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Tuesday, May 4. 2010
The Guiltiest of Pleasures
Okay, exactly a week ago this space published a blog about dirty little secrets. Actually, guilty pleasures, none of which are secret or ridden with guilt. I do, however, keep some of them low profile, the topic becoming too tedious over the years. It’s like the rule against talking politics and religion — and the New York Yankees in certain quarters.This is a guilty pleasure, a dirty little secret, one I’ve mostly kept to myself over the last 12 years. Yes, it began in the Clinton years, when America was in its biggest and longest materialistic boom. I was deep into it too. Had a little sports car, a 1988 Mazda RX-7. But I was living somewhat beyond my means, wearing a façade, being something I’ve never been nor ever could be, a lie only I was trying to buy.
Carl was still alive obviously, and we shared that condominium over by Poway. We paid rent on time, paid the bills mostly on time, and that was where the lie began and ended. The loan payments on that RX-7 were sporadic at best, then it needed serious repairs; the jobs came and went, from one telemarketing job to another, consistently unhappy with all of that, unhappy and putting on the façade that I was just the opposite: happy as a clam.
Ever wonder from where that little idiom originated? It’s fully American in origin, first being used in the early 19th Century up around the Northeastern part of the country, New England I guess. A clam, you see, when not ripped apart and served in a white sauce over your pasta, looks happy when it is opened and clams are often open at high tide, when they are less vulnerable to predators. Hence the phrase, “As happy as a clam at high tide.” Most Americans, like me, abbreviate the phrase and leave off the high tide reference. Who has the time to get it right these days?
So, in 1998 I was living “over the hill,” working jobs I was too ashamed to admit working, looking for and hoping for, meaningful employment. Since I subscribed to cable, and paid it myself, I couldn’t live without HBO. At the time, we could still get the premium channel on the analog signal most common with cable TV up until that time. HBO was my refuge from reality.
Sunday Nights were reserved for HBO. All of the network’s TV series aired on Sunday Nights, my favorites being Dream On, The Larry Sanders Show and Dennis Miller Live. Yeah, believe it or not, Dennis Miller used to be funny!All three of those shows were comedies, and none of them scrimped on language and sexual content and Dream On had lots of gratuitous nudity! Ah! The best reason to watch HBO! Everything you ever wanted to see on network TV, but couldn’t because the prudes who whine about good programming prevented it. Not that gratuitous nudity equals good programming, but it helps.
See, on network TV, people never use language many of us use on a regular basis; words like “fuck” and “shit.” Back in the 1990’s NYPD: Blue experimented with nudity, but we had to endure Dennis Franz’s bare ass. We did hear the characters talking like real Americans, but after that groundbreaking show left the air, network TV went back to bleh-as-usual.
So, what we were left with were the premium channels.
By 1998 Dream On had been off the air for two years and Sunday Nights were not quite as entertaining as they had been. The Larry Sanders Show was still the funniest program on TV, but HBO really had nothing to replace Dream On, in my book.
In stepped Candace Bushnell, sort of. More directly, in stepped producer Darren Starr with a series based on Bushnell’s book, Sex and the City, a tome taken from Bushnell’s newspaper column of the same name published in the New York Observer from 1994 to 1996.
It should be noted: the TV show and subsequent movie bare little resemblance to the actual book and column.
Now, what caught my attention about the show, from all the previews and hype, was the name obviously, but two of the actresses as well, Sarah Jessica Parker and Kim Cattrall. Parker had been in a movie with Nicholas Cage, Honeymoon in Vegas, one of the funniest movies of that decade. Who can forget the Flying Elvises!Besides the great storyline, Parker was often dressed in sexy, barely there clothing. After that film she was in the funniest movie of the 1990’s, Mars Attacks! She and Pierce Brosnan ended the film with their talking heads in jars.
Kim Cattrall, well, there’s really only one film that stands out over all others: Big Trouble in Little China. That’s not all she did of course. She had been in films and on TV since 1973 when she was — believe it or not — a contract player with Universal Studios. She was a regular on the old TV show, The Incredible Hulk, starring Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno as Dr. David Banner and the Hulk, respectively. And Cattrall was in the original Police Academy, the only one from that franchise that actually made me laugh.
But, it’s Big Trouble in Little China that remains firmly implanted in my memory! He co-star was Kurt Russell and the two had to battle supernatural, Kung Fu masters to … save the planet I think? No, just looked it up on Wikipedia: they had to save the girlfriend of Wang Chi, one of Jack Burton’s friends. That was a pretty funny movie and cult classic!
