actress julia sweeney as "pat"

theres been a lot of talk lately both here and elsewhere about what i describe as gender-bending.  the trans- are doing it.  the queer-identified are doing it.  the GLBs might be doing it, and the non-gender-conforming straights too. 

but no matter how gender-bendy any of us first-world privileged people think we are being (i make more money than my spouse, and i am a hardass!  give me a prize!) one fact remains, and i think feminists everywhere need to take a hard look at it.  women in other parts of the world, in *most* parts of the world in fact, and in the rural and urban-poor first-world too, are being oppressed based on not their gender, but their born-sex.  how can you tell?  they have a gaggle of kids following behind them calling them mommy, thats how.  either that, or they are being injured or killed in childbirth.  because world-wide, womens female gender-role as heterosexual wives and mothers are as rigorously enforced upon them as is their born-sex.  they dont have a choice.  and to whatever extent *we* have a choice there, we are privileged.

you may or may not remember the character “pat” from saturday night live, but i am certain that i am dating myself by using the reference.  heres what wiki has to say:

Pat (whose full name was revealed on an episode of “Saturday Night Live” as Pat O’Neil Riley) was a somewhat overweight character with short, curly black hair who wore glasses and a blue western-style shirt with tan slacks. The character spoke in a nasally voice that sometimes squeaked. Pat apparently suffered from very sweaty palms, and constantly wiped them on his/her clothing while making a strange whimpering sound, further adding to the character’s unappealing quality. Sweeney wore no makeup and colored her lips beige to further hide any sex identity clues.

The sketches always involved the celebrity guest hosts of the show playing everyday people who encounter Pat and then go to great lengths to discover Pat’s true gender without being so rude as to actually ask (since Pat can be short for either “Patrick”, a traditionally male name, or “Patricia”, a traditionally female name). Pat remained completely oblivious, endlessly frustrating the questioners with answers that leave the character’s sex vague. The character often made statements that seemed to reveal a sex, only to then immediately confuse things again. (A typical example might be, “Sorry if I’m a little grumpy, I have really bad cramps… I rode my bike over here, and my calf muscles are KILLING me!”) In another sketch, Pat tells Kevin Nealon that his/her name is Pat Riley, same as the coach of the Lakers, “except there’s a big difference between him and me. I’m not the coach of a professional basketball team.” Other gags included Pat’s attempts at humor, which served to confuse everyone further, such as when asked what Pat is short for, the character would reply, Pat is short for “P-a-a-a-a-a-t!”, or when asked in an application for sex, Pat responded “Please!”. Another joke was when Pat was asked the full name, to which the character responded that Pat almost never referred to the character’s self by the middle name, as it was embarrassing, to which an eager audience was filled in that it was “O’Neill”, again continuing the joke.

The character was popular enough to spawn a feature length 1994 film called It’s Pat (from the lyrics of the character’s theme song on Saturday Night Live). In the film, Pat meets Chris, another sexually ambiguous character played by Dave Foley. (On SNL, Chris had been played by Dana Carvey.) They quickly fall in love and propose to each other at the exact same time. Before the wedding, however, Chris breaks up with Pat on account of Pat’s arrogance and the fact that Pat cannot decide on a direction in life.

emphases mine.

now, its telling, isnt it, that these are the cues that most americans believe signal gender: arrogance and being unable to find a direction in life are typically male qualities (or rather, a decent reason to dump a man who isnt measuring up as a partner).  as is proposing marriage.  hair, clothing and voice are visual and auditory cues to a persons sex, and first-names are meant to help us identify a persons sex, not their gender, before that person ever enters the room (as in a resume).  but these things are trite, and trivial.  when the number-one signifier world-wide of whether someone is female is whether she is being dominated by male relatives, and made to be a wife and mother, without anyone ever asking her whether thats what she wants.

i have linked to this documentary before, but i think its message bears repeating, particularly in light of the recent conversations on this blog about transactivism, and sex-positive transwomen and what they have added and taken away from feminist discourse relatively recently.  which is the recognition and discussion about how sex-female is an oppressed class, around the world.

