summer fare aimed at the all-powerful teenaged boy demographic, it really is a fun idea -- who wouldn't want the power and excitement that comes with a police uniform and a black and white cruiser?

To pile on the irony, the film's trailer ran during the premier of the brilliantly titled Sharknado 2: The Second One -- in case you didn't get that it's a sequel, they told you twice. It's a cheesy follow-up to last year's SyFy hit, and it serves up an entire gallery of guest stars: Kelly Osborne as a violet-haired flight attendant whose head is consumed by a shark in mid-flight; Judd Hirsch, who starred on the series Taxi 35 years ago, driving a taxi through a shark storm; and Robert Hayes, who played the reluctant pilot who saves the day in the '80s comedy Airplane!, to name just a few. The premise has something to do with climate change prompting an increase in tornadoes; why they suck up multitudes of sharks and deposit them in mid-town Manhattan is never quite clear. 

In a world of 24-hour news feeds and a constant barrage of reality pinging at us from all our devices, I think we could all benefit from kicking off our shoes and relaxing with a nice, empty Sack Lunch or Sharknado. Personally, I think the family was shrunk down to sack lunch size. 

Please Don't Fling Your Soiled Panties

Several years ago I described how the Charmin toilet tissue brand had veered from its decades-long track of discreet, jovial advertising to feature a marketing campaign that essentially answered, quite unnecessarily, the question of whether a bear shits in the woods. 

Now Kotex has launched a campaign that features the dissatisfied women of the world flinging their dirty undergarments into the street -- panties that have been soiled by substandard feminine hygiene products. 

It's hard to see how this creative direction ever got to see the light of day. Historically, products that dealt with bodily functions involving human waste or sexual activity focused on the high-level benefits to the customer without wallowing in the sordid facts. If the softness of a toilet paper brand was elevated as its key feature, you didn't have to elaborate where that softness would be applied. If a feminine hygiene product or baby diaper was said to be highly absorbent, there was no need to elaborate as to what substances needed to be absorbed. 

I give a solid "fail" to any effort that not only endorses littering our streets and byways with menstrual-encrusted undergarments but showcases women wearing them on their heads. Kotex, you can do better than this. 

The Chimp Returns

It's been almost exactly two years since I abandoned this blog. At the time, I felt I was somehow running out of subjects, or more likely I was experiencing a feeling of being overwhelmed by a world that evoked so much conflicting outrage and heartbreak.  

If anything, our tiny blue planet -- made so much more fragile by recent pronouncements that there are an almost infinite number of earthlike planets in our galaxy alone -- is seething with conflict and trauma like never before. Undeniable climate change, Ebola outbreaks, the missile strike and loss of another Malaysian jetliner, the Gaza warfare, hobby lobby dramas, and so much more, all promise an endless stream of human-driven conflict and content to react to and write about. 

And, after some interesting but, in the end, unsatisfactory forays into social media (one Twitter account as myself, and one masked within an unidentifiable persona), I realize that long-form writing is what I enjoy most. It doesn't matter how many followers I have, only that I have this free-form forum to espouse about out culture and its mystifying insistence on goose-stepping our species ever closer to oblivion. 

Please watch this space for more entries. 

Smoke & Mirrors

I just don't get Cindy Sherman.

For over 30 years, this woman has been producing conceptual photographs that feature herself elaborately costumed and made up to simulate what seem to be female archetypes of everything from brittle socialites to lovelorn spinsters. I've yet to hear a satisfactory explanation of her artistic intent, even from her; she says herself that hopefully her oeuvre is "seen as feminist work, or feminist-advised," but "I'm not going to go around espousing theoretical bullshit about feminist stuff."

So what is it, then? Always using herself as her canvas, Sherman takes great pains to recreate the hairstyle and costume of whichever character she is trying to inhabit. But nearly every one has a stark, incongruous feature, like Kabuki white-face or heavy dabs of pancake, that calls it out as garish and inauthentic. Is that the point? It seems a thin artistic gimmick, yet it's one that garnered her $3.89 million in 2011 for one print called Untitled #96 (they're all called Untitled Something, as though she's as hesitant to make a clear statement about each work as she is to accurately describe the movement responsible for her tremendous success).