I belong to a cult!
So, Cattrall and Parker would be the stars of Sex and the City on HBO and if it was anything like Dream On, with sex and nudity, it would be a great show. It did not disappoint. Although Parker didn’t showed the goods, Cattrall frequently did and my one friend, who also had HBO, and I would cheer the episodes when Cattrall flashed us her lovely body.
At the time, we had no idea this was considered programming for women — and gays. I mean, my friend and I are heterosexual so what do we know about women’s issues and Manolo Blahniks? We were watching for the great stories and the beautiful women.
Sex and the City had 94 episodes over eight years and I rarely missed the Sunday Night airing. One year when I went to visit family in Denver I implored my brother to subscribe to HBO for a month so I wouldn’t miss Sex and the City or The Sopranos. Sadly, I had to wait until I got home to watch the replays.Most people would look at me like I am crazy when I said Sex and the City is one of my favorites TV shows. But, most of those people never subscribed to HBO and therefore had no idea what the show was all about, who was in it and of course, just how sexy a program it still is. Unless of course you’re watching the abbreviated version on one of the cable networks that edit out the naughty words and nudity. It’s as bad as trying to watch the Sopranos on one of the basic cable networks—worse! Sex and the City is all about sex! And relationships, most importantly the relationships between the four characters.
Ah yes, we cannot forget Miranda Hobbes and Charlotte York, played by Cynthia Nixon and Kristin Davis, respectively. Four highly ambitious, very beautiful single women taking Manhattan by storm.
By the end of the show’s run on HBO I had stopped telling people I was a fan of the show. For most, it was a program for women and gays and who really wants to have that conversation in this day and age? But I watched every episode, right ‘til the end when Mr. Big flew to Paris to take Carrie Bradshaw back to New York and make her his! She had moved to Paris to live with her lover, the Russian Aleksandr Petrovsky, played by Mikhail Baryshnikov.
Charlotte converted to Judaism and married her divorce lawyer, Samantha fell in love with her actor/client/lover Smith Jerrod and moved to Los Angeles, and probably the worst end to the show, Miranda married Steve. I never liked Steve. He was such a whiney … man! He didn’t want to live in Manhattan on Miranda’s considerable income, so they lived in Brooklyn. He didn’t want to enter Miranda’s world, she had to leave it to live in his. Why did she do it?
So anyway, the movie came out a couple years ago, but I never saw it. Life was different for me at the time and going to see a movie wasn’t high on my list of priorities and going to see a movie made for women? Not a chance.
Recently we started getting HBO in this house and on HBO On Demand you can still watch Sex and the City as it was meant to be seen and, wouldn’t you know it, the movie is featured on HBO On Demand as well. So, I watched it, from start to finish.
Steve cheated on Miranda and she left him, Samantha realized she loved New York and herself more than she loved Los Angeles and Smith, so she left him and moved back to New York. Charlotte actually got pregnant and Carrie, well, she and Big were planning the biggest wedding of the century, taking place in the New York Public Library, to be covered by Carrie for Vogue, complete with a one of a kind wedding dress by a designer with a name I can’t remember. What do I know about fashion? Have you seen my wardrobe?
Then, about halfway through the movie, with Carrie in that one of a kind dress waiting on the steps in the library, Big didn’t get out of his car. He jilted her on their wedding day! In the end, Carrie and Big get married at City Hall, Miranda forgives Steve and goes back to him and Samantha, well she ceremoniously turned 50 and celebrated her singleness of purpose — being herself!
That’s why she has been, and will forever be, the best character in the franchise. Not to mention, she is still smokin’ hot nude! Ah, the scene from the movie when she lays nude on a table for Smith, bits of her homemade sushi covering the tasty bits of her lovely body!
which brings to mind this little tidbit of trivia: two Playboy Playmates from the 1980’s recently posed for Playboy’s online site, The Cyber Club: Miss December 1989 Petra Verkaik and Miss August 1986, Ava Fabian. Verkaik is 42 and Fabian 48. Both are still smokin’ hot!
Makes you wonder, did the smokin’ hotness of Kim Cattrall at the age of 50 convince the powers-that-be at Playboy women can still be sexy after 36? Gotta wonder.
Well, that’s my one guilty pleasure, my one dirty little secret: I’m a fan of Sex and the City. Glad it eventually came to HBO so I could watch it in the comfort, convenience and secret anonymity of my home. Now I’m waiting for the prequel, based on Bushnell’s prequel, The Carrie Diaries. What can I say, I’m a hopeless romantic.
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