Lily Salter's Blog, page 995
September 30, 2015
From “kosher sex” to love maps, 5 tips for keeping your sex life hot
“There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, the other is getting it,” said Oscar Wilde. Passion is a tricky, elusive thing. Once captured, it flounders. But why does it wither when domesticated? Why do sexy intense beginnings so often lead to boring, sexless or otherwise meh middles and endings? Why aren't we having sex with our dear, highly-available partners, like, all the time? “Our senses crave novelty. Any change alerts them, and they send a signal into the brain. If there's no change, no novelty, they doze and register little or nothing. A constant state—even of excitement—in time becomes tedious, fades in the background because our senses have evolved to report only changes,” writes Diane Ackerman in "A Natural History of the Senses."* Or, says my friend Matthew, who thinks deeply on such things: “Once you're with someone, they become your family. And you don't want to have sex with people in your family.” Which is true enough, especially that last bit. But you can rekindle passion, at least according to the top Big Thinkers in the field, who offer differing—sometimes wildly so—theories on how to do it. By reframing things a bit, you can soon be happily fucking your beloved family member once again. Though you'll probably want to phrase that differently in your head. 1. Marnia Robinson Cred: Corporate lawyer-turned-writer and speaker on sex, relationships and porn. Co-hosts Your Brain on Porn website with husband Gary Wilson. The Big Idea: Karezza sex (slow sex without attempting orgasm) can help hack your neurochemicals. The Fix: The neurochemicals that make us so giddy with the first flush of love only last two years, tops. After that, the buzz wears off and couples get habituated (the nicer, more sciencey term for bored). Instead of trying to jack things up with new positions or sexy clown costumes that can further numb response to pleasure, slow things down with karezza sex, a form of affectionate, sensual sex that generally doesn't result in orgasm. This sex, according to Robinson, strengthens lovers' bonds and results in more frequent and satisfying sex. “It's like learning to diet by eating smarter, rather than struggling to eat less,” writes Robinson. “As my husband says, 'My limbic brain stays enchanted because I don't attempt to fertilize you.'” (Her husband, it will not surprise you to learn, is a science professor.) Test drive: Practice a “bonding behavior” like gazing into each other's eyes for several minutes or lying with your head on your partner's chest and listening to their heartbeat or synchronized breathing. Further reading: "Cupid's Poisoned Arrow: From Habit to Harmony in Sexual Relationships." 2. Shmuley Boteach Cred: American Orthodox rabbi, author and TV host. The Big Idea: Women are deep and endless sources of sexuality. Exploring that eroticism leads to richer, more profound sexual/spiritual connection. The Fix: A woman's sexuality is “much deeper and longer lasting than a man's. In the face of such intensity, most husbands fear they can't measure up,” writes Boteach in "The Kosher Sutra: 8 Sacred Secrets for Reigniting Desire and Restoring Passion for Life." But for the husband who's brave enough to jump in there and explore, there are sublime pleasures to be uncovered. “There is a part of us, a passionate part that is raw, instinctive, animal, visceral, and not attuned to social norms. It's incredibly erotic to witness this side of a person become revealed. A man who can arouse a woman to this level of abandonment witnesses something incredible,” writes Boteach, in perhaps the hottest collection of sentences you'll ever read by a rabbi. This deep sensuality flows into the rest of life, giving everything an “erotic pulse.” To get to that place, Boteach recommends “Kosher Tantric” sex, including delayed orgasm to prolong sex, making it into “a worship of the divine spark in each other.” He's also against going to the bathroom in front of each other—ruins the mystery. Test drive: Try the Jewish custom of abstaining from sex for two weeks when the woman starts her period. “Every month, there must be two weeks devoted to physical love, and two weeks devoted to intellectual communication and emotional intimacy," Boteach writes in "Kosher Sex: A Recipe for Passion and Intimacy." It may sound a bit old school and rigid, but the forbiddenness fostered by abstinence can build lust, plus the on/off plan happens to correspond nicely with most women's monthly swings of desire. Further reading: "The Kosher Sutra: 8 Sacred Secrets for Reigniting Desire and Restoring Passion for Life." 3. Esther Perel Cred: Writer, speaker, couples and family therapist. The Big Idea: We need safety and security in a relationship, yet we also need adventure and excitement. The problem is that satisfying either of these needs sort of negates the other. The trick is riding the wave between security and excitement, figuring out ways to introduce novelty, risk and mystery into the familiar and comfortable. The Fix: The erotic thrives on power plays, thwarted desire, threats of rivals and other non-safe and lovey ideas. Tap into these rich sources of desire by questioning your ideas about what's “acceptable” to you. For a lot of people, the greatest sources of excitement and pleasure have to do with childhood hurts. Being willing to poke around in these dark areas of your erotic brain is a potent natural fuel for pleasure. Test drive: Embrace the “shadow of the third.” In every relationship, there are other players, whether actual infidelities, flirtations or agreed-upon partners. Accepting this and working with it—whether by actually introducing others into your marital sex, negotiating monogamy or just feeling the arousal of a threat (perceived or real) of a romantic rival—beats complacency back and helps you see your mate as the desirable creature that they are. For further reading: "Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic + the Domestic" 4. John Gottman, Ph.D. and Julie Gottman, Ph.D. Cred: Husband and wife psychologists who run the Gottman Institute and the Relationship Research Institute. The Big Idea: Married people do best when they behave like good friends and handle conflicts in gentle positive ways. The Fix: The Gottmans are known for their Love Labs, in which they observed couples and found that future divorcees tended to handle conflict via what the Gottmans call “The 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse”: stonewalling, contempt, defensiveness and withdrawal. So don't do those. Good behaviors, which lack a catchy 4 Horseman-like name: Respond positively to your partner's “bids” (bids are requests for emotional connections via a question, quick hug and such). Create a love map—a mental list of your partner's preferences, dreams and sexual proclivities. Create rituals for initiating and refusing sex to minimize miscommunication and feelings of rejection. The resulting atmosphere of kindness and communication is conducive to “personal sex” that's focused on intimacy instead of intercourse. Test Drive: “Plan time for activities like hot baths, back rubs, touching, holding and simply making each other feel good physically and emotionally. If sex happens, that's fine. But if it doesn't, you'll still have met your expectation of enjoying time together,” advise the Gottmans. Further reading: "The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work" 5. David Schnarch, Ph.D. Cred: Psychologist, sex therapist and director of the Marriage and Family Health Institute. The Big Idea: Passion (as well as a healthy relationship) depends on “differentiation,” that is, each partner cultivating a strong sense of self, despite his or her partner's (very normal) efforts to thwart that growth. The Fix: When partners work on becoming differentiated, it creates tension and gridlock. This, coupled with what Schnarch delightfully calls “normal marital sadism,” can lead to marital breakdown, but it's actually an opportunity. Gridlock and tension create a dynamic environment for growth and help passion thrive. Anxiety is also good. Instead of working on anxiety reduction, couples should work on ways to tolerate anxiety via self-soothing. “Anxiety is often part of the best sex we ever have. It's part of growing sexually. Anxiety makes us pay attention to what's going on,” writes Schnarch. During sex, couples should focus on the connection, working on truly feeling their partner as they touch them. Also good is “hugging til relaxed,” which is pretty much what it sounds like. Test drive: Try for “eyes-open orgasm.” Looking deep into each other's eyes adds intimacy and meaning to sex. The more you do it, the longer you can do it and the deeper the connection. For further reading: "Passionate Marriage: Keeping Love and Intimacy Alive in Committed Relationships." * This, however, does not explain why there are so many strip clubs called Deja Vu. Jill Hamilton writes In Bed With Married Women (www.inbedwithmarriedwomen.com. Follow her on Twitter @Jill_Hamilton.
“There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, the other is getting it,” said Oscar Wilde. Passion is a tricky, elusive thing. Once captured, it flounders. But why does it wither when domesticated? Why do sexy intense beginnings so often lead to boring, sexless or otherwise meh middles and endings? Why aren't we having sex with our dear, highly-available partners, like, all the time? “Our senses crave novelty. Any change alerts them, and they send a signal into the brain. If there's no change, no novelty, they doze and register little or nothing. A constant state—even of excitement—in time becomes tedious, fades in the background because our senses have evolved to report only changes,” writes Diane Ackerman in "A Natural History of the Senses."* Or, says my friend Matthew, who thinks deeply on such things: “Once you're with someone, they become your family. And you don't want to have sex with people in your family.” Which is true enough, especially that last bit. But you can rekindle passion, at least according to the top Big Thinkers in the field, who offer differing—sometimes wildly so—theories on how to do it. By reframing things a bit, you can soon be happily fucking your beloved family member once again. Though you'll probably want to phrase that differently in your head. 1. Marnia Robinson Cred: Corporate lawyer-turned-writer and speaker on sex, relationships and porn. Co-hosts Your Brain on Porn website with husband Gary Wilson. The Big Idea: Karezza sex (slow sex without attempting orgasm) can help hack your neurochemicals. The Fix: The neurochemicals that make us so giddy with the first flush of love only last two years, tops. After that, the buzz wears off and couples get habituated (the nicer, more sciencey term for bored). Instead of trying to jack things up with new positions or sexy clown costumes that can further numb response to pleasure, slow things down with karezza sex, a form of affectionate, sensual sex that generally doesn't result in orgasm. This sex, according to Robinson, strengthens lovers' bonds and results in more frequent and satisfying sex. “It's like learning to diet by eating smarter, rather than struggling to eat less,” writes Robinson. “As my husband says, 'My limbic brain stays enchanted because I don't attempt to fertilize you.'” (Her husband, it will not surprise you to learn, is a science professor.) Test drive: Practice a “bonding behavior” like gazing into each other's eyes for several minutes or lying with your head on your partner's chest and listening to their heartbeat or synchronized breathing. Further reading: "Cupid's Poisoned Arrow: From Habit to Harmony in Sexual Relationships." 2. Shmuley Boteach Cred: American Orthodox rabbi, author and TV host. The Big Idea: Women are deep and endless sources of sexuality. Exploring that eroticism leads to richer, more profound sexual/spiritual connection. The Fix: A woman's sexuality is “much deeper and longer lasting than a man's. In the face of such intensity, most husbands fear they can't measure up,” writes Boteach in "The Kosher Sutra: 8 Sacred Secrets for Reigniting Desire and Restoring Passion for Life." But for the husband who's brave enough to jump in there and explore, there are sublime pleasures to be uncovered. “There is a part of us, a passionate part that is raw, instinctive, animal, visceral, and not attuned to social norms. It's incredibly erotic to witness this side of a person become revealed. A man who can arouse a woman to this level of abandonment witnesses something incredible,” writes Boteach, in perhaps the hottest collection of sentences you'll ever read by a rabbi. This deep sensuality flows into the rest of life, giving everything an “erotic pulse.” To get to that place, Boteach recommends “Kosher Tantric” sex, including delayed orgasm to prolong sex, making it into “a worship of the divine spark in each other.” He's also against going to the bathroom in front of each other—ruins the mystery. Test drive: Try the Jewish custom of abstaining from sex for two weeks when the woman starts her period. “Every month, there must be two weeks devoted to physical love, and two weeks devoted to intellectual communication and emotional intimacy," Boteach writes in "Kosher Sex: A Recipe for Passion and Intimacy." It may sound a bit old school and rigid, but the forbiddenness fostered by abstinence can build lust, plus the on/off plan happens to correspond nicely with most women's monthly swings of desire. Further reading: "The Kosher Sutra: 8 Sacred Secrets for Reigniting Desire and Restoring Passion for Life." 3. Esther Perel Cred: Writer, speaker, couples and family therapist. The Big Idea: We need safety and security in a relationship, yet we also need adventure and excitement. The problem is that satisfying either of these needs sort of negates the other. The trick is riding the wave between security and excitement, figuring out ways to introduce novelty, risk and mystery into the familiar and comfortable. The Fix: The erotic thrives on power plays, thwarted desire, threats of rivals and other non-safe and lovey ideas. Tap into these rich sources of desire by questioning your ideas about what's “acceptable” to you. For a lot of people, the greatest sources of excitement and pleasure have to do with childhood hurts. Being willing to poke around in these dark areas of your erotic brain is a potent natural fuel for pleasure. Test drive: Embrace the “shadow of the third.” In every relationship, there are other players, whether actual infidelities, flirtations or agreed-upon partners. Accepting this and working with it—whether by actually introducing others into your marital sex, negotiating monogamy or just feeling the arousal of a threat (perceived or real) of a romantic rival—beats complacency back and helps you see your mate as the desirable creature that they are. For further reading: "Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic + the Domestic" 4. John Gottman, Ph.D. and Julie Gottman, Ph.D. Cred: Husband and wife psychologists who run the Gottman Institute and the Relationship Research Institute. The Big Idea: Married people do best when they behave like good friends and handle conflicts in gentle positive ways. The Fix: The Gottmans are known for their Love Labs, in which they observed couples and found that future divorcees tended to handle conflict via what the Gottmans call “The 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse”: stonewalling, contempt, defensiveness and withdrawal. So don't do those. Good behaviors, which lack a catchy 4 Horseman-like name: Respond positively to your partner's “bids” (bids are requests for emotional connections via a question, quick hug and such). Create a love map—a mental list of your partner's preferences, dreams and sexual proclivities. Create rituals for initiating and refusing sex to minimize miscommunication and feelings of rejection. The resulting atmosphere of kindness and communication is conducive to “personal sex” that's focused on intimacy instead of intercourse. Test Drive: “Plan time for activities like hot baths, back rubs, touching, holding and simply making each other feel good physically and emotionally. If sex happens, that's fine. But if it doesn't, you'll still have met your expectation of enjoying time together,” advise the Gottmans. Further reading: "The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work" 5. David Schnarch, Ph.D. Cred: Psychologist, sex therapist and director of the Marriage and Family Health Institute. The Big Idea: Passion (as well as a healthy relationship) depends on “differentiation,” that is, each partner cultivating a strong sense of self, despite his or her partner's (very normal) efforts to thwart that growth. The Fix: When partners work on becoming differentiated, it creates tension and gridlock. This, coupled with what Schnarch delightfully calls “normal marital sadism,” can lead to marital breakdown, but it's actually an opportunity. Gridlock and tension create a dynamic environment for growth and help passion thrive. Anxiety is also good. Instead of working on anxiety reduction, couples should work on ways to tolerate anxiety via self-soothing. “Anxiety is often part of the best sex we ever have. It's part of growing sexually. Anxiety makes us pay attention to what's going on,” writes Schnarch. During sex, couples should focus on the connection, working on truly feeling their partner as they touch them. Also good is “hugging til relaxed,” which is pretty much what it sounds like. Test drive: Try for “eyes-open orgasm.” Looking deep into each other's eyes adds intimacy and meaning to sex. The more you do it, the longer you can do it and the deeper the connection. For further reading: "Passionate Marriage: Keeping Love and Intimacy Alive in Committed Relationships." * This, however, does not explain why there are so many strip clubs called Deja Vu. Jill Hamilton writes In Bed With Married Women (www.inbedwithmarriedwomen.com. Follow her on Twitter @Jill_Hamilton.