this gender-bendy shit is a first-world invention as it relates to women: whether they are sexually attracted to other women, or want to or actually do wear pants and a fedora is completely irrelevant in most places, because born-women are dominated and enslaved, sexually, socially, economically, and in every other way from the time they are born to the time they die. 

which often happens to coincide directly with their attempting to give birth, when they arent physically able to do so, having been married off at young ages and impregnated, often by men who for all appearances are serial child-rapists and end up serially murdering multiple child-brides in this fashion, moving from one to the next after their young “wives” are permanently disfigured or die as a result or prolonged and obstructed labor.  the video is embedded below, its about an hour long but its well worth watching, as it highlights the problem of child-brides and obstetric fistula in ethiopia.

again, i think its the radfems who are taking these things to heart, and considering womens lives, lived-experience and oppression around the world.  its the radfems who are doing the heavy lifting in this regard, when everyone else just wants to talk about gender.  fuck gender.  its really not my concern, and it shouldnt become the main concern of any feminist, or critical thinker, anywhere.

Quentin Tarantino may be many things — perverted, profane, whipsmart, cocky, a little too enamored with his own cleverness — but subtle he is not. He’s not even in the ballpark. Matter of fact, if that ballpark blew up, he wouldn’t hear the sound for another three days. Nah, Tarantino’s a guts-glory-chicks-and-explosions kind of director, and that imagination of his? In the name of Le Royale with Cheese does it dream up some wild-n-twisted trips.

Mark ”Pulp Fiction” down as one of the wildest. Every nanosecond of this humdinger’s 154 minutes contains something warped/crazy/effortlessly cool to behold: philosophical discussions about foot massages, the nature of miracles and a gold watche that has been places no watch should go; murders both coolly calculated and comically accidental; a frightful drug overdose; kinky sex (think S&M with an Alabama drawl and a gimp); and, last but not least, a sinfully delicious $5 milkshake. Random as this catalogue seems, Tarantino’s film is far more scattershot. The action doesn’t adhere to a simple timeline; instead, there are three stories that run parallel, then smash together, then diverge only to reconnect in ways that boggle the mind upon repeat viewings. “Pulp Fiction” is a genius noir/gangster combo that keeps us guessing. Guess long enough, though, and patterns start to emerge from the madness.

Sort of. Since Tarantino makes it nearly impossible to understand how these stories pool into a cohesive ending, let’s tackle one beast at a time. First, there’s “Vincent Vega and Marcellus Wallace’s Wife,” the tale of L.A. hitmen Vince (John Travolta) and Jules (a perfectly cast Samuel L. Jackson) heading to do a job ordered by their loose-cannon boss Marsellus (Ving Rhames). Since Marsellus recently threw a guy out a high-rise window for giving his wife Mia (Uma Thurman) a foot massage, Vince has the jitters about taking her out on the town. His plan is simple: “Chew my food with my mouth closed, laugh at her fucking jokes, and that’s it.” Of course, trouble has a tendency to follow Vince, so things don’t go that smoothly.

Smoothness doesn’t much like Butch (Bruce Willis) either, which we discover in ”The Gold Watch.” A talented boxer with a sweetly innocent girlfriend (Maria de Medeiros), Butch shovels some dirt on his own grave by winning the fight Marsellus paid him to throw. But his neat double-cross turns messy through a series of freak coincidences, the most interesting involving two pawn shop owners who plumb forgot to pack their manners (not to mention their morality) when they left the Deep South. ”The Gold Watch” leads into “The Bonnie Situation,” a conclusion of sorts where Tarantino himself shows up as Jimmie Dimmick, a pal of Jules who begrudgingly agrees to help him clean up an accidental hit (“my gun went off! I don’t know why!” insists the a brain matter-spattered Vance) with help from Winston Wolf (Harvey Keitel). What’s on Wolfe’s business card we can’t be sure, since the terse mystery man only offers “I solve problems” as his job description.