Here's how the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where her latest exhibit opens this weekend, sums up her work: One of the most influential artists of our time, Cindy Sherman creates provocative artworks that explore wide-ranging issues of identity and representation. "Artworks?"

The actress and impresario Tracey Ullman has been seamlessly unspooling and inhabiting similar characters for the past two decades and making all of them -- chain-smoking Hollywood hairdressers, trailer trash grandmothers, Jewish princesses from New Jersey -- walk, talk and entertain in a way that's impressive, moving and hilarious. That's a talent I can get behind.

Courting Disaster

Now that my civic duty has ended, I can finally make some observations about the experience.

• Television has permanently affected how judges behave. They all try to be funny, or dramatic, or, in the case of mine, Susan Dey.
• It's really quite a feat, on a morning when the temperature is a perfect 66 degrees, to maintain the climate of a public building at an equatorial level that replicates mid-day in Borneo. You could grow orchids in that court house, and train monkeys to harvest them.
• The defense attorney in this case did his client a real disservice. Elderly and theatrical, he affected a sort of Southern esquire Inherit the Wind persona of upswept grey hair and tightly-knotted bow tie. He was ill-prepared and relied on courtroom theatrics and smoke screens, and when he started the trial with a dissertation on the defendant's premature birth 32 years ago (quickly objected to by the prosecutor and sustained by the judge) we knew it was going to be a long haul to liberty. There were sidebars a-plenty.
• Some scientists are astute observers and some make you question their empirical wisdom. The victim in this case was a famous UCSF pathologist who was punched in the face for her iPhone. Her testimony was crisp, exact and clarifying. Her colleague who witnessed the incident had no sense of time (an act that must have taken five seconds was described as a minute-and-a-half long; the attacker, who was 6'2", was described as 5'2"). Let's find out what he's researching and assign that work to someone else before he blows up the city.
• Today's young prosecutors have terrific PowerPoint skills.
• The same terrifying, baggy-pantsed thug who would pop a cap in yo' ass on the street transforms into a charming gentleman once he enters the portals of Superior Court. "Excuse me, sir," one said to me, his gold dental grill flashing in the low-wattage institutional lighting as we snaked torward the metal detectors. "I believe you dropped this laundry ticket."
• When the victim is a woman, the defense will excuse all the female jurors they can because they're more likely to sympathize with a woman being attacked on the street.

So, that's over for another year. But since attorneys love nothing more than to populate their jury boxes with former Catholic altar boys like me, however lapsed, I'm sure I'll serve again.

The Banana Handler

I've spent the last week on jury duty, deep in the dusty bowels of San Francisco Superior Court. Since I'm not at liberty to discuss the details of this ongoing criminal case, let me just say that attorneys, during the lengthy selection process, won't pass up a chance to fill their jury boxes with former Catholic altar boys like me, however lapsed. That, and the fact that a number of jury candidates suddenly professed a simultaneous disdain for a basic tenet of the U.S. Constitution, is how I became Juror #3.

One incident that remains with me, though, is the type of observation that obsesses me for days whenever I reluctantly succumb to spending time in close contact my fellow humans -- or worse, a jury of my peers. One afternoon in the Jury Assembly Room, a vast hall where jurors can waste hours waiting to be called to duty or dismissed, I was tapping away at my laptop, trying from afar to keep my staff from rapidly going rogue, when I heard someone sit down at the next table. It was another member of my jury, a young man with the sun-touched look of a landscaper but who, much to my surprise when we were asked to state our professions, turns out to somehow be in finance. I watched him remove his lunch from his knapsack, each piece in a specially-designed, store-bought container: sandwich holder, drink receptacle, etc. Then he pulled out a curved, oblong yellow plastic object that reminded me of the gimmicky telephones that were produced in the 1980s, the ones that resembled hamburgers or Garfield the Cat. He set it down on the table, snapped it open, and removed a banana from it.

