Lil Rounds and Anoop are gone. I’d predicted Lil and Matt and I still think that’s how it should’ve gone. When Anoop did his encore of Donna Summer’s “Dim All the Lights,” he sounded even better than last night, looser and more in control at the same time. The judges wasted their save last week on Matt. It should’ve been spent on Anoop this week.
Highlights included appearances by disco stars Freda Payne, Thelma Houston and KC with skanky dancers instead of his Sunshine Band. It was all a little rough to watch. And I’m saying this as someone who really likes disco music and once paid to see KC live.
KC and the divas could’ve benefited from Paula’s choreography skills, which she unleashed on the contestants for the first time, making them look semi-coordinated and hip in their group number instead of awkward and flat-footed. Some took to the dance steps better than others but overall, Paula taught those kids well and reminded us how she first came to fame.
What’d you think of the group number? Did you agree with tonight’s castoffs?
This week, the trades report that Richard Jenkins has been cast as Richard from Texas, someone Gilbert befriended in India who ended up enlightening her with his insight and simple truths. I was able to reach the real Richard to get a quick reaction to Jenkins’s casting.
SA: He was very quietly piloting a bomber over Europe. And when he returned, he didn’t want the studios making something out of it, so it really was played down…Another guy that comes to mind is William Holden. A relative unknown at the time, he made training films for the Air Force for much of the war years, but he would have been great, too.
Sal might be Jane Wyman, if Ronald Reagan would have allowed her to do topless. Virginia Mayo would be good. Again, I believe, Ronald Reagan might have had a say. Other possibles: Lana Turner, Betty Grable, Olivia De Havilland, Rita Hayworth, as long as she didn’t bring her meddling husband, Orson Welles, in tow. Or possibly Lauren Bacall, for some of the tougher side and because she might have brought Bogie in tow. Reenie could be part Jane Russell—not the obvious parts—and part Jennifer Jones.
SA: These days I could see Scarlett Johansson or Ginnifer Goodwin, when she dyed her hair on Big Love, as Sal. Anyone from the Anne Hathaway School for Young Brunettes with Talent would be great as Reenie and maybe Lee Pace from the short-lived Pushing Daisies as Wink. He’s tall and a little Sad Sack and droopy-eyed and can do shy well.
PCN: Lee Pace would make an excellent Wink, especially if you’ve seen Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day.
And I’ve always been involved in art. Like Wink, I wanted to be a cartoonist when I was quite young. Big fan of Rube Goldberg as an eight-year-old. I actually took a lot of painting and drawing classes and flirted with a second major and a graduate degree in art—graphic design…Maybe I’d get into fireworks or the long con, preferably one involving a lot of disguises. Con men have to know how to build a narrative. Of course, in either job I’d be dead inside a month.
I would get rid of the mice that have appeared; possibly the hidden mold that I may or may not be inhaling. I would keep the framed Clash poster, signed by the band backstage when I was a young punk. Ditto the old map of North American native tribes and my library poster of Kelly Ripa telling kids to read books.
The inspiration for this one was very specific, though. I didn’t have the two characters or the setting or anything: I had a cover image and a title. I’d been talking to my father-in-law, who was a former commercial illustrator and painter in Chicago, about our mutual admiration for Gil Elvgren, arguably the most talented painter to ever produce pinup calendar art.
SA: Years and years, of course. Since before my voice changed. I don’t have a photographic memory, but it is pretty close. There is one reference book I looked at, The History of Girly Magazines (Taschen Books), that breaks down the genre into eras, and there are examples of some ridiculous photo shoots—especially the non-nude ones—with very strange and corny scenarios. None of them ended up in the book, but they inspired the cheesy arts-and-crafts approach to the set dressing. Things made of cardboard, hokey costumes, cobbled together props. And the over-the-top facial expressions and pun-heavy copy.
SA: I live near the original Argus Camera company. I mean, I can walk there from my house. It’s now an office building that houses a small museum dedicated to Argus. We had the after-party for my book launch there, with a jazz combo and cheesecake (the edible kind).
SA: I do kind of wonder if, right after that photo of the sailor bending the girl backwards—Alfred Eisenstaedt’s “V-J Day in Times Square”— if she didn’t haul back and slap the crap out of him. It’s possible she pressed charges. Wouldn’t it just be so great if someone discovered there was an entire roll of film after that frame, showing a burly husband appearing and throttling the guy?
SA: What’s interesting, too, is that when I dug around to find out what photo actually won the Pulitzer [in 1947] that supposedly beat out Wink’s fictional photo, I found that the amateur shot [by Arnold Hardy] of a woman falling from an apartment fire continues, to this day, to be mislabeled as “to her death,” when in reality she died several decades later. She recuperated—that whole business in the book is true. So the question is, was the photo really that effective and moving, or do people just remember the headline or the caption or the idea of the image? In a way, come to think of it, this entire novel was written as an imagining of a photo for which I had no real information.