It’s offhand comments like these that demonstrate one of Tarantino’s greatest strengths: revealing character traits with one or two stray lines of dialogue. He’s a student of human nature, and he knows the ways people fill time by arguing over whether foot massages are sensual or wondering what cheeseburgers are called in France (see above). And yet everything these characters say tells us something about themselves or the story. Christopher Walken, in his lone scene, delivers a howling-good speech that seems like comic relief, but the subject — the gold watch — comes back into play. Jules spouts a nonsensical version of Ezekiel 25:17, but it reveals his own moral code. Thurman, who finds jumpy loneliness in Mia, parlays a terrible joke about tomatoes into a real connection with Vince. Haphazard though they seem, these lines are the threads that knit everything together.

What else dazzles about “Pulp Fiction”? There’s the abundance of lurid violence — much of it comical (including an uncomfortably funny rape scene), some of it truly shocking, none of it gratuitious. Jackson and Travolta are one hell of two-man team, while Willis registers a pulse and Eric Stoltz has wit to burn. Ultimately, though, it’s the manic, fearless force of Tarantino that makes “Pulp Fiction” a sweet, sweet joyride, indeed.

Grade: A

Atheist Bus Campaign creator Ariane Sherine and Richard Dawkins at its launch in London

I “came out” as an atheist a few years ago, after years of shilly-shallying.

The basic Protestantism of my upbringing yielded, as a teenager, to an orthodox but rather devout kind of new-age pantheism; this drifted imperceptibly into a “spiritual but not religious” phase, followed by a lengthy spell as an agnostic. If people understood the word “agnostic” as it’s meant to be understood — the view that God’s existence isn’t provable one way or the other, so we should reserve judgment — I might have been willing to leave it at that. But in reality, most people think agnostic means “undecided,” as if its proponents just haven’t made their minds up yet. In either case, “agnostic” began to seem annoyingly timid, the soft option. So I took a deep breath and embraced the big, scary “A” word.

In general, I dislike applying ideological labels to myself. I don’t really want to be anything that ends in an “-ian” or an “-ist”; all it usually does is inspire people to put you in whatever stereotypical box the word conjures up for them. But in this case, I wanted to play whatever minuscule role I could in reclaiming the word — which is, after all, a perfectly good and useful one.

In Julia Sweeney’s wonderful one-woman show Letting Go of God, which chronicles her journey from devout Catholicism to cheerful nonbelief, she describes the difficult process of coming out to her parents. For her mother, not believing in God was one thing — but being an atheist? That was beyond the pale.

Sweeney is onto something here.  It’s not the concept that shocks people so much; it’s the word. Somehow, “atheist” has acquired a whiff of Stalinist absolutism — even among people who should know better, like Robert Wright, author of The Evolution of God.  In a recent Huffington Post Interview, Wright said, “. . . I don’t understand how people can call themselves atheists, if the term means you’re sure there’s no God. I don’t see how you can be sure of anything in this world. I’m technically an agnostic, although one with spiritual and religious leanings. But I don’t know anything, and I don’t know how anyone can say they know there’s no God.”

There you have it:  the assumption that atheism implies rigid, dogmatic certainty in the nonexistence of God. But why?

When people refer to themselves as Christians, I don’t automatically peg them as fire-breathing fundamentalists who have never entertained the slightest doubts about God’s existence. When people express their political leanings, I don’t take it for granted that they’re intolerant ideologues who will view me as a contemptible fool if I disagree. Unique among isms, atheism is assumed to contain an arrogant degree of certainty.

In my book, certainty is the real enemy. I respect doubt far more than faith. Even the things I’m surest of — such as that I am bald, and wear a size 10 1/2 shoe — I’m only about 99% sure of. A healthy, intellectually honest outlook demands that one percent of doubt, which is not enough to keep you up nights or to interfere with the daily business of life, but is enough to acknowledge that our minds are limited and easily-bamboozled instruments; and that reality as we think we understand it may be a delusion. I’m 99% sure I’m A.J. Mell, but the lunatic in the asylum is no doubt equally convinced that he’s Napoleon.

In fact, the most cocksure people I have ever run across are devout believers. Whenever I debate matters theological with Bible-believing Christians, it’s virtually guaranteed that, at some point in the conversation, they’ll assert that they don’t just believe there’s a God; they know there’s a God. Not through mere reason, you understand — but through some higher, deeper, purer way of knowing.

Well, I beg your pardon, but you don’t know. No one knows, because the assertion can’t be proved one way or the other, and is therefore unknowable. I used the lofty, mysterioso, higher-way-of-knowing canard many times myself, when I was a believer — and it was nothing more than a self-deluding dodge, a way of avoiding the tough questions by throwing up a cosmic smokescreen. And furthermore, where does all that “knowledge” leave the concept of faith? I thought faith, by definition, was a decision to believe in something that can’t be known. If you already know, what purpose or virtue is there in having faith?

The truth is, nobody really knows what’s going on. I expect that, like every other living thing, I have my finite moment of existence, and that when I die I’ll go back to wherever I was before I was born: i.e., oblivion. That said, if I discover that I do live on after death, I’ll be delighted — unless the fundamentalists are right, and nonbelievers are cast into a pit of eternal fire, in which case I’ll be depressed. But just because we can’t be 100% sure of anything doesn’t mean that one philosophy is as good as the next, or that we can’t passionately defend our particular world view. It just means that when contemplating infinite issues with finite brains, a little humility is in order.

The nomination to head the National Institutes of Health of Francis Collins, former genome mapping project administrator and probably the most prominent working scientist who also calls himself a Christian, disturbs  Sam Harris and P.Z. Myers, among many.

Collins is a theistic evolutionist and  a devotee of C.S. Lewis. He thinks we can’t be good without God.

I’m pretty sure he’s wrong about that. Some of my best good friends are Godless. Some of them aren’t even “spiritual.” As Julia Sweeney discovered, putting on the No God glasses leaves our vulnerable planet still hanging out there in space as pretty as ever, and leaves most of us as free of any impulse to run out and commit wanton sin as we ever were.

But I would just remind my friends that a few short months ago, the presidential appointment of an evolutionist of any stripe, theistic or otherwise, would have been astonishing. This president really does see himself as a “uniter, not a divider.” We’re going to have to get more comfortable with letting Obama be Obama.

Without God would there be no love? In my confusion I found someone who made it clear. Someone who had thought about this topic a lot. Now at this point I knew a little bit of science but not a lot, and that made me the perfect candidate for Deepak Chopra.

Julia Sweeney, Letting Go of God

I have tried listening to one of his audio books several times, but I have never been able to stand it for more than 15 minutes.

I was so intrigued with this quantum mechanics that Deepak refers to over and over and over again in his books, that I decided to take a class in it.

And what I found is-Deepak Chopra is full of shit!

Julia Sweeney, Letting Go of God

Delightfully succinct.

On my way to a retreat in Jasper, I listened to Julia Sweeney’s play Letting Go of God (Check out a trailer for it here).  It was yet another time of discernment for me.  Who is God and why do I believe?  I think those questions are an important part of the faith journey — they beg to be asked on a regular basis.

Which is exactly what Sweeney does throughout her play.  It’s a memoir of her struggle with God.  She examines the faith she grew up with and the forms of spirituality she later adopted with a critical honesty that I find admirable.

She puts it this way:

“Because the truth was, I was beginning to feel nervous about my relationship with God.  I felt like we were some married couple trying to find some common ground.  I began to wonder just who I was married too.”

With great fear and trepidation, she breaks up with God.

“I could just see him sitting on his suitcases near the front door of my house. And I went to him and said, ‘I’m sorry, God.  It’s not you, it’s me.  It’s just, I don’t think you exist. I mean, God, look at it this way, it’s really because I take you so seriously that I can’t bring myself to believe in  you.  I mean, if it’s any consolation, it’s sort of a sign of respect.  So sit here for a while if you want to.  You can stay a little while if you need to, there’s no big hurry. And slowly, over the course of several weeks, he just disappeared.”