Isn't the whole point of a banana that it's its own container? And what happens if your banana is more curved than your banana holder? Your Honor, I object!

Yabba Dabba Don't

Occasionally I'll stumble across a detail about some celebrity that is so odd it overtakes just about everything else I think I know about that person.

Case in point: Dick Clark's Flintstone-inspired home, currently on the market for $3.5 million. Perched amid 22 choice hilltop acres in Malibu with views of the Channel Islands, the one-story house features heavy, cavelike molded floors, ceilings and walls. Just looking at the photographs, the oppressive impact of all that weighty material feels like a spelunking expedition gone horribly wrong. What could have inspired "America's Oldest Teenager," now a stroke-ridden 82, to design his retreat as a suburban Lascaux?

Well, if childhood memory serves me, Clark once appeared as an animated version of himself on an episode of the Flintstones series in the early 1960s. It was a common trope of the show, which really was a prime time Stone Age interpretation of Jackie Gleason's The Honeymooners, to feature real-life guest stars. A Bedrock version of, say, Tony Curtis would do a walk-on in a ragged pelt, his name adjusted slightly to something like "Stoney Curtis," and mild mayhem would ensue.

Perhaps Clark was so taken with his prehistoric incarnation he created a retreat as an homage. Somehow, though, I predict that this will be just another expensive California tear-down.

Eat. Prey. Lurch.

Can a TV series about a relentless plague of the undead really show us what it means to be alive?

AMC's The Walking Dead, which resumed last night after a gripping mid-season finale, paints a bleak picture of a post-apocalyptic America. Wind-swept cities stand empty, except for hordes of flesh-hungry corpses stalking the few remaining humans. The fact that a rotting zombie in search of a snack can leap out of the shadows at any time lends more than a little tension to the story, but the real conflict is between the survivors. Like any global disaster that strips society of behavior-restraining conventions like law enforcement and the PTA, the dwindling cast of characters is pared down to archetypes. There's the redneck hillbilly who's discovered his internal nugget of humanity, the abused wife learning to thrive in a landscape devoid of the oppression she's always known, the older man who's lost everyone he's loved and pines for a younger woman who will never have him, the computer nerd falling in love with the spirited daughter of the farmer who gives them shelter. And at the core of the story are a good cop and a bad cop -- former best friends -- vying for dominance over the survivors and the woman they both love.

Based on the hard-hitting graphic novel series, TWD doesn't pull any punches. Just when our band of mismatched survivors finally manages to relax (note to self: a fish-fry barbecue may not be the best way to hide from zombies that can smell flesh cooking from miles away) the "walkers" descend to feed on our most beloved characters. I like how the plotline has even given us a functional explanation for the zombie plague itself, as a doomed scientist at Atlanta's Center for Disease Control demonstrated that the virus kills its human host but then rescuscitates its brain stem, resulting in a perpetually famished, shambling ghoul. Much of the first half of season two focused on the search for a little girl named Sofia, and instead of being delivered back to her mother the way viewers expected she was the last to emerge from the zombie barn hissing and moaning and, like all the others, hungry for human flesh.

I'll take my Jane Austen zombie-free, please, but serve up a compelling adult drama that showcases the human condition against the backdrop of annihilation and I'll keep tuning in.

Too Late To Say: Houston, We Have a Problem

It's amazing how often this scenario plays itself out: we watch a self-destructive celebrity like Amy Winehouse stumble around Camden Town for years in her scuffed ballet flats and then express surprise and a kind of collective grief when the toll finally claims her amazing talent and her life. It's happened again and again, with celebrities as diverse in their contributions and levels of talent as Michael Jackson and Anna Nicole Smith, and we keep expecting it to happen to tragedies-in-waiting like Lindsay Lohan but will somehow be taken aback when it actually transpires.


Whitney Houston has been skating on this thin ice for what, 15 years? Her career path took an unshakeable detour when she met the rapper Bobby Brown. She went from a clean-cut gospel-trained singer with a five-octave range to a raspy, drug-addled shadow of herself, a reality TV parody in a track suit shrieking obscenities at the ever-present camera. Just yesterday she was photographed emerging from a club looking confused and combative, with something that appeared to be blood running down her leg. 