“There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, the other is getting it,” said Oscar Wilde. Passion is a tricky, elusive thing. Once captured, it flounders. But why does it wither when domesticated? Why do sexy intense beginnings so often lead to boring, sexless or otherwise meh middles and endings? Why aren't we having sex with our dear, highly-available partners, like, all the time? “Our senses crave novelty. Any change alerts them, and they send a signal into the brain. If there's no change, no novelty, they doze and register little or nothing. A constant state—even of excitement—in time becomes tedious, fades in the background because our senses have evolved to report only changes,” writes Diane Ackerman in "A Natural History of the Senses."* Or, says my friend Matthew, who thinks deeply on such things: “Once you're with someone, they become your family. And you don't want to have sex with people in your family.” Which is true enough, especially that last bit. But you can rekindle passion, at least according to the top Big Thinkers in the field, who offer differing—sometimes wildly so—theories on how to do it. By reframing things a bit, you can soon be happily fucking your beloved family member once again. Though you'll probably want to phrase that differently in your head. 1. Marnia Robinson Cred: Corporate lawyer-turned-writer and speaker on sex, relationships and porn. Co-hosts Your Brain on Porn website with husband Gary Wilson. The Big Idea: Karezza sex (slow sex without attempting orgasm) can help hack your neurochemicals. The Fix: The neurochemicals that make us so giddy with the first flush of love only last two years, tops. After that, the buzz wears off and couples get habituated (the nicer, more sciencey term for bored). Instead of trying to jack things up with new positions or sexy clown costumes that can further numb response to pleasure, slow things down with karezza sex, a form of affectionate, sensual sex that generally doesn't result in orgasm. This sex, according to Robinson, strengthens lovers' bonds and results in more frequent and satisfying sex. “It's like learning to diet by eating smarter, rather than struggling to eat less,” writes Robinson. “As my husband says, 'My limbic brain stays enchanted because I don't attempt to fertilize you.'” (Her husband, it will not surprise you to learn, is a science professor.) Test drive: Practice a “bonding behavior” like gazing into each other's eyes for several minutes or lying with your head on your partner's chest and listening to their heartbeat or synchronized breathing. Further reading: "Cupid's Poisoned Arrow: From Habit to Harmony in Sexual Relationships." 2. Shmuley Boteach Cred: American Orthodox rabbi, author and TV host. The Big Idea: Women are deep and endless sources of sexuality. Exploring that eroticism leads to richer, more profound sexual/spiritual connection. The Fix: A woman's sexuality is “much deeper and longer lasting than a man's. In the face of such intensity, most husbands fear they can't measure up,” writes Boteach in "The Kosher Sutra: 8 Sacred Secrets for Reigniting Desire and Restoring Passion for Life." But for the husband who's brave enough to jump in there and explore, there are sublime pleasures to be uncovered. “There is a part of us, a passionate part that is raw, instinctive, animal, visceral, and not attuned to social norms. It's incredibly erotic to witness this side of a person become revealed. A man who can arouse a woman to this level of abandonment witnesses something incredible,” writes Boteach, in perhaps the hottest collection of sentences you'll ever read by a rabbi. This deep sensuality flows into the rest of life, giving everything an “erotic pulse.” To get to that place, Boteach recommends “Kosher Tantric” sex, including delayed orgasm to prolong sex, making it into “a worship of the divine spark in each other.” He's also against going to the bathroom in front of each other—ruins the mystery. Test drive: Try the Jewish custom of abstaining from sex for two weeks when the woman starts her period. “Every month, there must be two weeks devoted to physical love, and two weeks devoted to intellectual communication and emotional intimacy," Boteach writes in "Kosher Sex: A Recipe for Passion and Intimacy." It may sound a bit old school and rigid, but the forbiddenness fostered by abstinence can build lust, plus the on/off plan happens to correspond nicely with most women's monthly swings of desire. Further reading: "The Kosher Sutra: 8 Sacred Secrets for Reigniting Desire and Restoring Passion for Life." 3. Esther Perel Cred: Writer, speaker, couples and family therapist. The Big Idea: We need safety and security in a relationship, yet we also need adventure and excitement. The problem is that satisfying either of these needs sort of negates the other. The trick is riding the wave between security and excitement, figuring out ways to introduce novelty, risk and mystery into the familiar and comfortable. The Fix: The erotic thrives on power plays, thwarted desire, threats of rivals and other non-safe and lovey ideas. Tap into these rich sources of desire by questioning your ideas about what's “acceptable” to you. For a lot of people, the greatest sources of excitement and pleasure have to do with childhood hurts. Being willing to poke around in these dark areas of your erotic brain is a potent natural fuel for pleasure. Test drive: Embrace the “shadow of the third.” In every relationship, there are other players, whether actual infidelities, flirtations or agreed-upon partners. Accepting this and working with it—whether by actually introducing others into your marital sex, negotiating monogamy or just feeling the arousal of a threat (perceived or real) of a romantic rival—beats complacency back and helps you see your mate as the desirable creature that they are. For further reading: "Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic + the Domestic" 4. John Gottman, Ph.D. and Julie Gottman, Ph.D. Cred: Husband and wife psychologists who run the Gottman Institute and the Relationship Research Institute. The Big Idea: Married people do best when they behave like good friends and handle conflicts in gentle positive ways. The Fix: The Gottmans are known for their Love Labs, in which they observed couples and found that future divorcees tended to handle conflict via what the Gottmans call “The 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse”: stonewalling, contempt, defensiveness and withdrawal. So don't do those. Good behaviors, which lack a catchy 4 Horseman-like name: Respond positively to your partner's “bids” (bids are requests for emotional connections via a question, quick hug and such). Create a love map—a mental list of your partner's preferences, dreams and sexual proclivities. Create rituals for initiating and refusing sex to minimize miscommunication and feelings of rejection. The resulting atmosphere of kindness and communication is conducive to “personal sex” that's focused on intimacy instead of intercourse. Test Drive: “Plan time for activities like hot baths, back rubs, touching, holding and simply making each other feel good physically and emotionally. If sex happens, that's fine. But if it doesn't, you'll still have met your expectation of enjoying time together,” advise the Gottmans. Further reading: "The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work" 5. David Schnarch, Ph.D. Cred: Psychologist, sex therapist and director of the Marriage and Family Health Institute. The Big Idea: Passion (as well as a healthy relationship) depends on “differentiation,” that is, each partner cultivating a strong sense of self, despite his or her partner's (very normal) efforts to thwart that growth. The Fix: When partners work on becoming differentiated, it creates tension and gridlock. This, coupled with what Schnarch delightfully calls “normal marital sadism,” can lead to marital breakdown, but it's actually an opportunity. Gridlock and tension create a dynamic environment for growth and help passion thrive. Anxiety is also good. Instead of working on anxiety reduction, couples should work on ways to tolerate anxiety via self-soothing. “Anxiety is often part of the best sex we ever have. It's part of growing sexually. Anxiety makes us pay attention to what's going on,” writes Schnarch. During sex, couples should focus on the connection, working on truly feeling their partner as they touch them. Also good is “hugging til relaxed,” which is pretty much what it sounds like. Test drive: Try for “eyes-open orgasm.” Looking deep into each other's eyes adds intimacy and meaning to sex. The more you do it, the longer you can do it and the deeper the connection. For further reading: "Passionate Marriage: Keeping Love and Intimacy Alive in Committed Relationships." * This, however, does not explain why there are so many strip clubs called Deja Vu. Jill Hamilton writes In Bed With Married Women (www.inbedwithmarriedwomen.com. Follow her on Twitter @Jill_Hamilton.
“There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, the other is getting it,” said Oscar Wilde. Passion is a tricky, elusive thing. Once captured, it flounders. But why does it wither when domesticated? Why do sexy intense beginnings so often lead to boring, sexless or otherwise meh middles and endings? Why aren't we having sex with our dear, highly-available partners, like, all the time? “Our senses crave novelty. Any change alerts them, and they send a signal into the brain. If there's no change, no novelty, they doze and register little or nothing. A constant state—even of excitement—in time becomes tedious, fades in the background because our senses have evolved to report only changes,” writes Diane Ackerman in "A Natural History of the Senses."* Or, says my friend Matthew, who thinks deeply on such things: “Once you're with someone, they become your family. And you don't want to have sex with people in your family.” Which is true enough, especially that last bit. But you can rekindle passion, at least according to the top Big Thinkers in the field, who offer differing—sometimes wildly so—theories on how to do it. By reframing things a bit, you can soon be happily fucking your beloved family member once again. Though you'll probably want to phrase that differently in your head. 1. Marnia Robinson Cred: Corporate lawyer-turned-writer and speaker on sex, relationships and porn. Co-hosts Your Brain on Porn website with husband Gary Wilson. The Big Idea: Karezza sex (slow sex without attempting orgasm) can help hack your neurochemicals. The Fix: The neurochemicals that make us so giddy with the first flush of love only last two years, tops. After that, the buzz wears off and couples get habituated (the nicer, more sciencey term for bored). Instead of trying to jack things up with new positions or sexy clown costumes that can further numb response to pleasure, slow things down with karezza sex, a form of affectionate, sensual sex that generally doesn't result in orgasm. This sex, according to Robinson, strengthens lovers' bonds and results in more frequent and satisfying sex. “It's like learning to diet by eating smarter, rather than struggling to eat less,” writes Robinson. “As my husband says, 'My limbic brain stays enchanted because I don't attempt to fertilize you.'” (Her husband, it will not surprise you to learn, is a science professor.) Test drive: Practice a “bonding behavior” like gazing into each other's eyes for several minutes or lying with your head on your partner's chest and listening to their heartbeat or synchronized breathing. Further reading: "Cupid's Poisoned Arrow: From Habit to Harmony in Sexual Relationships." 2. Shmuley Boteach Cred: American Orthodox rabbi, author and TV host. The Big Idea: Women are deep and endless sources of sexuality. Exploring that eroticism leads to richer, more profound sexual/spiritual connection. The Fix: A woman's sexuality is “much deeper and longer lasting than a man's. In the face of such intensity, most husbands fear they can't measure up,” writes Boteach in "The Kosher Sutra: 8 Sacred Secrets for Reigniting Desire and Restoring Passion for Life." But for the husband who's brave enough to jump in there and explore, there are sublime pleasures to be uncovered. “There is a part of us, a passionate part that is raw, instinctive, animal, visceral, and not attuned to social norms. It's incredibly erotic to witness this side of a person become revealed. A man who can arouse a woman to this level of abandonment witnesses something incredible,” writes Boteach, in perhaps the hottest collection of sentences you'll ever read by a rabbi. This deep sensuality flows into the rest of life, giving everything an “erotic pulse.” To get to that place, Boteach recommends “Kosher Tantric” sex, including delayed orgasm to prolong sex, making it into “a worship of the divine spark in each other.” He's also against going to the bathroom in front of each other—ruins the mystery. Test drive: Try the Jewish custom of abstaining from sex for two weeks when the woman starts her period. “Every month, there must be two weeks devoted to physical love, and two weeks devoted to intellectual communication and emotional intimacy," Boteach writes in "Kosher Sex: A Recipe for Passion and Intimacy." It may sound a bit old school and rigid, but the forbiddenness fostered by abstinence can build lust, plus the on/off plan happens to correspond nicely with most women's monthly swings of desire. Further reading: "The Kosher Sutra: 8 Sacred Secrets for Reigniting Desire and Restoring Passion for Life." 3. Esther Perel Cred: Writer, speaker, couples and family therapist. The Big Idea: We need safety and security in a relationship, yet we also need adventure and excitement. The problem is that satisfying either of these needs sort of negates the other. The trick is riding the wave between security and excitement, figuring out ways to introduce novelty, risk and mystery into the familiar and comfortable. The Fix: The erotic thrives on power plays, thwarted desire, threats of rivals and other non-safe and lovey ideas. Tap into these rich sources of desire by questioning your ideas about what's “acceptable” to you. For a lot of people, the greatest sources of excitement and pleasure have to do with childhood hurts. Being willing to poke around in these dark areas of your erotic brain is a potent natural fuel for pleasure. Test drive: Embrace the “shadow of the third.” In every relationship, there are other players, whether actual infidelities, flirtations or agreed-upon partners. Accepting this and working with it—whether by actually introducing others into your marital sex, negotiating monogamy or just feeling the arousal of a threat (perceived or real) of a romantic rival—beats complacency back and helps you see your mate as the desirable creature that they are. For further reading: "Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic + the Domestic" 4. John Gottman, Ph.D. and Julie Gottman, Ph.D. Cred: Husband and wife psychologists who run the Gottman Institute and the Relationship Research Institute. The Big Idea: Married people do best when they behave like good friends and handle conflicts in gentle positive ways. The Fix: The Gottmans are known for their Love Labs, in which they observed couples and found that future divorcees tended to handle conflict via what the Gottmans call “The 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse”: stonewalling, contempt, defensiveness and withdrawal. So don't do those. Good behaviors, which lack a catchy 4 Horseman-like name: Respond positively to your partner's “bids” (bids are requests for emotional connections via a question, quick hug and such). Create a love map—a mental list of your partner's preferences, dreams and sexual proclivities. Create rituals for initiating and refusing sex to minimize miscommunication and feelings of rejection. The resulting atmosphere of kindness and communication is conducive to “personal sex” that's focused on intimacy instead of intercourse. Test Drive: “Plan time for activities like hot baths, back rubs, touching, holding and simply making each other feel good physically and emotionally. If sex happens, that's fine. But if it doesn't, you'll still have met your expectation of enjoying time together,” advise the Gottmans. Further reading: "The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work" 5. David Schnarch, Ph.D. Cred: Psychologist, sex therapist and director of the Marriage and Family Health Institute. The Big Idea: Passion (as well as a healthy relationship) depends on “differentiation,” that is, each partner cultivating a strong sense of self, despite his or her partner's (very normal) efforts to thwart that growth. The Fix: When partners work on becoming differentiated, it creates tension and gridlock. This, coupled with what Schnarch delightfully calls “normal marital sadism,” can lead to marital breakdown, but it's actually an opportunity. Gridlock and tension create a dynamic environment for growth and help passion thrive. Anxiety is also good. Instead of working on anxiety reduction, couples should work on ways to tolerate anxiety via self-soothing. “Anxiety is often part of the best sex we ever have. It's part of growing sexually. Anxiety makes us pay attention to what's going on,” writes Schnarch. During sex, couples should focus on the connection, working on truly feeling their partner as they touch them. Also good is “hugging til relaxed,” which is pretty much what it sounds like. Test drive: Try for “eyes-open orgasm.” Looking deep into each other's eyes adds intimacy and meaning to sex. The more you do it, the longer you can do it and the deeper the connection. For further reading: "Passionate Marriage: Keeping Love and Intimacy Alive in Committed Relationships." * This, however, does not explain why there are so many strip clubs called Deja Vu. Jill Hamilton writes In Bed With Married Women (www.inbedwithmarriedwomen.com. Follow her on Twitter @Jill_Hamilton.