Do I share my mind with a God who doesn’t exist?  I shared Sweeney’s question.  No answers yet, but more to think about.  She wishes there was a place to “worship” and celebrate the mystery of life, without the necessity of God.  I have to agree.  The value of church is so much bigger than the doctrine it espouses.

Here’s her talk at TED.  (I watch TED a LOT.)

Saturday Night Live alumnus, and the Wolf’s girlfriend in Pulp Fiction, did a DVD stand-up performance of her life’s religious journey, and her turning at last, to unbelief:

I thought, “Okay, calm down. Let’s just try on the not-believing-in-God glasses for a moment, just for a second. Just put on the no-God glasses and take a quick look around and then immediately throw them off.” So I put them on and I looked around.

I’m embarrassed to report that I initially felt dizzy. I actually had the thought, “Well, how does the Earth stay up in the sky? You mean we’re just hurtling through space? That’s so vulnerable!” I wanted to run out and catch the Earth as it fell out of space into my hands. . . .

I wandered around in a daze thinking, “No one is minding the store!” And I wondered how traffic worked, like how we weren’t just in chaos all the time. And slowly, I began to see the world completely differently. I had to rethink what I thought about everything. It’s like I had to go change the wallpaper of my mind.

Movies I reviewed for the Herald this week:

Two Lovers. “Fierce concentration on a tiny piece of emotional turf.”

Gomorrah. “No warm-hearted godfathers blathering on about the proper amount of garlic in the marinara sauce.”

Ben X. “You might wonder whether anybody’s in charge at this school.”

Ballerina. “But what a surface.”

Also, an interview I did with actress-auteur Julia Sweeney is included this week on ArtZone in Studio; watch here for the story of Sweeney’s new film Letting Go of God, a one-woman show that manages to be completely bright, disarming, and convincing about what its title says.

Sometimes people get the impression that the only people who embrace the title of “skeptic” are science nerds & geeks. Not so. There are, fortunately, a growing number of artists – musicians, comedians, singers – who have taken up the cause of promoting skepticism through their work. I wanted to give some of them a brief mention here.

They are Julia Sweeney (of Saturday Night Live fame), George Hrab, Greydon Square, and Tim Minchin. There are undoubtedly others beyond these four, but these are the big ones I know about now. I have met Julia, George, and Greydon, and I look forward to meeting Tim someday in the future.

I became aware of Julia Sweeney, George Hrab and Greydon Square through a well-known skeptical meeting called The Amazing Meeting (learn more about TAM’s sponsoring organization – the James Randi Educational Foundation). And I learned about Tim Minchin from one of the best skeptical podcasts on the Internet, the Skeptics Guide to the Universe.

As a taste, here is a link to a neat 9-minute beat poem by Tim Minchin called “Storm”. Enjoy!

It is encouraging to see that more and more high-profile artists are coming out and not only embracing but also promoting skepticism. This is a welcome trend, because it not only expands the message of the modern skeptical movement beyond areas to which it has traditionally been limited (i.e. the sciences), and it also lends an air of coolness to the movement which will broaden the appeal. And getting the message out to younger people that scientific thinking & skepticism can be cool and isn’t just for nerds is one of the best things that artists have to offer.

Whether by pure chance or divine plan, a couple of stories about childhood atheism and/or conversion to atheism ran across my screen yesterday.

* Ricky Gervais
* Calvin & Hobbes
* Julia Sweeney

In varying ways the story of my own “conversion” has affinities with each of these three; I think I’ve told it somewhere on the Internets before. There’s really two stories. The first is the night when I was five or so and figured out that Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, and all the rest didn’t exist, in a row, one after another. The second is a few years later, eleven or twelve years old and obscenely terrified of death because I didn’t really believe in God anymore. My parents, eventually fed up with my panic, took me to see our local priest, who gave me a couple of metaphors to chew on and told me I should pray for guidance.

So I did, and when I was done, I realized I’d been talking to myself.

I wrote this several years ago and it recently resurfaced during my Once Every Decade Computer Colonic. There is some updating to do, however … (1) Alex Borstein is a producer, writer and voice on “Family Guy” now … (2) after meeting Jackson Douglas I became a rabid Gilmore Girls fan, learning I was indeed smart enough and, in fact, have since been told I could be Lorelai Gilmore’s older sister — a compliment, though left-handed, that gives me a ridiculous amount of pleasure because my motto, like theirs, is “life’s short — talk fast” … (3) we took back that waitress’ tip … (4) it’s much easier these days to find liberals to talk to in Colorado … (5) I now know the guy who played Mr Wicke on the Drew Carey Show is Craig Ferguson, who entertains America in the middle of the night … (6) Ms Borstein’s “Drop Dead Gorgeous” is on Netflix. We watched it again and laughed ourselves silly. Not for the kiddies, though.

Okay, now you’re up to speed. It made me laugh and I hope you’ll enjoy it too.

Three Days as a Civilian at the Aspen Comedy Festival

I just got back from the HBO Comedy Festival in Aspen. I couldn’t have had more fun unless Mr. Steve Martin sat on my lap and told me jokes. No, I couldn’t have had more fun unless Mr. Steve Martin sat on my lap, told me jokes and tickled me with a feather. Well, okay, I couldn’t have had more fun unless Mr. Steve Martin sat on my lap, told me jokes, tickled me with a feather and paid my Aspen expenses.

Anyway, I didn’t actually see Mr. Steve Martin.

But I did have many other celebrity sightings.

Work with me here as I toggle back and forth using the singular “I” as well as the plural “we” to include my husband whenever I can’t make it all about me.

We were there at the urging — like we needed urging — of our pal Ted Hardwick, who was performing at the festival with the very funny Alex Borstein of “Mad TV” fame.

If you’re keeping count, this is Name Dropping #1. Ted doesn’t count because we knew him when he used to drink chocolate milk instead of double bourbons with Coke backs. Even though he’s been on television and at the Improv in Los Angeles AND at the Montreal Comedy Festival, he’s cool with it.

Ted does a flamboyant old-time stand-up comedian character named Teddy Towne. If I haven’t over-explained that enough, he also wears a loud plaid jacket and sunglasses. Teddy Towne opens the show for the talented Ms. Borstein.

So we met up with our pal Ted and headed back to the condo to stow our luggage and catch up with him. He showed us all the loot he got as a performer at the Festival . . . his official name badge, t-shirt, winter scarf, those cool earmuffs that wrap behind your head so as not to muss your Hollywood hair, and the coveted Comedy Arts Festival Beret. And some mints.

As we were hanging around, who comes in but the actual Alex Borstein, not just a name to be bandied about anymore, but a real live person. (Name Dropping #1A) She plopped herself down on the couch, opened a bottle of water and told us she needed somewhere to hang out until it was time to do the remote taping with Jay Leno for “The Tonight Show” to be broadcast later that night.

So we hung out and had an entertaining conversation with this most delightful, and very nice woman. If you didn’t already know, you can tell someone is nice by how they react when you pull out photos of your children. She passed the test . . . nary a whimper from her.

After Alex left, we wandered around Aspen, trying to score tickets in the Festival’s ill-conceived notion of ticket purchasing. Luckily, this became a moot point as Ted is very tall and was wearing The Badge of Comedy around his neck which proved to carry with it a certain cache. He refused to wear The Beret of Comedy or The Earmuffs of Comedy which I think could have gotten us much closer to Mr. Steve Martin. But I’m not going to open up that can of worms again.

As we walked around Aspen, Ted introduced us to Jackson Douglas who is married to Alex Borstein and has a recurring role on “The Gilmore Girls.” (Name Dropping #2) I never told him, and he was too polite to ask if we watched his show. If he had, I’d have been forced to tell him that I didn’t think I was smart enough to watch. The handful of times I’ve watched brought me to the realization that those Gilmore Girls talk too fast for me, a forty-something woman who lives on the Colorado plains.