Like many performers who die too young, she left one last performance as her final legacy: the role of the stage mother in the upcoming film version of Sparkle. Let's hope it does her memory justice as a natural actress and an immeasurable vocal talent. And in honor of her once-astonishing ability, let's try to remember her when she was fresh, lovely and maybe even a little unsure of herself -- but unmistakably impressive -- from videos that feature her alongside several dancers who soon succumbed to the AIDS pandemic. 

The Brown Elixer

Since I've completely given up on the San Francisco Chronicle, which has pared itself down like a late-season Biggest Loser contestant to an x-ray of its former self, on weekends I usually pick up the Sunday New York Times.

My favorite part is stopping by the Starbuck's in the upscale shopping center near my house. I make my way through the WiFi hoboes and screaming, over-entitled urban urchins to the counter, where I slap the thick bale of newsprint onto the counter. "Is that all?" the barrista will ask, after inquiring unconvincingly about my health and happiness level.

"Yes," I respond loudly. "I don't drink coffee." The response from the assembled caffein addicts is similar to when a living human stumbles into the zombie barn on The Walking Dead.

A study last week reported that the average American adult spends $1,096 a year on coffee, but I'm willing to believe that even in these troubled times it's much more than that. At just three visits to Starbuck's or Peet's a day at $4.00 a shot, that's $4,380.  Is it not strange and noteworthy that at 11 p.m. in any city or town you'll find people carting around 16-ounce cartons of coffee? People talk about how meth has ruined small town America but what about its watery brown cousin, the antsy hopped-up one that stains its users' teeth, fouls their breath and drains their already limited disposable income?

God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen In Peace

When I set out for a brief walk on that unseasonably warm Thursday afternoon just before Christmas, I had no idea I was about to discover a disturbing new trend in yard decorations.

I strolled through a small park just down the street from my office building in San Bruno, a suburb of San Francisco, and found myself in a middle-class neighborhood of single-family homes. On nearly every lawn lay the crumpled forms of Santas, snowmen, teddy bears and elves. It took me a while to realize that these sad tableaux, which resembled some holiday version of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre that had mown down the season's favorite icons with machine gun fire, were simply inflatable decorations, their compressors shut off during the daylight hours.

The company I work for does a healthy business in what it calls inflatable decor items, selling giant blow-up haunted houses in October and giant Easter Bunnies in April. But it had never occurred to me before that for most of the day these pressurized plastic figures would have so opposite an effect, lying unfestively together on the grass like victims of the Manson family.

Springtime for Transvestites

Many years ago there was a highly improbable television sitcom called Bosom Buddies. The premise was that two best friends vie for the same job at an advertising agency and decide, because women are paid half as much, they'll try to pass as women and split the position and its salary. 

Like the much more entertaining Some Like It Hot, you never really bought the idea of the cross-dressing actors as women and had to suspend disbelief that the female co-stars didn't see the five o'clock shadows and Adam's apples under the pancake makeup. But the show had an appealing young cast and ran long enough to launch Tom Hanks' career, despite the fact that Peter Scolari was the better actor. While his former bosom buddy went on to a prestigious film career that included numerous Oscar wins, Scolari stumbled along in sitcom runs like Newhart and currently hawks an erectile dysfunction medication on radio spots. The poor guy was even cast as the dad in the short-lived television version of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.


As if to prove that network television executives are never too ashamed to resuscitate a tired idea that was lucky to succeed the first time around, ABC has green-lighted a sitcom called Work It. So low-brow and mouth-breathing an effort it makes Bosom Buddies seem like an Ingmar Bergman film, this reboot of the cross-dressing buddies in the workplace concept has angered transgender groups and makes me wonder if there isn't some bottom-line Springtime for Hitler principle at play here, where the producers make a fortune if they attempt a series that is certain to fail. The promo poster says it all, I guess, but can the gay porno version be far behind?