“The Walk” between the Twin Towers: Amazing technical wizardry powers a tale of fake transcendence
I can understand why the people who make decisions in Hollywood thought that the story of Philippe Petit, the French wirewalker who staged an improbable and illegal walk between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in August of 1974, might make a good movie. After all, the Oscar-winning documentary about Petit’s death-defying stunt or artwork or whatever it was, “Man on Wire,” played out almost like a heist thriller and, without hitting us over the head with 9/11 references, made the point that Petit’s walk belonged to a simultaneously more innocent and more chaotic era. Especially in the era of full-scale digital effects inaugurated by “Gravity” – we could almost call it digital totality – recreating 110-story buildings that no longer exist, above an altered cityscape, is more possible now than ever before. I can also understand, in a more abstract way, why Robert Zemeckis, the onetime Spielberg acolyte who directed the “Back to the Future” trilogy, “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” “Forrest Gump,” “Flight” and now “The Walk,” has a devoted fan base among movie buffs. Zemeckis is devoted to making well-crafted popcorn movies, and has always tried to use cutting-edge special effects to tell stories, rather than just to bludgeon the audience into submission. I definitely understand the appeal of Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who plays Philippe Petit in “The Walk.” Gordon-Levitt is an immensely likable and talented actor who from his first days in show business has understood himself as both an artist and an entertainer, which is exactly how Petit sees himself as well. Put those ingredients together, and what do you get? I almost don’t know how to describe it, except with overlapping and contradictory clichés. “The Walk” is much less than the sum of its parts, except when the parts are so good you can’t ignore them. If this were a short film, almost entirely about Petit’s startling and breathtaking stroll, 1,200 or so feet above the streets of lower Manhattan – he walked back and forth between the towers three times, knelt on the wire and even lay down on it to commune with passing seagulls -- it would be magnificent. The event itself, although dangerous, impractical and inherently pointless, possessed a certain magnificence that captured the imagination of New Yorkers at the time, and that Zemeckis and Gordon-Levitt gesture toward without quite reaching. But for most of the film’s two-hour running time (and it feels a bit longer than that), “The Walk” makes no effort to confront the central question that faces all mainstream American movies in this decade, and maybe all cinema of all kinds: Why am I watching this, instead of watching something on TV that is quite likely to be dramatically superior, and told in a less condescending and less ostentatious manner? If the 3-D IMAX bigness of “The Walk” is supposed to be its own reward, or to make up for the film’s superabundance of flaws – well, I’m sorry, but I’m not aboard that train and I’m not sure anyone else is either. At the risk of causing anguish among Zemeckis loyalists, I will point out that in addition to the films mentioned above, this is the guy who directed “Beowulf,” “The Polar Express” and the 2009 Jim Carrey version of “A Christmas Carol.” It wouldn’t be fair to consign “The Walk” to that category of overprocessed, patronizing and forgettable (not to mention unintentionally terrifying, in the case of the Santa-goes-to-Nuremberg nightmare of “Polar Express”), but that strain of Zemeckis-ness is unmistakably present here. Gordon-Levitt narrates much of the movie as Petit, while atop an imaginary perch on the shoulder of the Statue of Liberty. I have no way of knowing whether that was in the script all along (which is by Zemeckis and Christopher Browne, and was based on Petit’s memoir) or was spawned by last-minute producer panic: “Nobody’s gonna understand this story unless we explain the whole damn thing!” But in either case it’s a bad decision made worse by enforced whimsy: Gordon-Levitt hams up Petit’s Franglais just a little (in life, the wirewalker speaks fluent English) and wears, I swear to God, a black turtleneck. I'm sure that at some point they tried him out with a red beret and a digital platter of snails, before deciding that was un petit peu de trop. By the time we actually reach Petit’s exhilarating walk on an August morning high above a depressed, crime-ridden and nearly bankrupt city (I suppose this is irrelevant, but Petit’s artistic coup made headlines just two days before Richard Nixon’s resignation), I was simply exhausted by Zemeckis’ oppressive insistence that I was being told a valuable, thrilling and humorous story, and was having a good time. I was worn down, first of all, by the bogus picture-postcard cuteness of the film’s depiction of early-‘70s Paris, which in the real world was a troubled and divided city struggling with the wounds of 1968. I was worn down by the winsome comparisons of the young Petit to Charlie Chaplin, by the storybook artifice of his childhood as a circus-obsessed kid in a remote French village, and by the overly obvious way the script moves the character from speaking French to speaking English, long before he leaves his homeland. (To my Yank ears. Gordon-Levitt’s French is pretty good, but it’s not likely to sound convincing to native speakers.) I was annoyed by the Pointless Winsome Parisian Girlfriend played by Charlotte Le Bon, whose actions in the film consist of strumming a Leonard Cohen song and staring deeply into Petit’s eyes. I was extra-double-annoyed by the Central Casting “Noo Yawk” accents of literally everyone he encounters when Petit comes to America, and by the crowd scenes where every single extra has been positioned to help focus our attention and is acting his or her ass off. Of course I understand that Zemeckis is not pursuing realism – or at least he’d better not be, since there is no attempt to depict the social fabric of either city -- and that the manicured artifice of “The Walk” represents a series of deliberate choices. But are they good choices, or useful choices? When Zemeckis and cinematographer Dariusz Wolski and their immense modeling and digital design team deliver the wordless and transcendent experience of a man risking his life (and the lives of others) for a purpose that cannot be explained and quite likely cannot be justified, they hint at the nature of Petit’s inexplicable achievement. But “The Walk” comes nowhere close to what “Man on Wire” accomplished in terms of elucidating how and why this extraordinary coup (the right word in both French and English) was pulled off. And along the way Zemeckis undercuts the entire enterprise so thoroughly with a pompous, preachy, prettified collection of stereotypes and archetypes, stuffed with pre-baked homilies about the importance of wonder and dreams, that the transcendence feels unearned and untrustworthy. I admire his delicate final codicil, which recognizes that something happened to those buildings 27 years after Petit’s walk that lends his story special resonance, without ever mentioning what that was or showing us how that part of the island looks today. In those last images, I felt “The Walk” finally shed the turtleneck, the beret and the fake French accent and address us directly, just as it fades to black.
What James Dean could teach Matt Damon about keeping your sexuality “one of those mysteries”
For 60 years, since James Dean died in a car crash on the late afternoon of Sept. 30, 1955, at age 24, a debate has raged about him. Was he straight, gay, bisexual? Actually, the debate has been going on for longer than that. Even while he was alive, there were rumors about his private life. He didn’t help matters any when he once answered a question about his sexual orientation by saying, “No, I’m not homosexual. But I am also not going through life with one hand tied behind my back.” Then again, Dean came to fame in the mid-'50s, when everyone was straight. Clark Gable was straight and Gary Cooper was straight and Spencer Tracy was straight, and — to the public at least — Rock Hudson was straight and Greta Garbo was straight and Tab Hunter was straight. There were no homosexuals. They didn’t exist. This was the era of the celluloid closet, when there were no gay characters in pictures and no gay actors in Hollywood. To make sure that remained true, one had to look no further than the Hays Code or the press departments at the studios. Indeed, in the photo opportunities set up for Dean by Warner Bros., the studio that released his three pictures — "East of Eden," "Rebel Without a Cause" and "Giant" — he was depicted as dashing, handsome and, above all else, heterosexual. He was photographed attending movie premiers with starlets like Terry Moore and Natalie Wood. He went on a handful of dates with Ursula Andress, all of them carefully documented with pictures. But Warner Bros.’s pièce de résistance came when it arranged for Dean to have a six-week “romance” with MGM hot property Pier Angeli, generating numerous news stories and fan magazine articles. According to press reports, the couple was deeply in love, but the affair ended abruptly when Angeli chose to marry not Dean but pop singer Vic Damone. Here is the problem with the image of Dean Warner Bros. manufactured at the time. It wasn’t accurate. While he did have affairs with women, his substantive relationships were with men. Throughout the '50s and '60s, the rumors about Dean’s sexuality remained just that — rumors. Then, in the '70s, sexual politics began to change. Slowly, gay people, famous and ordinary, gained visibility. By 1975, Jonathan Gilmore, an actor who was a close friend of Dean, felt he could reveal in "The Real James Dean" that their friendship included sexual experimentation. That same year, biographer Ronald Martinetti reported in "The James Dean Story" about Dean’s involvement with Rogers Brackett. A successful advertising executive in Los Angeles, Brackett opened doors for Dean and eventually moved him to New York where he helped him land his first show on Broadway. “I loved him and Jimmy loved me,” Brackett told Martinetti. “If it was a father-son relationship, it was also somewhat incestuous.” Then, in 1992, in "Little Boy Lost," journalist Joe Hyams disclosed that Dean’s first meaningful relationship occurred while he was growing up in Fairmount, Indiana. As most of his contemporaries were going steady with girls, Dean became involved with a local Wesleyan minister named James DeWeerd. “Jimmy never mentioned our relationship nor did I,” DeWeerd said to Hyams. “It would not have helped either of us.” In 1994, I published "Boulevard of Broken Dreams: The Life, Times, and Legend of James Dean." Even though previous books had made disclosures about Dean’s homosexuality, my book was generally perceived as outing him, since I documented his affairs with men, both short- and long-term. This seemed to disturb critics. Publishers Weekly called the book “a graphic sexual biography that’s likely to shock Dean fans.” Entertainment Weekly described the book with adjectives like “steamy,” “soggy,” “skewed.” Time spent a page attacking me before concluding, “Alexander’s inferences about Dean’s private life may make for cocktail-party chatter, but they finally are irrelevant.” William Bast didn’t think so. For five years, he and Dean had had a complicated involvement, starting in college when they shared a small apartment in Santa Monica, continuing when they lived in a room at the Iroquois Hotel in New York, and going all the way up to the time Dean died when, Bast would claim, they planned on moving into a house together in Los Angeles. Bast had written the first biography of Dean, "James Dean," published the year after he died. Naturally, this being 1956, there was no mention of homosexuality. Through the years, as Bast became a successful television writer, producing mainstream fare like "The Hamptons" and "The Colbys," he maintained his friendship with Dean was platonic. So I was careful not to say their on-again, off-again friendship was sexual. Instead, I said they were so close friends thought they were having an affair. That wasn’t good enough for Bast who filed a lawsuit against me in federal court in California. According to Bast, "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" “falsely accuses me of having had a long term (often sleazy) sexual relationship with Dean.” Despite my careful use of language, he believed “no one could come away from reading the book without understanding the book to report (falsely) a five year sexual affair between Dean and me.” His lawyer added: “Plaintiff [Bast] has done nothing to deserve being so falsely portrayed in the public’s eye. As a matter of law, this false portrayal is defamatory per se…. [B]eing so portrayed around the world has thrust Plaintiff [Bast] into the public eye in a way that he does not want and which upsets him deeply.” Depositions were conducted. We were getting ready to go to trial. Then suddenly Bast dropped the suit on the condition that future editions of my book include a denial that he had had an affair with Dean. That was 1995. Fast forward to 2006. Three and a half decades after Stonewall, the public’s perception of homosexuality had changed fundamentally. Entertainers like Ellen DeGeneres and Elton John had come out only to see their careers skyrocket. The gay marriage movement had taken hold with the first state, Massachusetts, legalizing same-sex marriage in 2004. And in certain circles in Hollywood it was now trendy to be gay. So Bast published "Surviving James Dean," in which he documented his five-year love affair with Dean, what he had sued me for a decade earlier. The book’s cover claimed this new “uncompromisingly honest, revealing” book “boldly addresses the task [Bast] began [in James Dean] but was unable to do justice to at the time, owing to legal constraints imposed by his publishers, by Dean’s studio Warner Bros., and out of respect for the actor’s own family.” So in the past Bast was unable to tell the truth about his and Dean’s relationship for legal reasons! There was no mention of the fact that when I merely alluded to the true nature of their relationship Bast hauled me into court. To be fair, sexuality is often hard to describe, much less document. Since I published "Boulevard," I discovered evidence of an affair Dean had with Geraldine Page, the now legendary Academy Award-winning actress, while they appeared on Broadway in "The Immoralist." I describe the affair in my new portrait of Dean, "Being James Dean." As it happened, it was just after he stopped seeing Page, to go to California to shoot "East of Eden," that Dean consummated his affair with Bast in a hotel room in the Sonoran Desert not far from San Diego. Or so Bast revealed in "Surviving James Dean" — finally. It’s ironic that Hollywood, a staunch defender of liberal causes for decades, has had such a struggle dealing with the sexuality of the stars it creates. The problem of how and when to talk about it, and why, has not gone away either. Consider Tom Hardy, who was asked by a journalist at a recent press conference to discuss his sexuality and responded with a curt “Why?” Or Matt Damon, who now-famously announced, “It must be really hard for actors to be out publicly…. I think you’re a better actor the less people know about you, period. And sexuality is a huge part of that,” going on to call it "one of the mysteries that you should be able to play." Sixty years may have passed, but in some ways the thinking in Hollywood has not evolved much beyond the way it was the day James Dean died, at least as far as actors and their sexuality is concerned.For 60 years, since James Dean died in a car crash on the late afternoon of Sept. 30, 1955, at age 24, a debate has raged about him. Was he straight, gay, bisexual? Actually, the debate has been going on for longer than that. Even while he was alive, there were rumors about his private life. He didn’t help matters any when he once answered a question about his sexual orientation by saying, “No, I’m not homosexual. But I am also not going through life with one hand tied behind my back.” Then again, Dean came to fame in the mid-'50s, when everyone was straight. Clark Gable was straight and Gary Cooper was straight and Spencer Tracy was straight, and — to the public at least — Rock Hudson was straight and Greta Garbo was straight and Tab Hunter was straight. There were no homosexuals. They didn’t exist. This was the era of the celluloid closet, when there were no gay characters in pictures and no gay actors in Hollywood. To make sure that remained true, one had to look no further than the Hays Code or the press departments at the studios. Indeed, in the photo opportunities set up for Dean by Warner Bros., the studio that released his three pictures — "East of Eden," "Rebel Without a Cause" and "Giant" — he was depicted as dashing, handsome and, above all else, heterosexual. He was photographed attending movie premiers with starlets like Terry Moore and Natalie Wood. He went on a handful of dates with Ursula Andress, all of them carefully documented with pictures. But Warner Bros.’s pièce de résistance came when it arranged for Dean to have a six-week “romance” with MGM hot property Pier Angeli, generating numerous news stories and fan magazine articles. According to press reports, the couple was deeply in love, but the affair ended abruptly when Angeli chose to marry not Dean but pop singer Vic Damone. Here is the problem with the image of Dean Warner Bros. manufactured at the time. It wasn’t accurate. While he did have affairs with women, his substantive relationships were with men. Throughout the '50s and '60s, the rumors about Dean’s sexuality remained just that — rumors. Then, in the '70s, sexual politics began to change. Slowly, gay people, famous and ordinary, gained visibility. By 1975, Jonathan Gilmore, an actor who was a close friend of Dean, felt he could reveal in "The Real James Dean" that their friendship included sexual experimentation. That same year, biographer Ronald Martinetti reported in "The James Dean Story" about Dean’s involvement with Rogers Brackett. A successful advertising executive in Los Angeles, Brackett opened doors for Dean and eventually moved him to New York where he helped him land his first show on Broadway. “I loved him and Jimmy loved me,” Brackett told Martinetti. “If it was a father-son relationship, it was also somewhat incestuous.” Then, in 1992, in "Little Boy Lost," journalist Joe Hyams disclosed that Dean’s first meaningful relationship occurred while he was growing up in Fairmount, Indiana. As most of his contemporaries were going steady with girls, Dean became involved with a local Wesleyan minister named James DeWeerd. “Jimmy never mentioned our relationship nor did I,” DeWeerd said to Hyams. “It would not have helped either of us.” In 1994, I published "Boulevard of Broken Dreams: The Life, Times, and Legend of James Dean." Even though previous books had made disclosures about Dean’s homosexuality, my book was generally perceived as outing him, since I documented his affairs with men, both short- and long-term. This seemed to disturb critics. Publishers Weekly called the book “a graphic sexual biography that’s likely to shock Dean fans.” Entertainment Weekly described the book with adjectives like “steamy,” “soggy,” “skewed.” Time spent a page attacking me before concluding, “Alexander’s inferences about Dean’s private life may make for cocktail-party chatter, but they finally are irrelevant.” William Bast didn’t think so. For five years, he and Dean had had a complicated involvement, starting in college when they shared a small apartment in Santa Monica, continuing when they lived in a room at the Iroquois Hotel in New York, and going all the way up to the time Dean died when, Bast would claim, they planned on moving into a house together in Los Angeles. Bast had written the first biography of Dean, "James Dean," published the year after he died. Naturally, this being 1956, there was no mention of homosexuality. Through the years, as Bast became a successful television writer, producing mainstream fare like "The Hamptons" and "The Colbys," he maintained his friendship with Dean was platonic. So I was careful not to say their on-again, off-again friendship was sexual. Instead, I said they were so close friends thought they were having an affair. That wasn’t good enough for Bast who filed a lawsuit against me in federal court in California. According to Bast, "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" “falsely accuses me of having had a long term (often sleazy) sexual relationship with Dean.” Despite my careful use of language, he believed “no one could come away from reading the book without understanding the book to report (falsely) a five year sexual affair between Dean and me.” His lawyer added: “Plaintiff [Bast] has done nothing to deserve being so falsely portrayed in the public’s eye. As a matter of law, this false portrayal is defamatory per se…. [B]eing so portrayed around the world has thrust Plaintiff [Bast] into the public eye in a way that he does not want and which upsets him deeply.” Depositions were conducted. We were getting ready to go to trial. Then suddenly Bast dropped the suit on the condition that future editions of my book include a denial that he had had an affair with Dean. That was 1995. Fast forward to 2006. Three and a half decades after Stonewall, the public’s perception of homosexuality had changed fundamentally. Entertainers like Ellen DeGeneres and Elton John had come out only to see their careers skyrocket. The gay marriage movement had taken hold with the first state, Massachusetts, legalizing same-sex marriage in 2004. And in certain circles in Hollywood it was now trendy to be gay. So Bast published "Surviving James Dean," in which he documented his five-year love affair with Dean, what he had sued me for a decade earlier. The book’s cover claimed this new “uncompromisingly honest, revealing” book “boldly addresses the task [Bast] began [in James Dean] but was unable to do justice to at the time, owing to legal constraints imposed by his publishers, by Dean’s studio Warner Bros., and out of respect for the actor’s own family.” So in the past Bast was unable to tell the truth about his and Dean’s relationship for legal reasons! There was no mention of the fact that when I merely alluded to the true nature of their relationship Bast hauled me into court. To be fair, sexuality is often hard to describe, much less document. Since I published "Boulevard," I discovered evidence of an affair Dean had with Geraldine Page, the now legendary Academy Award-winning actress, while they appeared on Broadway in "The Immoralist." I describe the affair in my new portrait of Dean, "Being James Dean." As it happened, it was just after he stopped seeing Page, to go to California to shoot "East of Eden," that Dean consummated his affair with Bast in a hotel room in the Sonoran Desert not far from San Diego. Or so Bast revealed in "Surviving James Dean" — finally. It’s ironic that Hollywood, a staunch defender of liberal causes for decades, has had such a struggle dealing with the sexuality of the stars it creates. The problem of how and when to talk about it, and why, has not gone away either. Consider Tom Hardy, who was asked by a journalist at a recent press conference to discuss his sexuality and responded with a curt “Why?” Or Matt Damon, who now-famously announced, “It must be really hard for actors to be out publicly…. I think you’re a better actor the less people know about you, period. And sexuality is a huge part of that,” going on to call it "one of the mysteries that you should be able to play." Sixty years may have passed, but in some ways the thinking in Hollywood has not evolved much beyond the way it was the day James Dean died, at least as far as actors and their sexuality is concerned.