We ended up at the beautiful St. Regis Hotel, which is one of those if-you-have-to-ask-you-can’t-afford-it kind of places. So we didn’t ask, but it didn’t make it easier to pay for our $42 round of three drinks. And here’s something interesting in a place like the St. Regis … if your cocktail waitress gives you the bum’s rush and doesn’t think you’ve tipped her well enough for walking fourteen steps to carry three drinks to you, she’ll refuse to accept it. As a woman with children of my own, I’m gonna say that her mother would be embarrassed by her behavior. But I digress.

In the bar of the St. Regis we saw Michael Moore who was at the festival to receive the Freedom of Speech Award for his body of terrific work, including his recent “Bowling for Columbine.” (Name Dropping #3)

As we were sitting, watching Michael Moore ignore us, an adorable long-haired weiner dog was nursing a brew at the table next to us. One thing I learned at the Comedy Festival was that “weiner” is much funnier than “dachshund.” Say them both out loud. You’ll see. When Mr. Weiner Dog (Name Dropping #4) started sniffing around my purse, I became a bit alarmed because, as they say in TexArkana, you just rent beer. So I got him back to his People and found out that Mr. Weiner Dog was himself a Hollywood star when they handed me a flyer advertising his latest movie. Can’t remember the name of the movie, nor Mr. Weiner Dog’s real name, but Richard Belzer’s photo was on the flyer, even though Mr. Weiner Dog’s was not. Another thing I learned at the Comedy Festival is that he should discuss this slight with his agent, his manager, his make-up person, his producer, and the cocktail waitress to rectify the situation immediately.

So it was only a matter of time before Richard Belzer (Name Dropping #5) walks up to Mr. Weiner Dog’s table and sits down. This, I suppose, makes it Mr. Richard Belzer’s table now. And in case you ever wondered . . . yes, the sunglasses stay on at night.

Since we had finished our $42 round of three drinks, and had decided for obvious reasons against another, we left the St. Regis bar. As we moved into the hallway, I saw some commotion to my right and a Beret of Comedy lumbering toward me. As it got closer I could see it belonged to John Goodman (Name Dropping #6) who is a great big happy bear of a man. There was a handful of people around him and as he walked, the crowd in the hallway parted, almost reverentially. Later, it was pointed out to me that the crowd really does have to part for Mr. Goodman, so I might have put my own little reverential spin on the situation.

Mr. Goodman and his group stopped smack dab in our way so we were forced to walk out of the hotel with them. As it was the Comedy Festival, I was expecting to get stuck in the doorway with Mr. Goodman a la The Three Stooges. Didn’t happen though. The Gods of Comedy were obviously busy elsewhere, maybe thinking up more funny names for “dachshund.” But, while we were leaving through the second sets of doors, who should hold the door open for me but Harry Shearer. (Name Dropping #7) He is the voice of so many great characters on “The Simpsons.”  I hope he wasn’t as bored as he looked. I probably should have said “weiner” to him.

Speaking of “The Simpsons,” Nancy Cartwright (the voice of Bart Simpson) was also at the Festival. It’s entirely possible that she could have been on my Celebrity Sightings List too, but I’m not entirely sure what she looks like. Maybe she was the one in the restroom who told me to eat her shorts when I crowded in front of her at the hand dryer.

We went to see Julia Sweeney’s show, “Guys and Babies, Sex and Gods.” (Name Dropping #8) What a delightful show she puts on! She has had a most interesting life and was telling about her adventures in adopting a baby from China. We laughed, we cried.

After we saw Teddy Towne and Ms. Borstein’s show (which I should tell you was the hottest ticket at the Festival despite what Kelsey Grammer’s people would have you believe), we went back to their dressing room where we were introduced to Janeane Garofalo. (Name Dropping #9) Even without her Beret of Comedy she was a hoot to hang out with. She is very well read and so interesting. Even the way she smokes is funny. She didn’t want to smoke in anyone’s face so she got right down on the floor where the full-length window opened so she could blow the smoke outside. But it was windy so it just blew back in. Okay, maybe it’s not that funny. Later, she and my husband and some others had a 3-hour conversation in the middle of the night, much of which was about politics. My husband was very excited to talk politics with someone who shares his liberal leanings. Hard to find someone simpatico on the Colorado plains.

