Roy vs. Eddie

Roy Ashburn

1. Roy Ashburn, the notoriously anti-gay rights senator from Bakersfield who was arrested on a DUI with a dude in his passenger seat after allegedly coming from a gay bar. And now the openly gay mayor of West Sacramento says that he’s spotted Ashburn at gay clubs a number of times. I don’t know if Ashburn is a closet gay or if he’s just been researching the lifestyle so that he can be even-handed when he makes his policy decisions about gay rights – after all, everybody knows that Eddie Murphy was just being a humanitarian by giving a lift to that transvestite prostitute a few years ago. And just because Murphy’s stand-up comedy act was viciously homophobic the same way that Ashburn’s political stance is doesn’t necessarily mean that they were trying to tip the public perception away from them as closet homosexuals. But there’s a big difference here: whatever their personal sexuality is (and I really don’t give a rat’s ass either way), Murphy is just an entertainer whose actions don’t affect anyone but himself and his family (which is none of my business). Ashburn is a lawmaker whose choices affect people’s lives. If it turns out that he is a closet gay who was making policy decisions to deflect detection of his sexuality, he was grotesquely irresponsible and should resign from his position in disgrace. Murphy should just hang it up because he makes terrible movies.

Dan E. Campbell and Glenn T. “Piece of Shit” Simon at last year's Razzie Awards. You gotta take the good with the bad.

2. Dan E. Campbell. It’s Academy Award weekend, and one of my activities is to attend the Golden Raspberry Awards presentation for the worst films of the year. It’s always an entertaining show in which many of my dear friends, including Kelie McIver, Glenn T. “Piece of Shit” Simon and Katsy Chappel are frequent performers. I even appeared in the 2008 show myself, and was so good that they have never asked me back because I so overshadowed everyone else that the rest of the presentation paled in comparison. The only downside of Razzie night is that somehow my nemesis Dan E. Campbell has wormed his way into the organization and is always cast in some court jester or village idiot role to give the show some darkly sadistic comic relief. This means that in addition to being charmed by the rest of the cast, I have to choke back the bile that inevitably rises from the darkest parts of my spastic colon when Campbell is onstage. It’s not that Dan isn’t a good performer, it’s just that he always seems to be coated with a kind of unnatural slime that reeks of damnation and makes me want to rush the stage and release a box of rabid, feral wombats that would devour him with their gnashing, razor-sharp teeth and then spit out his entrails into the foul mud from which he first sprang. It’s actually the same reaction I have towards Nicolas Cage, so I suppose I can deal with it. But when I see Dan up there, the raspberries I want to throw at him definitely aren’t golden.

Nick Park getting on my nerves.

3. Nick Park. As long as we’re on the subject of awards, I went to see the Oscar-nominated animated short films last night. They were all reasonably entertaining (considering that I had nothing to do with their creation) – there was a marvelous short called Logorama that was set in a universe populated by characters from commercials and advertisements – but the one that is obviously going to take home the statuette is Park’s Wallace and Gromit in ‘A Matter of Loaf and Death’. That means that Park will have won five Oscars in six nominations, and the only reason that he lost the one time was because he won it for a different film that he was nominated for in the same category. I like Wallace and Gromit as much as anybody, but I don’t like to see anyone honored that much unless it’s me and even though Park seems like a pretty nice guy, if I have to watch him collect yet another Academy Award while all my mantel is decorated with are my collection of old Slurpee Baseball Trading Cups from Seven-Eleven I’m going to throw a big hunk of Wensleydale cheese at my television set.

Paul St. Peter, Tom Ashworth and me in “Taming of the Shrew”

4. Tom Ashworth, who was my Facebook-assigned Best Friend of the Day (BFD) yesterday. Tom is a director who has demonstrated his brilliance by casting me many times, including three different productions of Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew. In the first (at the Globe Playhouse), I wore a six-inch long false nose that slid off my face one night in the final scene of the play. In the second (at the Richard Basehart Theatre), we had to interrupt a performance when my Elizabethan pants fell to my ankles at one of my entrances and the entire company walked off into the wings to leave me to repair the pantaloons while talking to the audience. The third was a rather charming Commedia dell’arte staging at a theatre inexplicably placed over a bowling alley in which Tom also played the character Tranio. There were no makeup or costumes mishaps in that one, although the costume designer brought her friend Bobbie to opening night who was a 60 year old, 6’4” transvestite who was dressed as Little Bo Beep and made up to look like something out of the Kabuki theatre. I blame you for all this nonsense, Tom. Burn in hell.

Jaz and her new bride.

5. Jaz Davison, who unsuccessfully tried to spread a rumor that she had married Amy Ball in England while Amy is on her worldwide walkabout to try and forget me. I was an usher at Jaz’s first wedding back in 1672 to a gentleman whose name has been sadly obliterated by the sands of oblivion. She has been married approximately two dozen times since then and while I can certainly understand how she could lose track at this point, the odds of her marrying Amy are radically slim. It has nothing to do with the fact that both Amy and Jaz are women – I am not only a vocal supporter of same sex marriage, but I find the whole chick/chick thing incredibly hot. But the last time I checked, Jaz was already married to someone and while I suppose it’s possible that she could have terminated her last marriage in time to hook up with Amy (being an old hand at such things), she seemed awfully content with the dude the last time I saw them together and didn’t appear to want to dump him. This can only mean that Jaz conned innocent young Amy into a sham marriage in order to rob Ms. Ball of her virtue. Since this is a scenario that I also find incredibly hot, I will now drop the subject in order to fantasize about my own perverse conclusions of the wedding night.