Lessons from “The Beast Side”: “Imagine how the cops would have reacted if a hate-spewing, black extremist had shot up a white church”
D. Watkins' "The Beast Side: Living (and Dying) While Black in America" is as eloquent as it is blunt in its firsthand account of how American society -- represented through brief stories from Watkins' own life shot through with pertinent socio-historical observations -- structurally devalues black lives. It's a polemic aimed not at the member of the communities represented in its pages so much as the white communities whose privilege hems in its protagonists' lives. In the introduction, Watkins presents what could be considered the Ur-example of white privilege, the manner in which the police treated Dylann Storm Roof, the young white supremacist who murdered nine parishioners in an historically black Charleston, South Carolina church earlier this year. Despite the fact that police believed him to be heavily armed, when they approach his vehicle he is taken into custody without incident; when he tells them he's hungry, the police treat him to Burger King; and when he's transported to court, he's provided with a bullet-proof vest. "Imagine how the cops would have reacted if a hate-spewing, black extremist had shot up a white church prayer meeting, telling his victims as he blasted them at point-blank range, 'I'll give you something to pray about'?" For white readers, it's a useful thought experiment -- for black readers, it's an unnecessary one. Each of the short vignettes that occupy the first half of "The Beast Side" attempt to dispel white stereotypes of inner city America via a give-and-take with bigotry, as in "Lessons of a Former Dope Dealer," which openly acknowledges that while many black youths turn to the drug trade, they apply an "inner city work ethic" that, "had they been exposed to a different way of life [would have had them] running a Fortune 500 company today." It's not the mythical inherent laziness of the so-called "welfare queen" that keeps these communities of "grinding grandma[s]" from elevating themselves out of poverty -- it's simply a lack of opportunity. Theirs is no culture of dependence, as conservatives like to argue, and the drug trade is evidence of this. As Watkins notes, the "hardworking people like us...are forced to create our own industries as a direct result of being isolated by society," which means the real question is why "employment inequality for African-Americans [is] always identified as laziness." Given that it's intended as an education for a white audience on matters that its black audience implicitly understands, it's not surprising that "The Beast Side" is at its most effective when Watkins' stories involve complex figures whose lives would be starkly different if they weren't black. There's the rapper "Young Moose" in "Crimes of the Art," whose past as a drug dealer then fueled his music, and whose lyrics then earned him a probation violation bust when he uploaded a video to YouTube. "To many people," Watkins writes, "what Moose does isn't art at all; it's just evidence." David Simon and Martin Scorsese can write and direct violent epics about life in the inner city without it being used as evidence that they're involved in criminal activity, but Moose can't. Or, as Watkins puts it, "[s]o now being black and from the ghetto bars you from artistic expression?" On one hand, Moose's life conforms to white conservatives' narrative about life in the inner city -- publish an article about the #BlackLivesMatter movement and your inbox will fill with emails about how "the animals" treat each other in President Obama's adopted hometown of Chicago, for example -- but on the other hand, it demonstrates just how little white conservative America cares to know about the circumstances that constrict the lives of people like Moose. Ask any self-identifying member of the Tea Party which of his or her rights are being actively abridged by the Obama administration, and after a short lecture on the Second Amendment, you'll learn about all the First Amendment speech protections that've fallen by the wayside in the past seven years -- even though, of course, they haven't. But conservatives' emotional connection to these imagined violations of their First Amendment rights is far more important, in their minds, than the legal and structural curtailing of Moose's right to self-expression — because black people in the inner city are, essentially, only hypothetical humans to them. Black people exist for conservative white America only as actors in a pernicious narrative about communities hell-bent on self-destruction, not as complex humans cornered in an impossible economy. Watkins' book could act as a corrective for those who believe they already know how to "solve" the "moral problem" of those who live in the inner city. Because first and foremost, it demonstrates that there is no simple moral problem to be solved after all — the amelioration of conditions in the inner city will require an economic and educational calculus far more complex than self-styled saviors of Black America like Bill O'Reilly would even dare imagine. More importantly, "The Beast Side" demonstrates that black inner-city residents are eminently worthy of salvation -- yes, they may be current slingers or former dealers, high right now or recovering addicts, or they may just be hard-working people incapable of escaping the inner city, but that doesn't mean they should be forgotten or, even worse, deliberately ignored. With strong, sober voices like Watkins' giving air to their grievances, there's hope that they soon won't be. 
D. Watkins' "The Beast Side: Living (and Dying) While Black in America" is as eloquent as it is blunt in its firsthand account of how American society -- represented through brief stories from Watkins' own life shot through with pertinent socio-historical observations -- structurally devalues black lives. It's a polemic aimed not at the member of the communities represented in its pages so much as the white communities whose privilege hems in its protagonists' lives. In the introduction, Watkins presents what could be considered the Ur-example of white privilege, the manner in which the police treated Dylann Storm Roof, the young white supremacist who murdered nine parishioners in an historically black Charleston, South Carolina church earlier this year. Despite the fact that police believed him to be heavily armed, when they approach his vehicle he is taken into custody without incident; when he tells them he's hungry, the police treat him to Burger King; and when he's transported to court, he's provided with a bullet-proof vest. "Imagine how the cops would have reacted if a hate-spewing, black extremist had shot up a white church prayer meeting, telling his victims as he blasted them at point-blank range, 'I'll give you something to pray about'?" For white readers, it's a useful thought experiment -- for black readers, it's an unnecessary one. Each of the short vignettes that occupy the first half of "The Beast Side" attempt to dispel white stereotypes of inner city America via a give-and-take with bigotry, as in "Lessons of a Former Dope Dealer," which openly acknowledges that while many black youths turn to the drug trade, they apply an "inner city work ethic" that, "had they been exposed to a different way of life [would have had them] running a Fortune 500 company today." It's not the mythical inherent laziness of the so-called "welfare queen" that keeps these communities of "grinding grandma[s]" from elevating themselves out of poverty -- it's simply a lack of opportunity. Theirs is no culture of dependence, as conservatives like to argue, and the drug trade is evidence of this. As Watkins notes, the "hardworking people like us...are forced to create our own industries as a direct result of being isolated by society," which means the real question is why "employment inequality for African-Americans [is] always identified as laziness." Given that it's intended as an education for a white audience on matters that its black audience implicitly understands, it's not surprising that "The Beast Side" is at its most effective when Watkins' stories involve complex figures whose lives would be starkly different if they weren't black. There's the rapper "Young Moose" in "Crimes of the Art," whose past as a drug dealer then fueled his music, and whose lyrics then earned him a probation violation bust when he uploaded a video to YouTube. "To many people," Watkins writes, "what Moose does isn't art at all; it's just evidence." David Simon and Martin Scorsese can write and direct violent epics about life in the inner city without it being used as evidence that they're involved in criminal activity, but Moose can't. Or, as Watkins puts it, "[s]o now being black and from the ghetto bars you from artistic expression?" On one hand, Moose's life conforms to white conservatives' narrative about life in the inner city -- publish an article about the #BlackLivesMatter movement and your inbox will fill with emails about how "the animals" treat each other in President Obama's adopted hometown of Chicago, for example -- but on the other hand, it demonstrates just how little white conservative America cares to know about the circumstances that constrict the lives of people like Moose. Ask any self-identifying member of the Tea Party which of his or her rights are being actively abridged by the Obama administration, and after a short lecture on the Second Amendment, you'll learn about all the First Amendment speech protections that've fallen by the wayside in the past seven years -- even though, of course, they haven't. But conservatives' emotional connection to these imagined violations of their First Amendment rights is far more important, in their minds, than the legal and structural curtailing of Moose's right to self-expression — because black people in the inner city are, essentially, only hypothetical humans to them. Black people exist for conservative white America only as actors in a pernicious narrative about communities hell-bent on self-destruction, not as complex humans cornered in an impossible economy. Watkins' book could act as a corrective for those who believe they already know how to "solve" the "moral problem" of those who live in the inner city. Because first and foremost, it demonstrates that there is no simple moral problem to be solved after all — the amelioration of conditions in the inner city will require an economic and educational calculus far more complex than self-styled saviors of Black America like Bill O'Reilly would even dare imagine. More importantly, "The Beast Side" demonstrates that black inner-city residents are eminently worthy of salvation -- yes, they may be current slingers or former dealers, high right now or recovering addicts, or they may just be hard-working people incapable of escaping the inner city, but that doesn't mean they should be forgotten or, even worse, deliberately ignored. With strong, sober voices like Watkins' giving air to their grievances, there's hope that they soon won't be.
D. Watkins' "The Beast Side: Living (and Dying) While Black in America" is as eloquent as it is blunt in its firsthand account of how American society -- represented through brief stories from Watkins' own life shot through with pertinent socio-historical observations -- structurally devalues black lives. It's a polemic aimed not at the member of the communities represented in its pages so much as the white communities whose privilege hems in its protagonists' lives. In the introduction, Watkins presents what could be considered the Ur-example of white privilege, the manner in which the police treated Dylann Storm Roof, the young white supremacist who murdered nine parishioners in an historically black Charleston, South Carolina church earlier this year. Despite the fact that police believed him to be heavily armed, when they approach his vehicle he is taken into custody without incident; when he tells them he's hungry, the police treat him to Burger King; and when he's transported to court, he's provided with a bullet-proof vest. "Imagine how the cops would have reacted if a hate-spewing, black extremist had shot up a white church prayer meeting, telling his victims as he blasted them at point-blank range, 'I'll give you something to pray about'?" For white readers, it's a useful thought experiment -- for black readers, it's an unnecessary one. Each of the short vignettes that occupy the first half of "The Beast Side" attempt to dispel white stereotypes of inner city America via a give-and-take with bigotry, as in "Lessons of a Former Dope Dealer," which openly acknowledges that while many black youths turn to the drug trade, they apply an "inner city work ethic" that, "had they been exposed to a different way of life [would have had them] running a Fortune 500 company today." It's not the mythical inherent laziness of the so-called "welfare queen" that keeps these communities of "grinding grandma[s]" from elevating themselves out of poverty -- it's simply a lack of opportunity. Theirs is no culture of dependence, as conservatives like to argue, and the drug trade is evidence of this. As Watkins notes, the "hardworking people like us...are forced to create our own industries as a direct result of being isolated by society," which means the real question is why "employment inequality for African-Americans [is] always identified as laziness." Given that it's intended as an education for a white audience on matters that its black audience implicitly understands, it's not surprising that "The Beast Side" is at its most effective when Watkins' stories involve complex figures whose lives would be starkly different if they weren't black. There's the rapper "Young Moose" in "Crimes of the Art," whose past as a drug dealer then fueled his music, and whose lyrics then earned him a probation violation bust when he uploaded a video to YouTube. "To many people," Watkins writes, "what Moose does isn't art at all; it's just evidence." David Simon and Martin Scorsese can write and direct violent epics about life in the inner city without it being used as evidence that they're involved in criminal activity, but Moose can't. Or, as Watkins puts it, "[s]o now being black and from the ghetto bars you from artistic expression?" On one hand, Moose's life conforms to white conservatives' narrative about life in the inner city -- publish an article about the #BlackLivesMatter movement and your inbox will fill with emails about how "the animals" treat each other in President Obama's adopted hometown of Chicago, for example -- but on the other hand, it demonstrates just how little white conservative America cares to know about the circumstances that constrict the lives of people like Moose. Ask any self-identifying member of the Tea Party which of his or her rights are being actively abridged by the Obama administration, and after a short lecture on the Second Amendment, you'll learn about all the First Amendment speech protections that've fallen by the wayside in the past seven years -- even though, of course, they haven't. But conservatives' emotional connection to these imagined violations of their First Amendment rights is far more important, in their minds, than the legal and structural curtailing of Moose's right to self-expression — because black people in the inner city are, essentially, only hypothetical humans to them. Black people exist for conservative white America only as actors in a pernicious narrative about communities hell-bent on self-destruction, not as complex humans cornered in an impossible economy. Watkins' book could act as a corrective for those who believe they already know how to "solve" the "moral problem" of those who live in the inner city. Because first and foremost, it demonstrates that there is no simple moral problem to be solved after all — the amelioration of conditions in the inner city will require an economic and educational calculus far more complex than self-styled saviors of Black America like Bill O'Reilly would even dare imagine. More importantly, "The Beast Side" demonstrates that black inner-city residents are eminently worthy of salvation -- yes, they may be current slingers or former dealers, high right now or recovering addicts, or they may just be hard-working people incapable of escaping the inner city, but that doesn't mean they should be forgotten or, even worse, deliberately ignored. With strong, sober voices like Watkins' giving air to their grievances, there's hope that they soon won't be.
HBO’s sexually-explicit mandate for “Westworld” extras is stricter than a porn contract
UPDATE: Deadline reports HBO denies the casting note came from the network. "The document that the background actors were given was created by an outside extras casting vendor,” said HBO in a statement. "It was not requested, written or approved by HBO, Warner Bros. Television, or the producers, and contains situations that we do not require of any actor. We are rectifying immediately the discrepancies in this vendor’s document with our actual on-set practices, which provide a professional and comfortable working environment for all performers.” HBO’s 2016 series "Westworld," based on the 1973 Michael Crichton film of the same name, about “a dark odyssey about the dawn of artificial consciousness and the future of sin,” is causing a stir not because of its plotlines, or its cast, which includes Anthony Hopkins, Ed Harris, Evan Rachel Wood, James Marsden, and Thandie Newton, but because of a particularly explicit casting call. According to The Hollywood Reporter, on Tuesday, extras were required to sign a consent form detailing exactly which kinds of nude sex acts they could expect to be required as part of their jobs. “The explicit consent form itself wouldn’t pass standards reviews at a broadcast network as it recites that the performer ‘may be required to perform genital-to-genital touching, simulate oral sex with hand-to-genital touching, contort to form a table-like shape while being fully nude, pose on all fours while others who are fully nude ride on your back, [and] ride on someone's back while you are both fully nude.” The form went on to say, “If you object to or are not comfortable with working on the Project for any reason, including the graphic nature, required Various Acts, and/or the Project Environment described in this Disclosure & Consent, you will not be able to work on this project.” That wording seems to leave little room for asking questions, getting clarification, or stating preferences as to what types of sex acts an actor might find acceptable. Union SAG-AFTRA (Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists) posted a notice to members of the Westworld production stating, “This is to advise all SAG-AFTRA represented background actors who signed this document that to the extent it conflicts with the SAG-AFTRA Television Agreement, it is unenforceable. The SAG-AFTRA Agreement provides that consent to appear in scenes requiring nudity or sex acts may be withdrawn at any time (consent may not be withdrawn as to scenes already shot).” As the Los Angeles Times put it, “It appears that the union’s true concern lay with the idea that its members may not comprehend that the SAG-AFTRA Agreement ensures that though they’ve signed a consent form, consent to appear in scenes requiring nudity or sex acts can be withdrawn regardless, so long as the scenes have not already been shot.” The wording of the original form is highly problematic, especially if extras are being told, whether directly or subtly, that they have little choice as to what they do with their naked bodies. According to The A.V. Club, “SAG-AFTRA, the union representing the actors, is sending a representative to be in attendance for the shoot, which it only does when it’s worried about potential infractions. The union worked hard to ensure that its members know they have the right to withdraw consent at any time, at least until the scenes are filmed, at which point their rights become akin to those of someone who posts selfies on the internet.” What struck me about the consent form was that it seemed even more overreaching than what porn performers are asked to do. Namely, performers seem to be being asked ahead of time to consent to various acts, such as “genital-to-genital touching.” I asked Kitty Stryker, head of production at porn company TROUBLEfilms, what she requires of her actors (Stryker has also acted in porn films). “We don't write contracts telling our performers what to do with their bodies,” Stryker told Salon via email. “They are encouraged to negotiate their scene offset ahead of time with their partner/s and to let us know how they want the scene to go. I imagine some companies might have contracts stating how much will be paid for what sexual acts, but that's not how we roll at TROUBLEfilms—you're paid the same regardless of sexual acts performed, gender, ethnicity, or ability.” If even porn companies aren’t requiring actors to sign on in advance to performing sex acts—or simulated sex acts—on camera, why should it be okay for HBO to? Refinery29 has suggested the contract terms were leaked in order to generate buzz about “how sexy” the show will be. Business Insider implied much the same with its headline, “This sexually explicit casting contract reveals just how kinky HBO's 'Westworld' could be.” Considering the vast coverage it’s gotten in a matter of hours, that certainly could be one possibility. A 2014 casting call for the show didn’t feature any language regarding sexually explicit acts. It’s fine if HBO wants to tout that it’s got a racy new show, but its sex appeal shouldn’t come at the expense of the express consent of its actors. I’m sure plenty of extras don’t mind getting down and dirty for the show, but they should at least know their rights and not be intimidated into agreeing to performing in scenes where they fear losing their job because they don’t want to spread their legs.
Kevin McCarthy’s silver-plated gift to Hillary Clinton: What his Benghazi blunder reveals about the GOP’s warped priorities
House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy is, at this moment, the Democrats’ best pal. He went on Fox News last night to talk up his campaign to replace outgoing House Speaker John Boehner, and he ended up saying out loud and on television the one thing Republicans aren’t supposed to say about the House Select Committee on Benghazi: it’s all about taking down Hillary Clinton: This is an archetypal example of the Kinsley Gaffe: a politician accidentally uttering a truthful statement. Anyone who’s paid even cursory attention to the GOP’s treatment of the Benghazi attacks will likely have already concluded that the party’s interest in the matter is linked to Hillary Clinton’s presidential ambitions. But it’s still bracing to see one of the most powerful Republicans in Washington come right out and brag about how he and his colleagues set up a taxpayer-funded investigation to damage the political prospects of the opposition party’s leading presidential candidate. It’s downright scandalous, and precisely the sort of political corruption that Republicans argue is at the heart of the Obama administration’s response to Benghazi. No less remarkable is the fact that McCarthy offered up the politicized Benghazi investigation as an “example” of how he would conduct business as Speaker of the House. He just put it right out there and told Sean Hannity that the McCarthy Congress will be a series of investigations aimed at hurting the Democrats’ chances of electoral success. He’s also impugned what little credibility Benghazi committee chair Trey Gowdy enjoys, and he’s given critics of the committee all the reason they need to trash the committee as a disreputable and untrustworthy exercise in partisan scapegoating. One Democratic member of the Benghazi committee had already called for the investigation to be shut down, and other Democrats are doing the same in the aftermath of McCarthy’s remarks. The Benghazi committee has always been wrapped in obvious fictions that provide its members and supporters with the barest minimum of plausible deniability as to its true purpose. We were told that the committee was necessary because dang it, we still just don’t know what happened in Benghazi (just ignore the half-dozen or so official investigations that preceded it). Committee chair Trey Gowdy frequently asserts that he is concerned only with information that is relevant to the committee’s mandate (as he’s expanded the investigation to areas that, by his own admission, are outside the committee’s purview and have little or nothing to do with the Benghazi attacks). Gowdy also insists that he’s running a professional investigation that has no interest in partisan politics and is committed to learning the truth about the events that led to the deaths of four Americans (as it leaks at every given opportunity, feeding often misleading information about Clinton’s emails to reporters). McCarthy’s candor has robbed the committee of its already specious claims to credibility. And he’s handed Clinton a powerful weapon to use against her critics. The Clintons’ political history is defined in part by the self-destructive behavior of Republicans during the 1990s, who turned the congressional oversight process into a nakedly political enterprise to destroy Bill and Hillary. With the likely next Speaker of the House boasting about the Benghazi committee’s political agenda and holding it up as an example of how he’d run things in his chamber, Hillary can say it’s déjà vu all over again, and you’d be hard-pressed to disagree with her. 
House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy is, at this moment, the Democrats’ best pal. He went on Fox News last night to talk up his campaign to replace outgoing House Speaker John Boehner, and he ended up saying out loud and on television the one thing Republicans aren’t supposed to say about the House Select Committee on Benghazi: it’s all about taking down Hillary Clinton: This is an archetypal example of the Kinsley Gaffe: a politician accidentally uttering a truthful statement. Anyone who’s paid even cursory attention to the GOP’s treatment of the Benghazi attacks will likely have already concluded that the party’s interest in the matter is linked to Hillary Clinton’s presidential ambitions. But it’s still bracing to see one of the most powerful Republicans in Washington come right out and brag about how he and his colleagues set up a taxpayer-funded investigation to damage the political prospects of the opposition party’s leading presidential candidate. It’s downright scandalous, and precisely the sort of political corruption that Republicans argue is at the heart of the Obama administration’s response to Benghazi. No less remarkable is the fact that McCarthy offered up the politicized Benghazi investigation as an “example” of how he would conduct business as Speaker of the House. He just put it right out there and told Sean Hannity that the McCarthy Congress will be a series of investigations aimed at hurting the Democrats’ chances of electoral success. He’s also impugned what little credibility Benghazi committee chair Trey Gowdy enjoys, and he’s given critics of the committee all the reason they need to trash the committee as a disreputable and untrustworthy exercise in partisan scapegoating. One Democratic member of the Benghazi committee had already called for the investigation to be shut down, and other Democrats are doing the same in the aftermath of McCarthy’s remarks. The Benghazi committee has always been wrapped in obvious fictions that provide its members and supporters with the barest minimum of plausible deniability as to its true purpose. We were told that the committee was necessary because dang it, we still just don’t know what happened in Benghazi (just ignore the half-dozen or so official investigations that preceded it). Committee chair Trey Gowdy frequently asserts that he is concerned only with information that is relevant to the committee’s mandate (as he’s expanded the investigation to areas that, by his own admission, are outside the committee’s purview and have little or nothing to do with the Benghazi attacks). Gowdy also insists that he’s running a professional investigation that has no interest in partisan politics and is committed to learning the truth about the events that led to the deaths of four Americans (as it leaks at every given opportunity, feeding often misleading information about Clinton’s emails to reporters). McCarthy’s candor has robbed the committee of its already specious claims to credibility. And he’s handed Clinton a powerful weapon to use against her critics. The Clintons’ political history is defined in part by the self-destructive behavior of Republicans during the 1990s, who turned the congressional oversight process into a nakedly political enterprise to destroy Bill and Hillary. With the likely next Speaker of the House boasting about the Benghazi committee’s political agenda and holding it up as an example of how he’d run things in his chamber, Hillary can say it’s déjà vu all over again, and you’d be hard-pressed to disagree with her.
House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy is, at this moment, the Democrats’ best pal. He went on Fox News last night to talk up his campaign to replace outgoing House Speaker John Boehner, and he ended up saying out loud and on television the one thing Republicans aren’t supposed to say about the House Select Committee on Benghazi: it’s all about taking down Hillary Clinton: This is an archetypal example of the Kinsley Gaffe: a politician accidentally uttering a truthful statement. Anyone who’s paid even cursory attention to the GOP’s treatment of the Benghazi attacks will likely have already concluded that the party’s interest in the matter is linked to Hillary Clinton’s presidential ambitions. But it’s still bracing to see one of the most powerful Republicans in Washington come right out and brag about how he and his colleagues set up a taxpayer-funded investigation to damage the political prospects of the opposition party’s leading presidential candidate. It’s downright scandalous, and precisely the sort of political corruption that Republicans argue is at the heart of the Obama administration’s response to Benghazi. No less remarkable is the fact that McCarthy offered up the politicized Benghazi investigation as an “example” of how he would conduct business as Speaker of the House. He just put it right out there and told Sean Hannity that the McCarthy Congress will be a series of investigations aimed at hurting the Democrats’ chances of electoral success. He’s also impugned what little credibility Benghazi committee chair Trey Gowdy enjoys, and he’s given critics of the committee all the reason they need to trash the committee as a disreputable and untrustworthy exercise in partisan scapegoating. One Democratic member of the Benghazi committee had already called for the investigation to be shut down, and other Democrats are doing the same in the aftermath of McCarthy’s remarks. The Benghazi committee has always been wrapped in obvious fictions that provide its members and supporters with the barest minimum of plausible deniability as to its true purpose. We were told that the committee was necessary because dang it, we still just don’t know what happened in Benghazi (just ignore the half-dozen or so official investigations that preceded it). Committee chair Trey Gowdy frequently asserts that he is concerned only with information that is relevant to the committee’s mandate (as he’s expanded the investigation to areas that, by his own admission, are outside the committee’s purview and have little or nothing to do with the Benghazi attacks). Gowdy also insists that he’s running a professional investigation that has no interest in partisan politics and is committed to learning the truth about the events that led to the deaths of four Americans (as it leaks at every given opportunity, feeding often misleading information about Clinton’s emails to reporters). McCarthy’s candor has robbed the committee of its already specious claims to credibility. And he’s handed Clinton a powerful weapon to use against her critics. The Clintons’ political history is defined in part by the self-destructive behavior of Republicans during the 1990s, who turned the congressional oversight process into a nakedly political enterprise to destroy Bill and Hillary. With the likely next Speaker of the House boasting about the Benghazi committee’s political agenda and holding it up as an example of how he’d run things in his chamber, Hillary can say it’s déjà vu all over again, and you’d be hard-pressed to disagree with her.
Bridezilla, put away that bill: No, you can’t invoice your no-show guests
Is it bizarre, appalling, mean-spirited, or all of the above? That’s surely part of what’s going through the mind of a Minnesota woman who was sent a bill by the bride of a wedding she was not able to attend. Here’s the lead from the Minneapolis television station KARE:
It was a couple weeks ago, Jessica Baker was getting ready to go to a wedding with her husband when she got a call from her mom. "She called at the last minute and had something come up and said I can't make it," said Baker. Her mom was supposed to watch their kids. And since the invitation said no children, that meant no wedding. But then this week, she received a bill for the dinner they were supposed to have enjoyed.The bill came to $79.50 and came with a note: "This cost reflects the amount paid by the bride and groom for meals that were RSVP'd for, reimbursement and explanation for no show, card, call or text would be appreciated.” (The bill also included a helpful $7.95 service and tax charge.) Wow. So how to break this down ethically? Weddings are expensive – somewhere between $25,000 and $30,000, with significant regional variations between New York City and Alaska. (Minneapolis is probably right in the middle of the pack.) But they almost always involve a lot of fussing over the guest list. If you’ve had people flake on you after they RSVP’d to an enormously pricey party you chose to invite them to, you know it’s frustrating. Not only did you pay for their food and drink (two herb-crusted walleyes!), you had to leave out other people – colleagues from work, relatives, actual friends -- who you could have asked instead. But to send them a bill? Presumably, the bride and groom invited this couple because they liked them. So to treat them like patients who skipped a doctor’s appointment is a little weird. So what is Baker to do? Well, for now, she seems to be ignoring the bill. (Are there collection agencies that will pursue such a thing?) But besides venting on Facebook and speaking to a local television station, there’s not much else she can do. That’s why we’re delighted with a new technological wonder: A Yelp-like app for rating… people. The Washington Post describes Peeble this way:
When the app does launch, probably in late November, you will be able to assign reviews and one- to five-star ratings to everyone you know: your exes, your co-workers, the old guy who lives next door. You can’t opt out — once someone puts your name in the Peeple system, it’s there unless you violate the site’s terms of service. And you can’t delete bad or biased reviews — that would defeat the whole purpose.One of the app’s co-founders, Julia Cordray, sees it as a helpful tool: “As two empathetic, female entrepreneurs in the tech space, we want to spread love and positivity. We want to operate with thoughtfulness.” Well, given the way the web bullying, Yelp ratings, and crowdsourcing in general have gone so far, this persistence of good vibes is kind of hard to fathom. There are some safeguards built in, but they seem pretty easy to jack. It also makes us think of Evgeny Morozov's diagnosis of "technology solutionism." And isn’t the whole idea here a bit invasive? “Where once you may have viewed a date or a teacher conference as a private encounter, Peeple transforms it into a radically public performance: Everything you do can be judged, publicized, recorded,” the Post points out. “That justification hasn’t worked out so well, though, for the various edgy apps that have tried it before." Now, I’m afraid this whole thing is making my skin crawl. But sometimes, two wrongs do make a right. There are not a lot of people who deserve to be “rated” on a creepy site that quantifies human beings. But if anyone does, it’s someone who would sent a friend a bill for missing a party when childcare falls through. Let’s keep our fingers crossed that Peeble will be used to shame obnoxious behavior. And that it’s founders find a way to change the app’s name before it’s too late.Is it bizarre, appalling, mean-spirited, or all of the above? That’s surely part of what’s going through the mind of a Minnesota woman who was sent a bill by the bride of a wedding she was not able to attend. Here’s the lead from the Minneapolis television station KARE:
It was a couple weeks ago, Jessica Baker was getting ready to go to a wedding with her husband when she got a call from her mom. "She called at the last minute and had something come up and said I can't make it," said Baker. Her mom was supposed to watch their kids. And since the invitation said no children, that meant no wedding. But then this week, she received a bill for the dinner they were supposed to have enjoyed.The bill came to $79.50 and came with a note: "This cost reflects the amount paid by the bride and groom for meals that were RSVP'd for, reimbursement and explanation for no show, card, call or text would be appreciated.” (The bill also included a helpful $7.95 service and tax charge.) Wow. So how to break this down ethically? Weddings are expensive – somewhere between $25,000 and $30,000, with significant regional variations between New York City and Alaska. (Minneapolis is probably right in the middle of the pack.) But they almost always involve a lot of fussing over the guest list. If you’ve had people flake on you after they RSVP’d to an enormously pricey party you chose to invite them to, you know it’s frustrating. Not only did you pay for their food and drink (two herb-crusted walleyes!), you had to leave out other people – colleagues from work, relatives, actual friends -- who you could have asked instead. But to send them a bill? Presumably, the bride and groom invited this couple because they liked them. So to treat them like patients who skipped a doctor’s appointment is a little weird. So what is Baker to do? Well, for now, she seems to be ignoring the bill. (Are there collection agencies that will pursue such a thing?) But besides venting on Facebook and speaking to a local television station, there’s not much else she can do. That’s why we’re delighted with a new technological wonder: A Yelp-like app for rating… people. The Washington Post describes Peeble this way:
When the app does launch, probably in late November, you will be able to assign reviews and one- to five-star ratings to everyone you know: your exes, your co-workers, the old guy who lives next door. You can’t opt out — once someone puts your name in the Peeple system, it’s there unless you violate the site’s terms of service. And you can’t delete bad or biased reviews — that would defeat the whole purpose.One of the app’s co-founders, Julia Cordray, sees it as a helpful tool: “As two empathetic, female entrepreneurs in the tech space, we want to spread love and positivity. We want to operate with thoughtfulness.” Well, given the way the web bullying, Yelp ratings, and crowdsourcing in general have gone so far, this persistence of good vibes is kind of hard to fathom. There are some safeguards built in, but they seem pretty easy to jack. It also makes us think of Evgeny Morozov's diagnosis of "technology solutionism." And isn’t the whole idea here a bit invasive? “Where once you may have viewed a date or a teacher conference as a private encounter, Peeple transforms it into a radically public performance: Everything you do can be judged, publicized, recorded,” the Post points out. “That justification hasn’t worked out so well, though, for the various edgy apps that have tried it before." Now, I’m afraid this whole thing is making my skin crawl. But sometimes, two wrongs do make a right. There are not a lot of people who deserve to be “rated” on a creepy site that quantifies human beings. But if anyone does, it’s someone who would sent a friend a bill for missing a party when childcare falls through. Let’s keep our fingers crossed that Peeble will be used to shame obnoxious behavior. And that it’s founders find a way to change the app’s name before it’s too late.
America’s Pope Francis fantasies don’t make sense: Kim Davis shows why he was never going to be a progressive mascot
This just in: the head of the Catholic Church doesn't love gay marriage. Stunning, I know. Yet when news of Pope Francis's meeting with Kim Davis, currently America's most famous homophobe, leaked out on Wednesday, people seemed surprised. Pope Francis, that raging lefty, embracing such a bigot? Uh, yeah. The Catholic Church is an anti-gay institution. Francis has been on record many times expressing his hostility to gay marriage. He has been very careful not to change any church doctrine on homosexuality. The only reason to suspect that he wouldn't want to meet with someone like Kim Davis—a woman who went to jail in defense of her religious beliefs—is that it just looks so bad. More than anything, it's a highly divisive thing to do during a trip that generated so much broad-based goodwill, and it doesn't dovetail with Francis's progressive posturing on things like the environment or poverty or criminal justice. This is where we need to step back and remind ourselves of a few things: Pope Francis is an extremely canny political actor. He's been a master at managing public relations. He's successfully yanked the Vatican away from the dour, stolid sense of decay that hung around Pope Benedict. But it's a mystery why people thought that his clearly razor-sharp political antenna would only be tuned in a leftward direction. We're talking about someone who—putting aside the sincerity of his own views on issues like marriage or contraception—is leading a deeply conservative institution with an increasingly restless conservative flank. Those conservatives have been clamoring for Francis to be more vocal about their fun pet issues, like the issue of how gay people are bad. What better scrap of red meat to toss to that constituency than to meet with Kim Davis? The meeting was even in secret and in private, lending it an extra-special air. The only other such meeting that Francis held on his American trip was with victims of church sex abuse. The equating of the two issues is certainly offensive to many, but there will be a lot of homophobic bishops breathing a sigh of relief at the seeming importance that Francis placed on the marriage question. Above all, the Davis meeting should remind people that, despite his indie posturing, Francis isn't running for president of liberal America. He's heading a global religious grouping of 1.2 billion people. The insistence that we place him on some traditional left-right spectrum is maddening. What does it matter to him if people see an inconsistency in his rhetoric around climate change and his refusal to contemplate female priests? All religions are a jumble of contradictory rules and regulations; why should Francis be any different? The breathlessness with which his calls to end the death penalty—an entirely traditional Catholic line of thinking—was received is another indication that people are forgetting about who exactly they're dealing with. More broadly speaking, anybody wishing to spur change in the Catholic Church should look past Pope Francis. It is ordinary people, and people's movements, that will force change, just as they've always done. Look at Ireland, a country synonymous with Catholicism that became the first nation in the world to legalize same-sex marriage by popular vote. Catholic leaders there were left wondering how they would reconnect with the millions who seemed to have rejected them. Look at the ever-widening schism in the Anglican church, where some factions have decided that they can accept gay people and other factions haven't. Religions are living, malleable things. Their rules can be rewritten. Francis might not be the pope to lead that change, but who knows what will happen down the line?
Indiana GOP’s House Leader resigns after texting sexually explicit video of himself cheating on wife to everyone on his “Contacts” list
The controversial House Majority Leader in Indiana -- he cosponsored the state's "religious freedom" law -- resigned suddenly on Tuesday after a sexually compromising video was sent to all of the people on his "Contacts" list, the Advocate's Bil Browning reports. After news of the mass-texting began to circulate, Representative Jud McMillin (R) claimed that his "phone was stolen in Canada and out of my control for about 24 hours. I have just been able to reactivate it under my control. Please disregard any messages you received recently. I am truly sorry for anything offensive you may have received." But his "Canadian girlfriend stole my phone" defense apparently didn't convince many of his "Contacts" -- or at least, not the ones who mattered -- and so Tuesday night he released a statement in which he said that the "time is right for me to pass the torch and spend more time with my family." During his five years in the legislature, McMillin has crusaded to "protect the integrity of the institution of marriage," but the Advocate reported that the woman on the video he texted was not, in fact, his wife. According to his campaign website, he claimed that "the family has always been the foundation of our strength of community" and that "[i]n these times of turmoil the rest of the country could learn something from our example." It's unclear what the rest of the country could learn from his example at this time, other than -- perhaps -- opposing LGBTQ rights across the board could have karmic implications for conservative Republicans with a proclivity for taking videos of themselves cheating on their wives.The controversial House Majority Leader in Indiana -- he cosponsored the state's "religious freedom" law -- resigned suddenly on Tuesday after a sexually compromising video was sent to all of the people on his "Contacts" list, the Advocate's Bil Browning reports. After news of the mass-texting began to circulate, Representative Jud McMillin (R) claimed that his "phone was stolen in Canada and out of my control for about 24 hours. I have just been able to reactivate it under my control. Please disregard any messages you received recently. I am truly sorry for anything offensive you may have received." But his "Canadian girlfriend stole my phone" defense apparently didn't convince many of his "Contacts" -- or at least, not the ones who mattered -- and so Tuesday night he released a statement in which he said that the "time is right for me to pass the torch and spend more time with my family." During his five years in the legislature, McMillin has crusaded to "protect the integrity of the institution of marriage," but the Advocate reported that the woman on the video he texted was not, in fact, his wife. According to his campaign website, he claimed that "the family has always been the foundation of our strength of community" and that "[i]n these times of turmoil the rest of the country could learn something from our example." It's unclear what the rest of the country could learn from his example at this time, other than -- perhaps -- opposing LGBTQ rights across the board could have karmic implications for conservative Republicans with a proclivity for taking videos of themselves cheating on their wives.The controversial House Majority Leader in Indiana -- he cosponsored the state's "religious freedom" law -- resigned suddenly on Tuesday after a sexually compromising video was sent to all of the people on his "Contacts" list, the Advocate's Bil Browning reports. After news of the mass-texting began to circulate, Representative Jud McMillin (R) claimed that his "phone was stolen in Canada and out of my control for about 24 hours. I have just been able to reactivate it under my control. Please disregard any messages you received recently. I am truly sorry for anything offensive you may have received." But his "Canadian girlfriend stole my phone" defense apparently didn't convince many of his "Contacts" -- or at least, not the ones who mattered -- and so Tuesday night he released a statement in which he said that the "time is right for me to pass the torch and spend more time with my family." During his five years in the legislature, McMillin has crusaded to "protect the integrity of the institution of marriage," but the Advocate reported that the woman on the video he texted was not, in fact, his wife. According to his campaign website, he claimed that "the family has always been the foundation of our strength of community" and that "[i]n these times of turmoil the rest of the country could learn something from our example." It's unclear what the rest of the country could learn from his example at this time, other than -- perhaps -- opposing LGBTQ rights across the board could have karmic implications for conservative Republicans with a proclivity for taking videos of themselves cheating on their wives.
September 29, 2015
Secrets of “Saturday Night Live’s” writers room: “The pressure was intense, but it was incredible”
Nearly 30 years ago, Second City alum Christine Zander was asked to audition for “SNL.” Her friend and frequent performing partner Nora Dunn was already on the cast and being kept on for the 1986-87 season, but Lorne Michaels was letting nearly everyone else go, and looking for new talent. Zander flew out to Burbank, did her bit, and … then ended up finding a job bartending. But a few months later, “SNL” called to offer her a seat in the writers room, headed by Jim Downey. Zander tells Salon that taking that job was one of the great decisions of her life. Though the schedule there was brutal—the work week began Monday afternoon and ran until late Saturday night—and Zander was often one of two women in a roomful of men, she says her seven years at “SNL” were some of her funniest, most creative, artistically liberated of her writing career. And they’d have to be: She was in a room with writers Al Franken, Rosie Shuster, Bonnie and Terry Turner, Marc Shaiman and Robert Smigel, and writing for cast members like her old pal Dunn, as well as Jan Hooks, Julia Sweeney and Mike Myers, among many others. Since leaving, Zander has worked consistently for nearly three decades, producing and writing on comedies such as “3rd Rock From the Sun,” “Samantha Who?,” “Nurse Jackie,” “Raising Hope” and, most recently, ABC Family’s “Kevin From Work.” She spoke with Salon about the first sketch she ever wrote for “SNL,” as well as some of her favorites; recounts her experience being a pregnant woman in a predominantly male writers room; reflects on the possible limitations of being on the cast for too long; and gives us a glimpse into the “SNL” writing process. Julia Sweeney had the most wonderful things to say about you. You two worked closely together at “SNL,” is that right? Yes. Julia came in and I was at “SNL” for seven seasons and I think she came in maybe the sixth season? We wrote together. It was so wonderful, so easy and fun. We bonded instantly. She’s just a great person and a great, great writer. And I worked with Nora. In 1986, Al [Franken] and Tom [Davis] came to Chicago looking to audition people [for “SNL”] because that show was such a disaster, with the cast. I didn’t get an audition. I was doing performance and stuff in Chicago. Were you at Second City? I studied at Second City and then I was just doing whatever I wanted to. Nora and I used to perform together on different stages in Chicago, different bars and things, doing kind of our own comedy characters. In the 1980s and ’90s in Chicago, you could perform anywhere. I think you still can, too. It’s such a great place to wet your toes and learn a lot. Then “SNL” hired Nora, and in ’87, they needed more people, so I got to audition for the show. They flew me to Burbank and I did eight minutes of original material. Other people were there, like Phil Hartman and Jan Hooks. Probably Lovitz. And I had dinner with Nora and Lorne after the whole deal and Jan got hired. They really made the right choice. They had you go to Burbank? Yeah. It was at NBC in Burbank, on the Johnny Carson set. They had people audition there. So I didn’t make it, but they were nice to me. Nora kind of kept the bug in their ear that I existed. Six months later, they called and said, “Do you want to come write?” And I was bartending, so I said, “Yes, yes I DO want to write!” Then that was it. I got there and I learned how to do it. I think Lorne would have been OK with me trying to be on-camera, but for some reason, I just decided that I preferred to cultivate relationships with the cast and write. And I’m glad I did because now it’s my 28th year of being in the Writers Guild and working constantly. Were there other women in the writers room at that time? When I got there, the only other female writer was Rosie Shuster. She was lovely, and took me under her wing. But it was mostly all guys. It was smaller when I was there—about 12 writers—and it was the greats: Jim Downey was our head writer and Jack Handey was there. George Meyer and Robert Smigel, Al Franken, Tom Davis, and A. Whitney Brown. And of course the cast wrote—they all collaborated. Shortly after I arrived, Bonnie and Terry Turner came. I became close friends with Jack and Al and Bonnie and Terry, so I wasn’t lonely. We’d all wander into each other’s offices late at night if we needed help or didn’t have any ideas and kind of hopped onto other people’s things. I mean, it was terrifying. It was really emotionally hard and physically hard. It is a young man/woman’s game. I think I ate one meal a day. The pressure was intense, but it was incredible. Now that I look back at it, there’s no anger. There’s no bad feelings. It’s just warm and fuzzy, wonderful. That feeling of how lucky I was to go to what to me was the best university in the world. That is a grueling schedule, I imagine, going non-stop from Monday afternoon to late Saturday night. Yeah. I think it might have gotten a little bit more structured now over the last 10 or 15 years, but it was a self-imposed terrible schedule. You didn’t have to start work at 5 on Monday. You didn’t have to come in at 4 on Tuesday. Everything was just on tradition from ’75—this procrastination, and start working late at night and work all night long and it all goes toward the Wednesday table read that you stay up all night for. Three years in, I had a baby, so I think I might have come in a little earlier, but I still stayed up late. It was hard. I can imagine. I can’t see a place like that being especially family-friendly. At that point, most of the guys in the cast had children. Al was a big family guy. He had a couple of kids and had been through a lot. I remember when I got pregnant, I waited to tell people until it was safe. Andy Breckman didn’t know yet, and he started to say, “Zander, you shouldn’t get pregnant now. It’s too hard.” We were talking about it somehow, maybe I was talking to Al and then Breckman came in and said, “What are you guys talking about?” “Oh, Zander was talking about getting pregnant.” My terrific memory from that was it spread around the office and everyone was happy, and then a lot of the guys put my name on all of their sketches so it was as if I had written on all of them. So, my experience being pregnant and being a woman on that show was it was pretty great because they had no idea what I was going through so they coddled me. Nobody was mad that I was pregnant. It was just, We don’t know what’s going on with her body so just be really nice to her. [Laughs.] Because they’re all young, except the older guys like Al and Jack. The thing that I did miss was there were a lot of great women that worked behind the scenes too who were very helpful and very considerate. You weren’t working with a lot of women. It was just Rosie and then when Rosie left, it was just Bonnie Turner. And then Marilyn Miller would come and go, but that was it for female writers. Were there cast members that you would pretty much work with exclusively? I was really close to Nora because we had been close friends in Chicago so we did a lot of stuff together. And then when we’d get something finished, I’d end up writing with other actors or other writers. I’d wander into Mike Myers’ office. He’d be writing something for himself and I’d help or co-write it with him. Or I’d go just totally conceptual with Jack Handey. It was really kind of collaborative but I did always feel like I needed to work on women’s things because you had to, you should, otherwise not a lot of people would. I’m not saying that men didn’t write for women because they did. What was your first sketch that you got to air? It was for Bill Murray and it was about a guy that Jan Hooks had met in a bar and she got totally drunk and slept with him. Basically, she just wakes up and he’s taken over her apartment and her life. He’s spoken to her mother. He set her cat free. He has plans for the future and he’s a nightmare. He’s this freeloading guy. [They’d hooked up] after she’d had one too many margaritas. I might add too that it was 1987, so we could still do fucking in bars. AIDS was there, but we straight people weren’t worrying about it. I always think of that too, because now you can do it, but everyone knows what you have to do to have that kind of sex. So how do you come to the table on Monday with fresh material, after having just finished late on Saturday night? You are exhausted, since you’re up late and you only have Sunday off. So at the Monday meeting, everybody’s going, “I have nothing.” Then you go in and you think on your feet and pitch something that just enters your mind that minute and try to get a big laugh. Whether or not you write, it doesn’t matter. A lot of times, people would have some concepts they’d thought about before or if they thought enough about the host and the host was cool or flexible, you could always pitch them doing some impression or something. It was always pretty lame but so ridiculous that you usually laughed. And we all laughed at each other because we wanted to get out of there. We wanted the host to feel comfortable. We never wanted them to feel bad. You try to be as entertaining as possible. Most of the time, I think the hosts were terrified. It wasn’t as if we’d worked on something for 48 hours and pitched an entire sketch. Jack Handey would pitch something like, “There’s a zoo and there’s a really unhappy leopard so he gets an ant to call in his colony to help him escape the zoo.” Everyone would say, “Am I in that?” Do hosts ever weigh in or want to participate in creating a sketch? After they have dinner with Lorne—they must still do this—they come back to the office and walk around into each office and check in. And that’s our opportunity to run ideas past them that we’re actually working on. They usually play along and say, “Oh, I’d love to be a riverboat captain and what would I do?” Sometimes they improvise and they’re funny. Other times, they’re just polite. It’s so awkward for them and so hard to do. I gotta say, I think I did 138 shows so I don’t remember anybody being an asshole in those moments when they’re visiting all of us. Nora and I did a sketch called “Attitudes.” That was a great one, if I do say so myself, but we had John Malkovich as our host and he was wonderful. He came in and we told him what we were working on and he was a driftwood artist and he improvised a great deal. He got the character immediately and that was really exciting—it turned out to be a really funny sketch. People put themselves in your hands because Lorne makes them feel comfortable. They know they have to behave because they’re at our mercy. Did you work with Jan and Nora on the Sweeney Sisters? When I first got there I would kind of help them. They would write those pretty quickly with Marc Shaiman because it was such a loose setup and mostly about the medley. Mostly the premise, like where were they? A banquet hall. Or a ski lodge. An elevator. So I would only help them out on that. Who were other people that you worked with? Did you work with Victoria Jackson? I put Victoria in things. I didn’t really put her as the lead in many things. She’d be in group things. But she has said in different magazines that I had given her the idea for the song “I’m Not a Bimbo,” which I’m very grateful for, it was very sweet. I did go up to her because everyone was complaining about her being a bimbo and I said why don’t you write a song called I’m not a bimbo? “Thank you Christine! That’s great!” [Said in a perfect Victoria Jackson voice.] You sound just like her! She’s astonishing. [Laughs] When she was on the show she was just a born-again and there really was nothing political she would speak on. Well, we didn’t have a black president then. Yeah, right. She didn’t care about that stuff at that point, except she did care about God. But she wasn’t that preachy when I was there. Frankly, since I didn’t feel like I had a handle on what I could do for her professionally or for her comedy, I wouldn’t engage. She would occasionally give us tapes that had some kind of born-again Christian speaker on it, but she was so jealous of Jan and Nora, there would be really ridiculous, hilarious fights where she would just accuse them of being the devil and stuff. I just kind of stayed out of that. I mean, she wasn’t abusive and she wasn’t insane at that point. It’s just so weird. God, seeing her at the 40th reunion was just awkward because the hate people have for her is palpable. She just looks crushed and weird when she’s in that crowd, she doesn’t look happy—it’s just not good. You’d left by the time Sarah Silverman came on the cast, yes? We were just ships passing in the night. I just remember that she was really young and she always wanted to do an Update piece about her vagina and nobody would let her. Gee, what a surprise. I think she’s a genius. It was the wrong place for her to be. She was great. People like her and Jenny Slate, who famously got fired from “SNL,” then went on to do just fine. Yeah, it doesn’t mean death anymore when you’re fired from there. I think more people become more successful and that’s because there are people who are wrong for the show but are really right for something else, they’re just so talented. Ben Stiller was there a short amount of time. It is a strange structure and it’s a strange place politically, so if you’re not right for that, you just can’t stay there. Michaela Watkins—brilliant and a great writer, and it just didn’t work out. For me, it just taught me a great deal. I think it’s harder for actors. I just think that that’s where true competition is. It’s stressful, week after week, wanting to get your stuff to air, seeing how many of your sketches get to air. As a performer, that’s what you do. Whereas as a writer, if you find yourself getting shafted every week, it would be extremely difficult and just crushing to your ego and you just feel like, “OK, well I guess my sense of humor does not really gel with the voice of the show.” That’s the message being sent. But also, for a couple seasons they overbooked the plane. There were just too many people in the cast clamoring for airtime. I would think it was like, not to mix metaphors here, survival of the fittest. Yeah, and the thing is too, I’ve always felt that being in the cast can be damaging if you want a career in movies. Not if you’re a guy, that usually works out, because you’ll do your silly guy movies if you’re funny enough. But because, it seems like it’s important that you have a persona that is relatable and real. What’s so genius about how Tina Fey managed her career was she did very few sketches and did the news, and then used it as a springboard to be a comedic actress and create her own roles where she isn’t a big broad character. Do you know what I mean? Like Phil Hartman, the genius that he was, was always in character, so he never was going to get a dramatic role or even a straight role in a comedy because he was never Phil Hartman in any of those things. Bill Murray—the most genius guy—there was always a Bill Murray persona that people fell in love with, that he was able to pick and choose after Ghostbusters, because financially he was doing so well, and do independent films where he’s cast in things nobody would think of him for. Like when he did “Razor’s Edge,” he demonstrated that he had dramatic acting chops and people saw how versatile he was. Right and then he goes away and then he comes back and he does “Rushmore.” And Sofia Coppola’s “Lost in Translation.” So they’re tiny and they don’t pay, but that doesn’t matter. They’re not Adam Sandler box office. When I was there, I think a lot of cast members felt like if they stayed longer than five years, they were a failure because it was supposed to be a springboard after five to greater things. But then people like Phil Hartman, who was such a utilitarian player, so necessary, and the king of the show, knew it was a great gig, and was paid well. But a lot of people felt like they had to get out after five. They knew they were ready or they knew they had some opportunities. As writers, it seemed like a lot of people stuck around. We all stuck around about seven or so years. That’s a brutal schedule to endure for so long, but I can also see how infectious it would be, like how hard it would be to give up. You’d get a kind of Stockholm Syndrome maybe. Well I was from Chicago. I’d visited L.A. once. I never watched sitcoms, I thought it was the greatest thing in the world. I moved because, I had a child and then my husband got a job in L.A. He was a writer too. I’m divorced now, but he’s a writer. So just thought well I’m going to move to California and I have to, because that’s where the writing jobs are for him. And I thought well what am I going to do now, I don’t think I’m going to write sitcoms. Then I ended up getting involved in those and the rest is history. And now looking back, “SNL” was the most artistically free place I’ve ever been. You wrote what you wanted and it got on or it didn’t. You didn’t get notes that said “You can’t say this, you can’t say that.” We had a head writer who would actually make your thing funnier. Jim was great with recognizing different voices, he would know what you were trying to attempt. Not every head writer has that kind of gift. You’re lucky if you have that, because a lot of people want it to sound the way they sound. And Lorne would just be “I don’t like that joke or you really think that works, too long, take that out.” He’d give those notes in between dress and air. Or he just wouldn’t like your sketch and then it wouldn’t get on. He’s not going to explain everything to you about why he doesn’t like it. So then you just go into your room and cry. That would be hard. Out here [in L.A.], from the very inception, people are telling you what to do. There [at “SNL”], you say I want to do a sketch about a woman who married her cat, everybody laughs and they expect to see it. They don’t tell you, how you gonna do that? Why is she going to marry a cat? There’s no question. Once you’ve been in the trenches there, you gotta be such a fast-thinking deft writer. I mean anything would seem like a walk in the park after that. You’re ready for anything. Yeah. You are and as far as the adrenaline and the nerves and the lack of sleep and the emotional rollercoaster of a week of live television, you come out here and it’s like, When am I going to get nervous, excited, or when am I going to feel horrible? And you do, I mean it’s kind of a rollercoaster in half-hour TV too, but it’s only about 30 percent of what you get there. And then if you’re doing the single-camera stuff, which most of us have been doing now for the last six or seven years, not exciting, it’s like a movie, slow and tedious. But it’s funny, not live TV with lots of jokes. What are your favorite sketches that you worked on? My favorites? Well, “Attitudes” was a favorite. And I always loved working on the “Pat” sketches with Julia. She created that, but we wrote a lot of those together. There was one I did with Julia that was a parody of a 1960s movie, that we called “Their Eyes Evolved to Be on Their Breasts.” Do you remember that? Yes, I do. It was really brilliant. You guys managed to do a lot of really great feminist sketches during a particularly dude-bro era of Adam Sandler and Rob Schneider. So to have the counter-balance of Nora and Jan and Julia .... Yeah, well Nora’s stuff was always so smart and her characters are so different than characters that people do. They are very feminist and they’re very smart, and her joke writing for her characters is really brilliant, it’s not stuff you see very often. I did a sketch, one of the first things I did the first couple of years I was there, Jack and I wrote a sketch called “Bean Cafe,” it was just set ups to fart jokes that were never paid off, and Tom Hanks did it. So it was things like “You know what is silent, but deadly,’ and it was about a spider, it wasn’t about a fart. It was just eight fart jokes never realized. We loved it. There was another sketch that I did with Bonnie and Terry Turner and what I love about this was we laughed so hard writing it and we started writing it at 4 a.m. It was with Christina Applegate where she played Cher. It was an infomercial called “Focus on Beauty,” hawking Lori Davis’s shampoo and conditioner. Remember when they’d do those infomercials about that kind of stuff and it’d may be be about 15 minutes long? Yes, really late at night, right? Yeah, after midnight and Cher did one, it was with her and her sister, her best friend and this Lori Davis—Chris Farley played her. She was a large blond lady. I just watched it recently and...my son loves it, and the hook for it was there is no alcohol in the product and it’s so exciting. I walked into their office and asked, “Hey, do you want to do this?” And we were immediately on the same page. We start laughing and then we just wrote it down. And it was so funny because when I knew Christina was coming, I always thought she could do it and everybody thought I was crazy. She thought I was crazy, but she did a really fine job. I later worked with her on “Samantha Who?” and when I first saw her on set, she said, “You made me do Cher!’ It must be really fun, as the hours tick on and you enter that punchy phase. The punchy phase was fantastic. It worked for all of us. I don’t think I wrote anything incredibly funny unless it was after 3 a.m. And now I can’t stay up past midnight working, I want to cry. So many of these jokes and sketches are part of the culture, the lexicon, really. I’ve always been blown away by people that know really obscure sketches. Because everybody responds to the recurring characters. I can think of things that Robert Smigel wrote that are really history-making, like “Get a Life with Shatner,” “Talking to the Nerds,” and things like that. When I’ve met somebody that remembers a sketch like “Green Hilly,” something I did with Jack Handey with Alec Baldwin and it was the ’40s and they’re playing tennis and he and Jan run in and he kisses everything and then finally kisses her, like he kisses a dog, he kisses a butler, and it’s just ridiculous, but then you think Oh my God, you like that specific sense of humor, that specific weird ass thing that we did, that’s incredible. That gives you the will to live. When we realize that it’s making somebody else feel really good, that’s so powerful.Nearly 30 years ago, Second City alum Christine Zander was asked to audition for “SNL.” Her friend and frequent performing partner Nora Dunn was already on the cast and being kept on for the 1986-87 season, but Lorne Michaels was letting nearly everyone else go, and looking for new talent. Zander flew out to Burbank, did her bit, and … then ended up finding a job bartending. But a few months later, “SNL” called to offer her a seat in the writers room, headed by Jim Downey. Zander tells Salon that taking that job was one of the great decisions of her life. Though the schedule there was brutal—the work week began Monday afternoon and ran until late Saturday night—and Zander was often one of two women in a roomful of men, she says her seven years at “SNL” were some of her funniest, most creative, artistically liberated of her writing career. And they’d have to be: She was in a room with writers Al Franken, Rosie Shuster, Bonnie and Terry Turner, Marc Shaiman and Robert Smigel, and writing for cast members like her old pal Dunn, as well as Jan Hooks, Julia Sweeney and Mike Myers, among many others. Since leaving, Zander has worked consistently for nearly three decades, producing and writing on comedies such as “3rd Rock From the Sun,” “Samantha Who?,” “Nurse Jackie,” “Raising Hope” and, most recently, ABC Family’s “Kevin From Work.” She spoke with Salon about the first sketch she ever wrote for “SNL,” as well as some of her favorites; recounts her experience being a pregnant woman in a predominantly male writers room; reflects on the possible limitations of being on the cast for too long; and gives us a glimpse into the “SNL” writing process. Julia Sweeney had the most wonderful things to say about you. You two worked closely together at “SNL,” is that right? Yes. Julia came in and I was at “SNL” for seven seasons and I think she came in maybe the sixth season? We wrote together. It was so wonderful, so easy and fun. We bonded instantly. She’s just a great person and a great, great writer. And I worked with Nora. In 1986, Al [Franken] and Tom [Davis] came to Chicago looking to audition people [for “SNL”] because that show was such a disaster, with the cast. I didn’t get an audition. I was doing performance and stuff in Chicago. Were you at Second City? I studied at Second City and then I was just doing whatever I wanted to. Nora and I used to perform together on different stages in Chicago, different bars and things, doing kind of our own comedy characters. In the 1980s and ’90s in Chicago, you could perform anywhere. I think you still can, too. It’s such a great place to wet your toes and learn a lot. Then “SNL” hired Nora, and in ’87, they needed more people, so I got to audition for the show. They flew me to Burbank and I did eight minutes of original material. Other people were there, like Phil Hartman and Jan Hooks. Probably Lovitz. And I had dinner with Nora and Lorne after the whole deal and Jan got hired. They really made the right choice. They had you go to Burbank? Yeah. It was at NBC in Burbank, on the Johnny Carson set. They had people audition there. So I didn’t make it, but they were nice to me. Nora kind of kept the bug in their ear that I existed. Six months later, they called and said, “Do you want to come write?” And I was bartending, so I said, “Yes, yes I DO want to write!” Then that was it. I got there and I learned how to do it. I think Lorne would have been OK with me trying to be on-camera, but for some reason, I just decided that I preferred to cultivate relationships with the cast and write. And I’m glad I did because now it’s my 28th year of being in the Writers Guild and working constantly. Were there other women in the writers room at that time? When I got there, the only other female writer was Rosie Shuster. She was lovely, and took me under her wing. But it was mostly all guys. It was smaller when I was there—about 12 writers—and it was the greats: Jim Downey was our head writer and Jack Handey was there. George Meyer and Robert Smigel, Al Franken, Tom Davis, and A. Whitney Brown. And of course the cast wrote—they all collaborated. Shortly after I arrived, Bonnie and Terry Turner came. I became close friends with Jack and Al and Bonnie and Terry, so I wasn’t lonely. We’d all wander into each other’s offices late at night if we needed help or didn’t have any ideas and kind of hopped onto other people’s things. I mean, it was terrifying. It was really emotionally hard and physically hard. It is a young man/woman’s game. I think I ate one meal a day. The pressure was intense, but it was incredible. Now that I look back at it, there’s no anger. There’s no bad feelings. It’s just warm and fuzzy, wonderful. That feeling of how lucky I was to go to what to me was the best university in the world. That is a grueling schedule, I imagine, going non-stop from Monday afternoon to late Saturday night. Yeah. I think it might have gotten a little bit more structured now over the last 10 or 15 years, but it was a self-imposed terrible schedule. You didn’t have to start work at 5 on Monday. You didn’t have to come in at 4 on Tuesday. Everything was just on tradition from ’75—this procrastination, and start working late at night and work all night long and it all goes toward the Wednesday table read that you stay up all night for. Three years in, I had a baby, so I think I might have come in a little earlier, but I still stayed up late. It was hard. I can imagine. I can’t see a place like that being especially family-friendly. At that point, most of the guys in the cast had children. Al was a big family guy. He had a couple of kids and had been through a lot. I remember when I got pregnant, I waited to tell people until it was safe. Andy Breckman didn’t know yet, and he started to say, “Zander, you shouldn’t get pregnant now. It’s too hard.” We were talking about it somehow, maybe I was talking to Al and then Breckman came in and said, “What are you guys talking about?” “Oh, Zander was talking about getting pregnant.” My terrific memory from that was it spread around the office and everyone was happy, and then a lot of the guys put my name on all of their sketches so it was as if I had written on all of them. So, my experience being pregnant and being a woman on that show was it was pretty great because they had no idea what I was going through so they coddled me. Nobody was mad that I was pregnant. It was just, We don’t know what’s going on with her body so just be really nice to her. [Laughs.] Because they’re all young, except the older guys like Al and Jack. The thing that I did miss was there were a lot of great women that worked behind the scenes too who were very helpful and very considerate. You weren’t working with a lot of women. It was just Rosie and then when Rosie left, it was just Bonnie Turner. And then Marilyn Miller would come and go, but that was it for female writers. Were there cast members that you would pretty much work with exclusively? I was really close to Nora because we had been close friends in Chicago so we did a lot of stuff together. And then when we’d get something finished, I’d end up writing with other actors or other writers. I’d wander into Mike Myers’ office. He’d be writing something for himself and I’d help or co-write it with him. Or I’d go just totally conceptual with Jack Handey. It was really kind of collaborative but I did always feel like I needed to work on women’s things because you had to, you should, otherwise not a lot of people would. I’m not saying that men didn’t write for women because they did. What was your first sketch that you got to air? It was for Bill Murray and it was about a guy that Jan Hooks had met in a bar and she got totally drunk and slept with him. Basically, she just wakes up and he’s taken over her apartment and her life. He’s spoken to her mother. He set her cat free. He has plans for the future and he’s a nightmare. He’s this freeloading guy. [They’d hooked up] after she’d had one too many margaritas. I might add too that it was 1987, so we could still do fucking in bars. AIDS was there, but we straight people weren’t worrying about it. I always think of that too, because now you can do it, but everyone knows what you have to do to have that kind of sex. So how do you come to the table on Monday with fresh material, after having just finished late on Saturday night? You are exhausted, since you’re up late and you only have Sunday off. So at the Monday meeting, everybody’s going, “I have nothing.” Then you go in and you think on your feet and pitch something that just enters your mind that minute and try to get a big laugh. Whether or not you write, it doesn’t matter. A lot of times, people would have some concepts they’d thought about before or if they thought enough about the host and the host was cool or flexible, you could always pitch them doing some impression or something. It was always pretty lame but so ridiculous that you usually laughed. And we all laughed at each other because we wanted to get out of there. We wanted the host to feel comfortable. We never wanted them to feel bad. You try to be as entertaining as possible. Most of the time, I think the hosts were terrified. It wasn’t as if we’d worked on something for 48 hours and pitched an entire sketch. Jack Handey would pitch something like, “There’s a zoo and there’s a really unhappy leopard so he gets an ant to call in his colony to help him escape the zoo.” Everyone would say, “Am I in that?” Do hosts ever weigh in or want to participate in creating a sketch? After they have dinner with Lorne—they must still do this—they come back to the office and walk around into each office and check in. And that’s our opportunity to run ideas past them that we’re actually working on. They usually play along and say, “Oh, I’d love to be a riverboat captain and what would I do?” Sometimes they improvise and they’re funny. Other times, they’re just polite. It’s so awkward for them and so hard to do. I gotta say, I think I did 138 shows so I don’t remember anybody being an asshole in those moments when they’re visiting all of us. Nora and I did a sketch called “Attitudes.” That was a great one, if I do say so myself, but we had John Malkovich as our host and he was wonderful. He came in and we told him what we were working on and he was a driftwood artist and he improvised a great deal. He got the character immediately and that was really exciting—it turned out to be a really funny sketch. People put themselves in your hands because Lorne makes them feel comfortable. They know they have to behave because they’re at our mercy. Did you work with Jan and Nora on the Sweeney Sisters? When I first got there I would kind of help them. They would write those pretty quickly with Marc Shaiman because it was such a loose setup and mostly about the medley. Mostly the premise, like where were they? A banquet hall. Or a ski lodge. An elevator. So I would only help them out on that. Who were other people that you worked with? Did you work with Victoria Jackson? I put Victoria in things. I didn’t really put her as the lead in many things. She’d be in group things. But she has said in different magazines that I had given her the idea for the song “I’m Not a Bimbo,” which I’m very grateful for, it was very sweet. I did go up to her because everyone was complaining about her being a bimbo and I said why don’t you write a song called I’m not a bimbo? “Thank you Christine! That’s great!” [Said in a perfect Victoria Jackson voice.] You sound just like her! She’s astonishing. [Laughs] When she was on the show she was just a born-again and there really was nothing political she would speak on. Well, we didn’t have a black president then. Yeah, right. She didn’t care about that stuff at that point, except she did care about God. But she wasn’t that preachy when I was there. Frankly, since I didn’t feel like I had a handle on what I could do for her professionally or for her comedy, I wouldn’t engage. She would occasionally give us tapes that had some kind of born-again Christian speaker on it, but she was so jealous of Jan and Nora, there would be really ridiculous, hilarious fights where she would just accuse them of being the devil and stuff. I just kind of stayed out of that. I mean, she wasn’t abusive and she wasn’t insane at that point. It’s just so weird. God, seeing her at the 40th reunion was just awkward because the hate people have for her is palpable. She just looks crushed and weird when she’s in that crowd, she doesn’t look happy—it’s just not good. You’d left by the time Sarah Silverman came on the cast, yes? We were just ships passing in the night. I just remember that she was really young and she always wanted to do an Update piece about her vagina and nobody would let her. Gee, what a surprise. I think she’s a genius. It was the wrong place for her to be. She was great. People like her and Jenny Slate, who famously got fired from “SNL,” then went on to do just fine. Yeah, it doesn’t mean death anymore when you’re fired from there. I think more people become more successful and that’s because there are people who are wrong for the show but are really right for something else, they’re just so talented. Ben Stiller was there a short amount of time. It is a strange structure and it’s a strange place politically, so if you’re not right for that, you just can’t stay there. Michaela Watkins—brilliant and a great writer, and it just didn’t work out. For me, it just taught me a great deal. I think it’s harder for actors. I just think that that’s where true competition is. It’s stressful, week after week, wanting to get your stuff to air, seeing how many of your sketches get to air. As a performer, that’s what you do. Whereas as a writer, if you find yourself getting shafted every week, it would be extremely difficult and just crushing to your ego and you just feel like, “OK, well I guess my sense of humor does not really gel with the voice of the show.” That’s the message being sent. But also, for a couple seasons they overbooked the plane. There were just too many people in the cast clamoring for airtime. I would think it was like, not to mix metaphors here, survival of the fittest. Yeah, and the thing is too, I’ve always felt that being in the cast can be damaging if you want a career in movies. Not if you’re a guy, that usually works out, because you’ll do your silly guy movies if you’re funny enough. But because, it seems like it’s important that you have a persona that is relatable and real. What’s so genius about how Tina Fey managed her career was she did very few sketches and did the news, and then used it as a springboard to be a comedic actress and create her own roles where she isn’t a big broad character. Do you know what I mean? Like Phil Hartman, the genius that he was, was always in character, so he never was going to get a dramatic role or even a straight role in a comedy because he was never Phil Hartman in any of those things. Bill Murray—the most genius guy—there was always a Bill Murray persona that people fell in love with, that he was able to pick and choose after Ghostbusters, because financially he was doing so well, and do independent films where he’s cast in things nobody would think of him for. Like when he did “Razor’s Edge,” he demonstrated that he had dramatic acting chops and people saw how versatile he was. Right and then he goes away and then he comes back and he does “Rushmore.” And Sofia Coppola’s “Lost in Translation.” So they’re tiny and they don’t pay, but that doesn’t matter. They’re not Adam Sandler box office. When I was there, I think a lot of cast members felt like if they stayed longer than five years, they were a failure because it was supposed to be a springboard after five to greater things. But then people like Phil Hartman, who was such a utilitarian player, so necessary, and the king of the show, knew it was a great gig, and was paid well. But a lot of people felt like they had to get out after five. They knew they were ready or they knew they had some opportunities. As writers, it seemed like a lot of people stuck around. We all stuck around about seven or so years. That’s a brutal schedule to endure for so long, but I can also see how infectious it would be, like how hard it would be to give up. You’d get a kind of Stockholm Syndrome maybe. Well I was from Chicago. I’d visited L.A. once. I never watched sitcoms, I thought it was the greatest thing in the world. I moved because, I had a child and then my husband got a job in L.A. He was a writer too. I’m divorced now, but he’s a writer. So just thought well I’m going to move to California and I have to, because that’s where the writing jobs are for him. And I thought well what am I going to do now, I don’t think I’m going to write sitcoms. Then I ended up getting involved in those and the rest is history. And now looking back, “SNL” was the most artistically free place I’ve ever been. You wrote what you wanted and it got on or it didn’t. You didn’t get notes that said “You can’t say this, you can’t say that.” We had a head writer who would actually make your thing funnier. Jim was great with recognizing different voices, he would know what you were trying to attempt. Not every head writer has that kind of gift. You’re lucky if you have that, because a lot of people want it to sound the way they sound. And Lorne would just be “I don’t like that joke or you really think that works, too long, take that out.” He’d give those notes in between dress and air. Or he just wouldn’t like your sketch and then it wouldn’t get on. He’s not going to explain everything to you about why he doesn’t like it. So then you just go into your room and cry. That would be hard. Out here [in L.A.], from the very inception, people are telling you what to do. There [at “SNL”], you say I want to do a sketch about a woman who married her cat, everybody laughs and they expect to see it. They don’t tell you, how you gonna do that? Why is she going to marry a cat? There’s no question. Once you’ve been in the trenches there, you gotta be such a fast-thinking deft writer. I mean anything would seem like a walk in the park after that. You’re ready for anything. Yeah. You are and as far as the adrenaline and the nerves and the lack of sleep and the emotional rollercoaster of a week of live television, you come out here and it’s like, When am I going to get nervous, excited, or when am I going to feel horrible? And you do, I mean it’s kind of a rollercoaster in half-hour TV too, but it’s only about 30 percent of what you get there. And then if you’re doing the single-camera stuff, which most of us have been doing now for the last six or seven years, not exciting, it’s like a movie, slow and tedious. But it’s funny, not live TV with lots of jokes. What are your favorite sketches that you worked on? My favorites? Well, “Attitudes” was a favorite. And I always loved working on the “Pat” sketches with Julia. She created that, but we wrote a lot of those together. There was one I did with Julia that was a parody of a 1960s movie, that we called “Their Eyes Evolved to Be on Their Breasts.” Do you remember that? Yes, I do. It was really brilliant. You guys managed to do a lot of really great feminist sketches during a particularly dude-bro era of Adam Sandler and Rob Schneider. So to have the counter-balance of Nora and Jan and Julia .... Yeah, well Nora’s stuff was always so smart and her characters are so different than characters that people do. They are very feminist and they’re very smart, and her joke writing for her characters is really brilliant, it’s not stuff you see very often. I did a sketch, one of the first things I did the first couple of years I was there, Jack and I wrote a sketch called “Bean Cafe,” it was just set ups to fart jokes that were never paid off, and Tom Hanks did it. So it was things like “You know what is silent, but deadly,’ and it was about a spider, it wasn’t about a fart. It was just eight fart jokes never realized. We loved it. There was another sketch that I did with Bonnie and Terry Turner and what I love about this was we laughed so hard writing it and we started writing it at 4 a.m. It was with Christina Applegate where she played Cher. It was an infomercial called “Focus on Beauty,” hawking Lori Davis’s shampoo and conditioner. Remember when they’d do those infomercials about that kind of stuff and it’d may be be about 15 minutes long? Yes, really late at night, right? Yeah, after midnight and Cher did one, it was with her and her sister, her best friend and this Lori Davis—Chris Farley played her. She was a large blond lady. I just watched it recently and...my son loves it, and the hook for it was there is no alcohol in the product and it’s so exciting. I walked into their office and asked, “Hey, do you want to do this?” And we were immediately on the same page. We start laughing and then we just wrote it down. And it was so funny because when I knew Christina was coming, I always thought she could do it and everybody thought I was crazy. She thought I was crazy, but she did a really fine job. I later worked with her on “Samantha Who?” and when I first saw her on set, she said, “You made me do Cher!’ It must be really fun, as the hours tick on and you enter that punchy phase. The punchy phase was fantastic. It worked for all of us. I don’t think I wrote anything incredibly funny unless it was after 3 a.m. And now I can’t stay up past midnight working, I want to cry. So many of these jokes and sketches are part of the culture, the lexicon, really. I’ve always been blown away by people that know really obscure sketches. Because everybody responds to the recurring characters. I can think of things that Robert Smigel wrote that are really history-making, like “Get a Life with Shatner,” “Talking to the Nerds,” and things like that. When I’ve met somebody that remembers a sketch like “Green Hilly,” something I did with Jack Handey with Alec Baldwin and it was the ’40s and they’re playing tennis and he and Jan run in and he kisses everything and then finally kisses her, like he kisses a dog, he kisses a butler, and it’s just ridiculous, but then you think Oh my God, you like that specific sense of humor, that specific weird ass thing that we did, that’s incredible. That gives you the will to live. When we realize that it’s making somebody else feel really good, that’s so powerful.
