Navigation

Archive | Age Matters

In the Sandbox with Carol Burnett

September 14, 2016 in Age Matters, Book Matters, Feminist Matters, TV Matters

queen carrolCarol Burnett is undeniably the unsung foremother of TV comedy. While Lucille Ball deserves praise galore for her groundbreaking 1950s sitcom, big-eyed, big-jawed, big-hearted, big-italics Burnett was one of the first women on TV to lead a regular variety hour. Emerging in the early 1960s as a star on Broadway and “The Garry Moore Show,” she signed a contract with CBS who tried to pigeonhole her into a sitcom. Instead she launched the smash “The Carol Burnett Show,” which lasted eleven seasons–a feat even now on network television–and helped make the careers of such golden girls as Vicki Lawrence and Bernadette Peters while resuscitating such secretly hilarious sirens as Shirley Temple and Rita Hayworth.

Now eighty-three, Burnett has written her third memoir, In Such Good Company, a tell-all about the show that entertained home audiences from 1967 to 1978. Stuffed with juicy tidbits about new and old Hollywood (you’ll adore tales of Carol Channing’s diet of whale blubber), the book is so frank and funny that it inspired me to hunt down some of the skits she describes so vividly. Continue Reading →

Bridget Jones’s Blergh

September 13, 2016 in Age Matters, Book Matters, Feminist Matters, Film Matters

bridgetIt sounds dumb and, in fact, it is, but I’m wrangling mightily with the question of whether I should attend tonight’s critics’ screening of Bridget Jones’s Baby. There’s the fact that it’s bound to be terrible (even the book is, and this is not the sort of franchise likely to transcend its origin material). Then there’s the issue of Zelweger’s face–reacting to the drama around it, reigning myself in from the impulse to hit people who feel comfortable opining on it. All told, I should probably not go to the screening–I can easily get out of the related assignment–but something in me feels I am abandoning another fortysomething woman felled by the culture that once built her up. And this is something I’ll just never comfortably do.

Suria 8/27/71-9/11/01

September 11, 2016 in Age Matters, Country Matters, Snapshot, Spirit Matters

suriaI’ll never forget the morning, only weeks before her death, when she taped a hair to the bathroom mirror with a note. It was her 30th birthday–30 seemed so old to us both–and in her big gorgeous calligraphy she had written: “MY FIRST GRAY HAIR.” There’s more to this story–in some ways it’s the story of my 20s–but 15 years later it still doesn’t feel like I’ve earned the right to tell it. All I can say is every time I curse all the gray mixed into my blonde, I flash on that note–her characteristic bemusement, her breezy assumption there’d be many more to come–and I cry. Suria.

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy