Category: Television

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The “greatest Hungarian sculptor of our time”: A Memo to Blanche Devereaux

You don’t derive much comfort from a musty expression like “let a smile be your umbrella” when you are walking around Óbuda on a wet and gloomy afternoon. It was pretty much wet and gloomy throughout our second stay in Budapest, and even the statues seemed to be putting up their defences against the elements. I was cheered nonetheless by Imre Varga’s “Women with Umbrellas” (pictured here); and when we walked around the gallery dedicated to the work of the greatest Hungarian sculptor of our time,” a scene from The Golden Girls came to my mind, which tends to operate that way.

In an episode originally aired on 19 December 1987 (about a year and a half before I first caught sight of the gals from whose exchanges I learned American English), Blanche, Rose, and Dorothy all agree to pose nude for a sculptor. A Hungarian sculptor, that is. Aside from the thrill of being immortalized in art, what is most on the minds of the three is that Laslo is a bachelor, and a virile specimen at that. They are all pretty much smitten with the self-assured man with the magnificent voice who, as played by Tony Jay, comes across like a cross between Monty Woolley (radio’s “Magnificent Montague”) and Mischa Auer (briefly known as “Mischa the Magnificent” on the air).

When the artist’s work is done, it remains to be seen whether he is interested in pursuing one of them:

Blanche. Laslo, before you make your choice, just let me say what a privilege it has been for me to come here and work with the man whom I consider to be the greatest Hungarian sculptor of our time.

Dorothy. Yes, and just let me say that if Blanche can name two other Hungarian sculptors of any time I shall eat that statue.

I’m getting close, Blanche, should you ever choose to “phone a friend” (even though, as you soon realized, Laslo is a “friend of Dorothy’s”). Imre Varga is a magician who can make sheet metal seem like sheer silk or imbue it with the weight of human suffering, who can make dead matter sway and sway us into believing that the dead matter. His work, which has withstood the political upheavals that relegated many of his contemporaries to the scrapheap (or the ghetto that is Statue Park), is a chronicle of a people and the individuals among them who influenced the course of its history (like St. Stephen, pictured above). Through his portraits in metal, Varga will make you look up names and never let you forget his own . . .

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The Starburst Galaxy

“Your name doesn’t mean anything to me, but I’m happy for you that you’re somebody around here.” That is not what I said to popular British television actress Michelle Collins when I met her backstage at the Shaftesbury Theatre in the winter of 2006 (as I mentioned here, in passing). I had been living in Britain for over two years already and still felt like a party-crashing amnesiac among a group of strangers absorbed in a game of Trivial Pursuit, the edition of which appeared to be Mesopotamian. Relocating to another country, however culturally related it may be to the universe you left behind (in my case, the microcosmopolitan hub known as Manhattan), is not unlike the sensation of tuning in to a serial that, unbeknownst to you, has been running for several successful seasons on a cable network to which you have just gotten access. You try your darndest to get into it; yet looking on only leaves you with the impression that the rock you dwelled under is not even the third one from the sun but orbiting another solar system altogether. So you lay down the telescope at last and, unless you meet them in person, give up on identifying the luminaries begot in a galaxy light-years beyond your sphere.

Tonight, the glamorous Ms. Collins returns to UK television to head the cast of Rock Rivals, a new pulp drama set in the world of reality show business, its creative forces, its performers, and its followers. The eight-part series airs on ITV, home of reality programs like The X Factor, the British revamp of American Idol. As with the shows it feeds on, Rock Rivals lets viewers decide who wins the fictional singing contest by choosing one of two possible endings.

Satire or satellite, it is another commentary on the kind of starburst galaxy the entertainment industries insists we inhabit. Starburst galaxies are the kind of systems with a particularly high star-formation rate. Who can keep up with all those newly created celebrities? Sometimes, stars have to fall or catastrophically explode before I take note.

There’s one born every minute—along with the adoring crowd on whom such upgraded gaseousness exerts its gravitational pull. As paradoxical as it might sound, that is probably why I leap at the chance of catching a star in the process of being formed. Presently, the only satellite-dished up treat I take in is American Idol, to which I keep coming back for another helping until David Archuleta is being unaccountably voted off by folks who wouldn’t recognize a rising sun if it hit them in the solar plexus.

Watching reality television has its comforts. It gives you the impression—or should that be “creates the illusion”?—that you are no mere stargazer but a starmaker with powers equal to the vast industry whose well-oiled if by now antiquated machinery is working against time, odds, and YouTube to produce the kind of temporary radiance that passes for stellar. The aging medium turns them out fast for a reason: with all those puffed up somebodies insisting on making stars or asses of themselves, the gas in this galaxy is just about used up.

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Amazons and Old Lace: Cranford Televisited

Well, this was one to watch out for. Not that I could have missed the announcements, given that the new five-part television adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford stories is the cover story of this week’s Radio Times. A grand production it is shaping up to be, judging from the first installment, which aired tonight on BBC 1. The television series borrows from several of Gaskell’s works; aside from the Cranford papers (published in serial form between 1851 and 1853), writer Heidi Thomas also draws on incidents from “Mr. Harrison’s Confessions,” the story of a young physician (serialized in 1851) and the novella My Lady Ludlow (serialized in 1858) to create what the Radio Times refers to, using that most horrid and hackneyed of adjectives, a “unique universe.”

Quaint or daring, Gaskell’s world is certainly uncommon in its Cukorian selection of characters. “In the first place,” we are told, “Cranford is in possession of the Amazons.” As is often the case, the version-maker of the current series chose to forgo the contrivance of voice-over narration, at a considerable loss of clever prose. That said (and however much there is left unsaid), the opening line is soon rendered visible to the televisitors of this fabled community, which, albeit, not entirely devoid of male bodies, is dominated by formidable females. Foremost among them are Judy Dench and Eileen Atkins as the sisters Jenkyns (pictured), ably supported by Imelda Staunton, Julia Sawalha, and the ever compelling Francesca Annis (last seen on UK television in the latest Marple mystery).

I was anxious to learn how my favorite moment would be dealt with, whether it would be told or dramatized. Surely it is too hilarious a scene to be omitted. I am referring, of course, to the aforementioned “pussy” incident. The treatment was, shall we say, rather graphic and indecorous, which is not to say that it was not wildly amusing.

Miss Deborah Jenkyns, that advocate of “[e]legant economy” who much preferred Dr. Johnson to the young author of the Pickwick Papers (then newly published), would no doubt have objected to the sound effects employed to dramatize pussy’s response to the “tartar emetic,” not to mention the shot of the piece of lace thus extracted. In the hands of the producer, this “anecdote” known only to a circle of “intimate friends” so civilized and reserved as to be “afraid of being caught in the vulgarity of making any noise in a place of public amusement,” becomes an attack on the Victorian fabric of Cranford that the worthy Amazons might have been spared.

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Passport to Ridicule

Well, who needs fun house mirrors? When it comes to deriving amusement from staring at distorted reflections of yourself, there is nothing like the jack-in-the-box of old photographs. However familiar, they still manage to surprise. Sometimes, those snapshots of your past take on lives of their own as, in the eyes of others, they begin to resemble the faces of strangers. It becomes rather trying when you begin to think of your former self as a latter-day Frankenstein who, attempting to create life in his image, unwittingly gave birth to something monstrous beyond his control.

Owing to a current television program, I am the subject of much joshing here at Ty Newydd, our home (“ty” being Welsh for house). Once again, we are tuning in to The X Factor, one of those illegitimate, hyperactive offspring of the aforementioned Major Bowes so eagerly adopted these days and brought into the homes of an adoring public. And until such time as the show’s televoting devotees decide they have had their fill and be rid of him, I must expect to be mocked each Saturday evening for allegedly resembling the decidedly odd Rhydian Roberts, one of the two Welsh contestants in this year’s competition.

Each week, Rhydian is making a spectacle of himself as he appears before a panel of judges (the cocky Simon Cowell, the confidently second-rate Dannii Minogue, the feisty Sharon Osborne, and the amiable Irishman Louis Walsh) to take on a duet from The Phantom of the Opera or take the stage like an ice-sculptured Liberace in sequins and faux furs, belting like Welsh pop icon Shirley Bassey to the bewilderment of the British people who never beheld anyone quite like him.

Remote and humorless, Rhydian seems to come to life only on the stage. Thus far, he has remained an impenetrable mystery. Too straight for camp, he has a discipline and drive more chilling than the ambitions of Eve Harrington. He is a regular storm-trouper. It is no less disconcerting to be likened to him. Fortunately, the theatrical one can carry a tune, which is where any comparisons between us two, unwarrantable as they are to begin with, must most assuredly come to an end. In the words of frustrated blues singer Eve Peabody, “mine is strictly a bathtub voice.”

No, I don’t mind making a display of myself (as I have done here on numerous occasions). In fact, before I made up my mind that one journal was quite enough of me, I briefly contemplated dedicating one to the history of my hair, an autobiographical venture I intended to call The Shoulderpadded Atlas (for which this picture might have qualified). It would have been another argument for the non-visual arts, no doubt, which is better put forward here on broadcastellan. That said, it is just as well that I share my life here, given that the past preserved on my old computer seems to have been lost in yesterday’s crash.

Since then, I have had as much reason to cheer as I have sense not to burst into song. It was determined this morning that I shall have to dig up my passport again. Another trip to the old haunts of Gotham is in the offing. Considering that the above picture has changed more accurately to reflect my present exterior, I shall probably get through immigrations without suffering much ridicule (let alone comparisons to a man as yet unknown stateside). Of course, that also means I am going to miss the season finale of X Factor. Not a void a bottle of Aqua Net can’t fill.

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Theater of the Mime

There is something magical about it. The idea that an old mirror might show us a reflection of our past, with you and me on the other side to make sense of it all. I don’t believe there is such a thing as old news, unless you are averse to or incapable of examining it in the light of your own reflections. I am still flicking through the August 1949 issue of Radio and Television Mirror, as I have been all this week, if only to test my own maxim (which, I admit, sounds rather like the slogan with which NBC once tried to vindicate its reruns).

Earlier this week, an article in the Hollywood Reporter suggested that television is on its way out (except in Australia), that people turn to their computer instead to snatch out of the web whatever they want whenever they want it rather than rely on the old TiVo, let alone simply stay put when something of interest comes on. Back in 1949, television, though practically dating back to the age when radio became the medium of the moment, was still in its commercial infancy, “commercial” being redundant, considering that its growth and maturity were determined by the medium’s viability as a promotional tool.

According to the Mirror, there were just over 1.3 million TV sets in the US that spring, half of them in New York City. Radio was still tops; but those who did not have a TV set were beginning to think of radio as something inferior, as something that would never allow them to keep up with the Joneses.

Few people defended radio those days, in part because programming had gotten worse (instead of more diverse) with the advent of tape recording, used largely for the sake of economy, rather than reportorial or artistic experimentation. Shows were no longer produced live, which gave audiences the impression that they listened to a reproduction rather than a once-in-a-lifetime theatrical event and, as summer reruns became common, the sense that one had heard it all before. Radio was losing its edge, and listeners were only too ready to find that edge and push their old receivers over it. In other words, they were pushovers for television.

So, just what could television do that was not possible on the old wireless? Not much, really, considering the picture quality was still so poor as to give you a headache finding the difference and the production techniques were so inferior as to give rise to the adage that, in radio, the pictures are better. The theater of the mind, it is true, could not recreate the enjoyment of an old-fashioned charade, as demonstrated above by Vincent Price. Pantomime. Now there’s a concept with which to silence the old wireless (even though silent movies could hardly have staged such a comeback against the talkies).

Mr. Price, who appeared on KTTV’s Pantomime Quiz, along with Lon McAllister (also pictured in the foreground), seems to have leaped at the opportunity of saying “boo” to shake up the public on behalf of the television industry. Pity, he was so much more sophisticated as the Saint of the airwaves.

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Where Girls Get Their "fannies" Scratched; or, A Case of Censorship

Well, the cheek of it! I mean, who’d have thought anything quite this petty would come to pass nowadays in the kingdom of Benny and Fanny Hillbillies that gave the world “Pussy Galore”! Mrs. Slocombe’s pussy, for instance! Just last weekend (shortly before our digital receiver box gave up the ghost), BBC 2 presented its latest instalment of Balderdash and Piffle, a national word-hunt in which the British public is asked to dig for evidence of earlier uses of put-downs and swearwords like “tosser,” “plonker,” and “pratt” than are currently acknowledged in the street cred craving Oxford English Dictionary. Yet you won’t find the word “fanny” uttered on British cable television. Even the Golden Girls are getting their “fannies” scratched by overeager censors.

I noticed it a few days ago, listening, eyes averted, to an episode in which Rose and Blanche (recently seen—alas, not by me—at a New York City gay bar promoting her latest memoirs) are giving themselves a serious makeover in order to land a pair of eligible twins. The bathing suits were a bit tight, they had to admit; but according to Rose, the ever resourceful Blanche dreamed up a kitchen sink remedy faster than dieting: to spray their behinds with butter substitute PAM so as to be able to cheat themselves into those truth-telling garments.

Ingenious, to be sure. Yet viewers here in the United Kingdom didn’t get to hear about it. That word, “fannies” was faded out. Of course, it means something other than buttocks in the Queen’s English. Still, I thought it a rather pathetic cover-up. Come to think of it, the other day we had an e-mail message returned since it included the word “bitch,” even though it referred to the canine variety.

Since we are on the subject of “pussy” (a subject I, not numbering among the cat fanciers, rarely bring up in any company, polite or otherwise): here is my favorite scene from Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (dating back to 1853, mind you). Laughing too loudly about it, without having anything in mind but a tosser-upper of a feline, got me into an embarrassing situation during my—pardon the vulgarly academic expression—”oral examination”:

The friendship begun over bread and butter extended on to cards [. . .]. 

As a proof of how thoroughly we had forgotten that we were in the presence of one who might have sat down to tea with a coronet, instead of a cap, on her head, Mrs. Forrester related a curious little fact to Lady Glenmire—an anecdote known to the circle of her intimate friends, but of which even Mrs. Jamieson was not aware. It related to some fine old lace, the sole relic of better days, which Lady Glenmire was admiring on Mrs Forrester’s collar. 

“Yes,” said that lady, “such lace cannot be got now for either love or money; made by the nuns abroad, they tell me [. . .]. I daren’t even trust the washing of it to my maid” [. . .]. Of course, your ladyship knows that such lace must never be starched or ironed. Some people wash it in sugar and water, and some in coffee, to make it the right yellow colour; but I myself have a very good receipt for washing it in milk, which stiffens it enough, and gives it a very good creamy colour. Well, ma’am, I had tacked it together (and the beauty of this fine lace is that, when it is wet, it goes into a very little space), and put it to soak in milk, when, unfortunately, I left the room; on my return, I found pussy on the table, looking very like a thief, but gulping very uncomfortably, as if she was half-chocked with something she wanted to swallow and could not. And, would you believe it? At first I pitied her, and said ‘Poor pussy! poor pussy!’ till, all at once, I looked and saw the cup of milk empty – cleaned out! ‘You naughty cat!’ said I, and I believe I was provoked enough to give her a slap, which did no good, but only helped the lace down—just as one slaps a choking child on the back. I could have cried, I was so vexed; but I determined I would not give the lace up without a struggle for it. I hoped the lace might disagree with her, at any rate; but it would have been too much for Job, if he had seen, as I did, that cat come in, quite placid and purring, not a quarter of an hour after, and almost expecting to be stroked. ‘No, pussy!’ said I, ‘if you have any conscience you ought not to expect that!’ And then a thought struck me; and I rang the bell for my maid, and sent her to Mr. Hoggins, with my compliments, and would he be kind enough to lend me one of his top-boots for an hour? I did not think there was anything odd in the message; but Jenny said the young men in the surgery laughed as if they would be ill at my wanting a top-boot. When it came, Jenny and I put pussy in, with her forefeet straight down, so that they were fastened, and could not scratch, and we gave her a teaspoonful of current-jelly in which (your ladyship must excuse me) I had mixed some tartar emetic. I shall never forget how anxious I was for the next half- hour. I took pussy to my own room, and spread a clean towel on the floor. I could have kissed her when she returned the lace to sight, very much as it had gone down. Jenny had boiling water ready, and we soaked it and soaked it, and spread it on a lavender- bush in the sun before I could touch it again, even to put it in milk. But now your ladyship would never guess that it had been in pussy’s inside.”

Go ahead, girls, get your “fannies” sprayed! Just make sure those tight-laced censors understand which end you are buttering.

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(Up) Yours in Songs

Well, the 52nd Eurovision Song Contest is history. That it is also politics was once again apparent in the shamelessly biased attacks on our nerves during the announcements of the televoting results. The face of Europe is changing, and that of anyone tuning in west of Latvia likely to get longer. Perhaps, last year’s Finnish win was the traditional song contest’s swansong.

This year, it was the revenge of what the west regards as Europe’s ugly ducklings. From now on, or until further notice from Russia, the contest is going to be one big Eastern Euro-paean after the singing of which most of those precious “points” are being traded by former Communist countries voting for each other’s representatives in a series of mostly predictable not-so-foreign flag waving gestures.

When you live on what now looks like a remote island way to the west of it all, “Flying the Flag” is a pointless exercise; the UK’s Scooch, who misfired with said camp number, could only rely on major points from a minority anglophisle like Malta.

“Yours in song”: Rose Marie (seen here in a photograph from my collection) had nothing to do with it.

The night proved the might of the new Russia, whose brass girlband screamed something about “want[ing] your money, honey,” and the animosity our younger and poorer relations in the east feel toward the western founding fathers of the old love-thy-neighbor fest. Perhaps, voting is still a novel concept to them, which is not to say that the winner of the evening, Serbia’s Marija Serifovic was inferior to the imitation swing from Germany (crooned by a smarmy and charm-deficient Roger Cicero) or the pink mess that was supposed to convey “L’amour à la Francaise.”

Had the runner-up (Ukraine) walked away with the trophy, I would have attributed the success to the outrageous if too-silly-to-be-offensive drag act that thumped its nose at the contest, just as Finland’s provocative monster metal medalists did last year. This time around, winning the contest was not a matter of sending or shaking it up (Denmark’s “Drama Queen” and Israel’s “Push the Button” did not even make it into the finals; nor did Switzerland, Austria, Belgium, and the Netherlands.

The natural selection of favorites and the survival of the allegedly fittest or finest was a matter of ethnic myopics, of turning Eurovision into a bloc party in which the eastern front now far outnumbers the west. It wasn’t exactly hostile (the audible resentment of the results by the audience in the hall notwithstanding)—but it sure wasn’t impartial.

Afterwards (and a few Black Russians later) I signed off from the politics of schlock pop-rock with a screening of The Dolly Sisters (1945), in which a musical act from Eastern Europe (Hungary, in this case) gets the full Hollywood treatment. Speaking of Hungary, even at the risk of undermining my east/west dialectics, I thought that Magdi Rúzsa’s “Unsubstantial Blues” ought to have fared better.

Meanwhile, I did not get to continue my Radio Vs. Television series, my plans having been thwarted by yet another broadband brownout; nor was I able to tune in many of the previously announced new drama series airing on BBC 4, relying, clearly overmuch, on internet radio rather than the old wireless.

And now, after permitting friends to celebrate another one of my many happy returns, I am turning by back on Europe for a trip to Gotham. As much as I resent having to pay for wireless access by sipping overpriced java at a Starbucks, I’ll try to report from there . . .

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Black Eye/Boxed Ear: Radio Vs. Television, Round One

Well, I’m working myself up to a season finale of sorts. On 20 May, broadcastellan will turn two. And since the anniversary falls smack into the limbo of my (projected) three-week hiatus—during which time I am once again catching the sights and sounds of New York City, my former home—this week’s journal entries are meant to remind me why I love writing about radio, the medium television bullied into submission. Let’s have a sparring contest between video and the wireless. Do we need images to get the picture? Can radio show television how it’s really done? Or might not sight be a welcome, even necessary, adjunct to sound? That kind of debate.

Though I grew up, like fellow webjournalist Brent McKee, being a “Child of Television,” I don’t sample many contemporary programs these days. I generally snatch from satellite TV whatever old movies I see listed in the Radio Times (yes, Britain’s premier TV guide is still called the Radio Times). Perhaps I shouldn’t be pooping on the dish, given that many of the films I have watched so far this year (and am listing in the column on the right) were recorded from television, British channels FilmFour, the four BBC channels, and TCM UK being the main purveyors.

So, what programs have I been watching lately? I confess to an occasional glance at a few early episodes of Ugly Betty, a serial so uneven in tone and unselfconsciously hokey in its storytelling that it makes me think Postmodernism has finally jumped the shark. I’m still following the exploits of those frenetic Housewives, however much the series and I have suffered since Marcia Gross went on maternity leave. This might have been Nicollette Sheridan’s chance to become more than a supporting player; but Edie’s hardened slut-with-a-soft spot turn is as tedious as it is unconvincing. Besides, I still mourn the exit of Valerie Mahaffey, for whose wicked ditziness I fell big time in the early 1990s, when it was on full display in Norman Lear’s too-smart-for-prime time serial The Powers That Be.

Since the gals I have been cheering for are leading the competition, I keep tuning in to the current season American Idol, even if it means turning down the volume when subjected to the song catalogues of mentors like Jon Bon Jovi. Rather an ordeal is Any Dream Will Do, a British song-and-dance contest in which a group of guys vie for the title role in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Largely deficient in ability or charisma, the contestants may very well be the death of the musical’s West End revival later this year—a case of pop culture trash canning itself.

What do these illegitimate children of Major Bowes signify, now that Eurovision fever is once again sweeping the nations (forty-two of them, to be exact)? Small fries, I say (if only to account for my choice of illustration, the above being an image from the early US television program Small Fry Club).

But, to get this match started. Last night, 6 May, I watched “How the Edwardians Spoke,” an the unlikely television documentary shown on BBC4, Britain’s “digital channel of the year.” This seemed to me the ideal subject for a radio program: a dialectician (Joan Washington) in search of lost pieces of shellac holding the voices of Britons imprisoned in Germany during the First World War. The men, of whose days in the camps only few pictures survive, were asked (not forced, apparently), to read or sing some lines in English so that their regional accents could be captured and studied by Austrian Anglophile Alois Brandl.

I was doubtful about the prospect of staring at spinning records from a bygone age; but seeing these “voices” come home to their families after ninety years in the can and witnessing their reception made for inspired television. Imagine hearing your ancestors (in one case, a dead brother of a woman yet living) speak or sing from the grave, as it were. Rather than being merely pleasing, the images of Britain’s landscapes, whose variety Ms. Washington linked to the wide range of accents and dialects, assisted me (still foreign to the British isles) in placing those voices, in tracing their origins on the map of the Kingdom.

Radio voices of the past cannot be trusted to tell the story of all these Englishes. On US radio, the British tended to sound like Alan Mowbray, while the dearth of authentic dialects in Britain was mainly due to the generic BBC English now challenged by regionally diverse newscasters. Like BBC2’s Balderdash and Piffle, which begins its second season this week, “How the Edwardians Spoke” proved to be radio worth watching. Seems that, instead of pummeling it, television is making eyes at the wireless, if only to invade the domain of sound that radio has lost sight of …

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Post-Cold War Days, meleg Nights: Eurovision, Idol Worship, and National Identity

I wonder whether I’ll come across any signs of support for Magdi Rúzsa next week when we wander around the Hungarian capital of Budapest. Though no politician, Ms. Rúzsa is something of an ambassador. A former Megasztar (or Hungarian Idol) contestant, she is going to Helsinki to represent Hungary in this year’s Eurovision Song Contest, to be held on 12 May. The contest, which has been staged annually since 1956 in an effort to foster a united Europe, rarely brings out the best a culture has to offer; but it often brings out the worst in nationalistic pride. As such, this noble experiment of Cold War Eurovisionaries is an abject failure, both diplomatically and artistically. That it turned out to be a sensational success and is now more popular than ever has more to do with spectacle than respectability. Hoping for musical excellence or cultural relevance would be tantamount to expecting an Academy Award-worthy performance from Hungarian mantrap Zsa Zsa Gabor, recipient of the 1958 Golden Globe in the whatever-happened-to-that category of “Most Glamorous Actress.”

As a German expatriate, and a less than proud German at that, I am too wary of nationalism to be cheering its benefits. In order to counteract nationalism,Eurovision rules stipulate that television viewers cannot call in to cast their vote in favor of a contestant representing their own country; but that rule poses no hindrance to borders-hopping fanatics, of which there are, I am pleased to say, very few Germans, if the notoriously poor performance of my native country is any indication. And yet, even a nation as divided as Iraq can be united in Idol worship, as has been suggested in this report about the Iraqi winner of Star Academy, which is rather a sign of hope than an alarm signal.

Now, I’m not sure how Ms. Rúzsa will fare. Hungary, which joined the competition along with several other reformed Eastern Bloc nations in 1994 (after a failed attempt in 1993), has a patchy record at best; in fact, Rúzsa’s “Unsubstantial Blues” has to make it through the semi-finals (on 10 May) in order to qualify for the main event. I suspect that the number will be overshadowed by some of the more outrageous acts, among which Ukrainian drag queen Verka Serdyuchka is the one to top (although the Danes got a “Drama Queen” in the running). While popular enough to get the nation’s votes, Verka Serdyuchka has enraged Ukrainian nationalists who deem the act an embarrassment, as was the case back in 1998 when transgender diva Dana International represented Israel (and won the competition). Clearly, those sing-to-win performances of Celine Dion or Lulu (recently featured on American Idol) are fuzzy Eurovision history; but is Verka merely presenting a challenge to more traditional acts or challenging the very act of representing a nation? Once you cross the boundaries of gender, are national borders to be upheld? Or is subculture proposed as a transnational superculture?

Cold war days seem to have made way for balmy postmodern nights. The iron curtain has melted into uncurtailed irony; and what once looked like a breakdancing showdown among feuding neighbors is now a free-for-all breaking with traditions. To use a scrap of Hungarian I just picked up, things are certainly meleg these days (meaning “gay” or “not cold”). And as much as I regret the lack of good tunes or taste, I can’t help but warm to this queer new world of a continent I left so long ago.

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Acid Tongues in Wilted Cheeks: Hollywood and the "Older" Woman

Well, she’s being teased quite a bit this season about her obsolescence, about being too old for her former job, too old to start dating again after her marriage fell apart, too old for any excitement greater than awaiting the arrival of the latest issue of Cat Fancy. The superannuated one is Gabrielle Solis, one of those supposedly Desperate Housewives. She’s a mere 31, mind you; but that’s just about a quarter to finished on the watch of a supermodel. It’s Hollywood poking fun at its obsession with youth, an obsession I never shared even while I stilled possessed it. It is pointless to shout “Grow up!” these days, since that is exactly what is feared most.

If fifty is the new thirty, does it follow that thirty is the new pre-pubescence? Perhaps that is why Gabrielle is asked to prep hideous little Miss Sunshines for a short career of runway sashaying or paired with an even more hideous Ritchie Rich of a teenager who seriously undermines her chances of landing a man. Gabrielle is not so much robbing the cradle than sinking back into it.

Men like birthday boy William Shatner (born on this day in 1931) never had it quite as tough to stay employed, even though they might experience their own aging anxieties, drowned sorrows untraceable in their bloated or botoxed visages. If Desperate Housewives can be claimed to succeed in making mature women appear desirable it is only by making them look and act less than mature. At least they are spared for a while longer from the fate of being assigned nothing more glamorous or challenging than a low budget sequel to Trog.

Joan Crawford, who did exit with that movie on her resume, made a career out of playing formidable women past forty just until she passed fifty, at which untender moment the formidable was twisted into the berserk. According to Hollywood, the line between fierce and frantic is as thin as a wrinkle behind a layer of gauze; and even in the make-believe of radio, where no gauze is required to assist those incapable of suspending their disbelief at the sight of crow’s feet, Crawford was asked to walk and cross it.

In “Three Lethal Words”, a tongue in less-than-rosy cheek Suspense thriller that aired on this day, 22 March, back in 1951, Crawford is heard as Jane Winters (read: well past spring or about to enter the second childhood of a Jane Withers), a woman who confesses to being, gasp, 43! You know the old gal has a problem (according to Hollywood logic, that is) when she also confesses to having been “ill” and walks into a film studio with a bottle of nitric acid in her pocket.

“It’s amazingly powerful,” she tells her former colleague, now head of the studio’s story department, to whom she is trying to pitch a story of a woman not unlike herself. As it turns out, that is an understatement, considering that the parallels are melodramatically overstated by Ms. Winters choice of character: Sally Summers, a screenwriter who tries to make herself believe that “43 isn’t very old,” but who is constantly reminded of her relative antiquity by her marriage to an actor 19 years her junior, especially when that young man leaves her after being told to send his wife Mother’s Day cards and is teased about not only having seen Sunset Boulevard, but “living it”!

“Three Lethal Words” throws acid into the wrinkle-free face of Hollywood; but the woman who gets to do the throwing is not looking any better for having dreamed up the deed.