Areas of Unrest

27 December 2000 - Burned Rice and Chest Hair

QOTD: "Beware of prophets wearing rubber clothing." - William Neely

Reading: Kathleen Taylor, Cold Front

Listening to: The Bobs, I Brow Club

Just after my last entry, I realized that I can't actually remember the last time I saw an electric Chanukah menorah. Have they died the well-deserved death of the tacky? Are people who are too assimilated to light candles (or burn oil, which is really more authentic but messier) so assimilated that they don't do any display of Jewish identity? Or am I just not looking at the right places?

The celebrity death column has lots of potential subjects. I'm sure Jason Robards was a fine actor, but I'm no great fan of Eugene O'Neill so I'm not in a position to judge what most people consider his finest work. I'm not sure whether or not Billy Barty was a fine actor, but I'm sure that he never got cast without consideration of his height. That leaves Victor Borge. The thing that I think is important to say about him is that he had to be a damn good musician to do the parodies he did. My favorite Borge shtick was when he played music upside-down.

As for what I've actually been doing, I've managed to do massive amounts of household filing. And I've written almost all of the end of year charity checks. (The rest will be done in the morning before work.) If I can get through two more stacks of paperwork, my living room might be presentable again. Unfortunately, I made a key mistake this evening and continued reading a murder mystery while cooking rice for dinner. "Just one more chapter," I thought, "and I'll check on it." Oh, well, at least I now know that my smoke detector works. (The pot is salvageable, but it will take major scrubbing to get the charred remains of the rice off.)

Which brings me to one of many rants I have promised in the past and not delivered on, largely because something else rantworthy usually comes up. We really have to reverse this trend towards hairless male actors. I'm watching some nice steamy scene on TV or a movie. If it's really good, the hero is wearing a flannel shirt, which is one of the sexiest things a man can wear. (Tweed jackets and most sorts of formal wear are also on the list.) The heroine starts to unbutton the hero's shirt. And the whole scene is ruined. I'm 42 years old, damn it, and I don't want to watch sex scenes played by prepubescent boys. I'm a hopelessly heterosexual woman and I want to watch a man on the screen. And men (as opposed to boys) have chest hair. Chest hair provides textural interest and there are, um, lots of things you can do with it to provide other sorts of interest.

I'm often accused of a lack of interest in pop culture since I don't go to movies much and I usually prefer to read instead of watching TV. But I assure you that I'd be far more interested in trivia about actors if they only gave me actors worth looking at. I know Hollywood is run by 20 year old gay men, but there really are some of us middle-aged women with money to spend on entertainment, too.

I am willing to compromise a little. You can cast all the hairless men you want, actually. Just make them keep their shirts on.