There were some other shows we wanted to see but had to wait in line, because, apparently, Ted’s Badge of Comedy was losing power. While waiting in line, however, I saw Norm Macdonald (Name Dropping #10) and my husband saw the guy who plays Mr. Wicke on “The Drew Carey Show” (Name Dropping #10.5) And later on, Mike Myers (Name Dropping #11) bumped into my husband. Nothing really funny about poor balance, but we’ll blame it on the altitude and cut him some slack.

Which leads me back to Alex Borstein, who is funny and has impeccable balance. She also, by the way, told me I had nice skin. Uh huh, uh huh. Ms. Borstein’s show is called “Drop Dead Gorgeous in a Down-to-Earth Bombshell Sort of Way.”  Which she is. The television does not do her justice, but that isn’t the point. Her point, made in a laugh-yourself-silly-kinda-way is that she is looking for role models on television and in movies. She tells very funny stories about the descriptions of women that Hollywood producers are looking to cast in their shows. You know, like the character named “Teena” who is a physicist but also blond, sexy and willing to get into wet t-shirt contests. Or “Unnamed Woman” who is sitting at her vanity in sexy lingerie to sell motor oil.

Frankly, these are not women anyone can identify with, whether you’re a short, Jewish entertainer or a 40-something woman with nice skin and three kids. But if she’s looking for a role model, I don’t think she has to look any further than her own mirror.  Alex Borstein, Janeane Garofalo and Julia Sweeney are all amazing, smart, articulate, opinionated and very funny women with or without their Berets of Comedy. I would be honored if my daughter took on any of them as a role model.

Except for the smoking, Janeane, I’m pretty sure that’s not good for you.

How ‘bout you? Got any names to drop?

Official trailer to Letting Go Of God:

Letting Go of God is a one-person-monologue by Julia Sweeney chronicling her search for God.

I’ve never seen the show but only clips like this one:

You can buy the DVD of Letting Go Of God here!

10 Books About Atheism You’ll Want For Christmas

Pastor responsible for “Under God” in the pledge dies – He died on Thanksgiving giving me another reason to be thankful.

Off to it today.  With Friend (as opposed to Saucy).  Didn’t have dreams directly related to Rachel, but I remember a bunch of emotions experienced that were related.  This doesn’t seem to be getting any easier.

I also tried 3 (THREE) times to download Entourage last night and all three times the files didn’t work.  Yeeeaaarrrggg!

But, I got a message from Jeannie.  She got the stuff I sent and said she’d work on it this week.  That may or may not be literally true.  Not a reflection on her abilities, just her schedule.  I think she’s balancing something like a dozen active projects in addition to mine.  Something will work out.  I think it’d be crazy-fun if she got Sweeney at least to talk to us.  No pressure, Jeannie!

Gotta go take a shower now.  I’m ICKY!

Nope NOT A JOKE!  Ive been hearing rumors about this for a year or so now.  Its set to come out in 2010.  Directed by Colin Brady a virtual unknown he directed Everyones Hero in 2006 an animated piece of shit.  Its rumored to have John Lithgow, and Julia Sweeney in it as well. So on Ebay they are auctioning off a walk on roll for this film.  I would have thought it would have been complete CGI so a voice part?  Nope it says walk on NON SPEAKING roll, that leads me to believe that we are looking at a Live Action SMURFS MOVIE!  Ha hahahaha amazing, I saw a smurf porno once, I vomited twice.  I dont know how they can even do this, 95% of new movies out have to have a love story in them anymore to pull in the female viewers so I guess everyone is gonna have to bang smurfette in this one or create a few chicks to round out Smurf Village.

Ill watch this movie with no hope of anything in my mind.  Thoughts, Comments?  IVE included a few pics of what the movie may look like.  Enjoy…