Julene Snyder

Seeking spirituality with a pop-culture twist was a popular pastime in the ’70s. Hordes were looking for a brand of redemption that didn’t involve fire and brimstone: Hell, you couldn’t turn around without running into acoustic guitars and “folk masses” at your local Catholic church, Hare Krishnas dancing in suburban malls, groovy Jesus freaks and sold-out est conference rooms. “Jesus Christ Superstar” set my own adolescent quest for meaning into overdrive. After that fateful day at the movies, I was driven to actually read the gospels, digging out the old “Good News for Modern Man” (American Bible Society, 1967) that a born-again playmate had pressed on me way back in third grade.

God help me, I ended up getting baptized four times in those heady times. Just, you know, covering the bases.

That sort of reaction wasn’t as extreme as you’d think. Even today, more than 30 years since it was released, a multitude of like-minded souls have put up Web sites in homage to various permutations of “Jesus Christ Superstar.” They trade gossip and tidbits about the various actors who have portrayed this passion play’s principals over the years and share stories of how the rock opera has changed their lives. Hey, just saying, I’m not the only one.

“Jesus Christ Superstar” has been staged countless times over the past several decades, but for aficionados there are really just three significant artifacts. There’s the first album, released in October 1970, which purists insist is the most excellent. This is the version that features then-obscure rocker Ian Gillan (of Deep Purple) as Jesus Christ, and it comes with a handy booklet of lyrics for those who’d like to follow along at home. The LP sold more than 3 million copies before the Broadway opening, and the U.K. production went on to be the longest-running musical in British theater history.

(Somewhat less immortal is the initial 1971 Broadway show, which featured one-time Black Sabbath session singer turned born-again Christian Jeffrey Fenholt as Jesus and Ben Vereen as Judas. Time magazine described the latter’s singing style as “Sammy Davis Jr. imitating Chuck Berry.” Other reviews were less kind.)

Then there’s the movie that first bewitched me, the hippie-dippy one directed by Norman Jewison that came out in 1973, sandwiched, in terms of Jewison’s career, smack in between “Fiddler on the Roof” and “Rollerball.” This version was made into an album as well. (For those keeping track, it’s the one with a silhouette of the crucifixion on the cover.) Both those slices of rock history feature the anguished Carl Anderson as Judas and Ted Neeley in the title role, that same foxy savior who first loomed over me in the dark. While he doesn’t have anything near the vocal range of Gillan, Neeley certainly looks the part of hapless messiah. He’s scrawny, more than a little scruffy, not necessarily the brightest bulb in the chandelier, but he burns, baby, he burns.

More recently, a new “Jesus Christ Superstar” was launched in the U.K. and wound up making it to Broadway for a revival in 2000. This production’s staging, by Gale Edwards, was captured on film for PBS’ “Great Performances” in 2001. For this updated foray, Christ was played by the overly perfect Glenn Carter, whose crinkled locks and buff physique made him seem like the Lord as interpreted by Calvin Klein.

But the real star of the show here, as always, was the great betrayer, Judas Iscariot. Much as Carl Anderson’s rendition of the disciple-gone-wrong stole the show in Jewison’s movie, balding Frenchman Jérôme Pradon emotes his doomed ass off in the new version. Brooding anti-Jesus Pradon is thin and dark where Carter is sculpted and golden, and the hints of homoeroticism in Judas’ jealousy over Christ’s friendship with Mary Magdalene add a contemporary queer-studies twist. Truth to tell, by the end of the video, I had a new crush object, edging Jesus to one side for the first time in years.

While Webber and Rice’s story wouldn’t seem to need much explaining — being, you know, a loose chronicle of the last seven days of Jesus — for those poor souls who managed to miss the “Jesus Christ Superstar” train as it’s chuffed through every station in the country over the past 30 years, a brief synopsis might be in order.

The eerie overture kicks off with a wailing guitar lick that builds with ominous intensity, a frantic mélange of sounds presaging the score’s major numbers. It’s an anxious layering of riffs and fragments, blending orchestral flourishes with hard rock’s escalating tension, until the rhythm finally melds together into a lavish celebration of the familiar chorus to the title track, which is immediately cut short by faint wailing voices and discordant notes. Five minutes in, the listener is already exhausted and exhilarated.

No time to rest: As the story opens, Judas is freaking out, big-time. His pondering quickly escalates to wailing doubts about Jesus’ exploding popularity, the cluelessness of His followers and the inevitability of conflict with the authorities (“We are occupied, have you forgotten how put-down we are?”). Cut to the apostles, a bunch of useless slackers forever milling about and asking: “What’s the buzz, tell me what’s happening.”

There’s a hint of the old nudge-nudge, wink-wink when Mary Magdalene steps in to soothe Jesus, punctuated by Judas’ sneering take on how all this female attention is just another troubling symptom of the direction Jesus is heading. In the first great exchange between the pair, Judas sneers that the former prostitute “doesn’t fit in well with what you teach and say.” Mary attempts to defuse the situation with the placating ditty “Everything’s Alright,” but Judas blows a gasket. While the two men keep ragging on each other, Mary continues to insist that all is copacetic. It’s not.

Meanwhile, the high Jewish priests are discussing the Jesus problem. An insinuating bass line keeps their conversation building with ominous foreshadowing for the carpenter from Nazareth. In the end, it’s decided: “This Jesus Must Die.” Uh-oh. With unfortunate timing, Jesus and His supporters pick that moment to hosanna their way past the priests’ council. Inside, the priests strategize the best way to deal with resistance: “His half-witted fans will get out of control.” Oblivious, the crowd continues to sing and prance about like mindless twits.

Horns sound as the parade swells to Lollapalooza-like numbers, and an infectious piano line kicks into a groovy sing-along: “Christ, you know I love you, did you see I waved?” Jesus’ follower Simon Zealotes slyly advises Him to “keep them yelling their devotion, but add a touch of hate of Rome.” Like the rest of the apostles, Simon wants a revolution. He wants a Jewish homeland. He wants the “filth from Rome who rape our country” to get their comeuppance. Bad move, Simon. Jesus is a lover, not a fighter.

Cut to Monday morning. Pontius Pilate sings a soft lament about his premonition that bad shit’s about to go down. The tempo kicks into high gear when Jesus enters the temple, where decadence and depravity abound. A driving riff plays off the line, “Roll on up, for my price is down.” Jesus pitches a fit and smashes everything all to hell. He muses sadly about how the end is coming, then is promptly hit with pleas from beggars who reprise the temple riff (“See my eyes, I can hardly see”). Overwhelmed, Jesus ends up telling them — with an anguished rock ‘n’ roll howl — to heal themselves.

Mary Magdalene’s sweet love song diffuses the tension. She’s conflicted over her love for Jesus. He’s just a man. She knows all about men. Nonetheless, she doesn’t know how to love this one.

Come morning, Judas has decided to turn traitor, almost in spite of himself. Relentless rhythms punctuate his rationalizations that he really didn’t come of his own accord. Whatever, shrug the priests, who toss him some coins and tell him it’s not blood money, just a fee. When Judas takes the money and tells them where to find Jesus, a mournful chorus intones, “Well done, Judas. Good old Judas.”

The Last Supper finds the apostles behaving like blithering fools as usual, drinking wine and dreaming of their post-Gospel immortality. Jesus knows He’s doomed and finally tells them the buzz they’re incessantly asking for: He’s going to be betrayed and denied, and then He’ll wind up dead. They act clueless when He asks them to remember Him via the old bread-body, blood-wine analogy, and He blows up at them: “Look at your blank faces. My name will mean nothing 10 minutes after I’m dead.” As the tension builds to near-unbearable tautness, Judas screams out his disillusionment, sneering that it would serve Jesus right if he didn’t turn Him in after all. But of course, he has no choice.

Once the useless apostles fall asleep, it’s time for Jesus’ showstopper: his obligatory, if temporary, loss of faith. He howls his doubts to God, whose silence is deafening. The song builds to a bombastic crescendo, but in the end, of course, He acquiesces. He has no choice, either.

Right on cue, Judas shows up with some soldiers and gives his betrayer’s kiss. The apostles are ready to kick some ass, but Jesus tells them to chill out. “Why are you obsessed with fighting? Stick to fishing from now on.” The once-adoring crowd turns fickle, clamoring for His thoughts and feelings. (“How do you view your coming trial? Have your men proved at all worthwhile?”) He doesn’t respond, which pisses everybody off.

After Peter’s denial, the action jumps to Pontius Pilate, who’s unimpressed, and sends Jesus off to be judged by King Herod. He’s trotted over to the wacky monarch, who merrily warbles a ragtime ditty, urging Jesus to “rock the cynics” and prove His deity. No dice, dude, so Herod sends Him away with all the petulance of a spoiled toddler.

Judas can’t stand the guilt; in a reprise of his earlier “doomed for all time” tune, he belts out his realization that he’s “been spattered with innocent blood.” His howls are briefly softened when he echoes his own doubts about how to love Him (“When He’s cold and dead will He let me be?”), but soon enough he’s back in bummersville and kills himself. The (heavenly?) chorus kicks in with a mournful buh-bye: “Poor old Judas. So long, Judas.”

The priests demand that Pilate do their dirty work, and reprise an earlier melody (“Hosanna, superstar”) into a new, grimmer sentiment (“We need him crucified”). As the music drives the action forward, Pilate finally agrees to have Jesus whipped; guitar riffs ripple and build for 39 lashes, in a distinctly sexual rhythm, as the beat gets faster and faster and faster. While Pilate begs Jesus to speak, to save Himself, the crowd keeps shouting for blood, and Jesus finally speaks. “Everything is fixed and you can’t change it.” The crowd screams for blood. Finally, Pilate howls out the death order in despair: “Die if you want to, you misguided martyr!”

Stand back, give them room, ’cause it’s time for the glitzy title track, the grand finale belted out by Judas in the afterlife, backed up by a soulful female chorus. It’s the biggest of this show’s showstoppers, designed to get an audience on its feet and swaying like an old-time gospel chorus while Judas poses pesky theological questions like, “Did you mean to die like that? Was that a mistake or did you know your messy death would be a record-breaker?”

As the last note fades, eerie laughter, faint discordant notes and the pounding of nails punctuate Jesus Christ’s last few words. It’s all over. A subdued echo of the overture brings us full circle. Curtain.

As an art form, rock operas never really took off. The oeuvre came and went during the early ’70s and consists, pretty much in its entirety, of the unholy trinity of “Jesus Christ Superstar,” “Tommy” and “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” Just as well, probably.

While “Cats” and “Evita” were still ahead of them, for my money, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s collaboration never again reached the sublime heights of “Jesus Christ Superstar,” whose score and lyrics are woven together with near seamless momentum. The pair’s abysmal first effort, “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat,” was written while both were still at school. It shows. (“Joseph” is mainly of interest because of how silly Donny Osmond looks in the film version’s title role — and for a few hints of musical themes that anticipate “Jesus Christ Superstar,” their next effort.) The phenomenal success of JCS, as fans call it, made millionaires of Webber and Rice and led them, for good or ill, to a long career as theatrical collaborators.

Lord knows there’s no credibility to be had in proclaiming one’s love for “Jesus Christ Superstar.” In most quasi-sophisticated circles, finding JCS anything but pure drivel makes a person suspect, not just as a critic but as a music lover and perhaps as a human being as well. Witness all the terrible reviews the work has gotten over the years: “Bombastic kitsch that [doesn't] rock,” said Rolling Stone. “The lyrics are pedestrian and often absurd,” harrumphed the Nation. “Flat, pallid, actually pointless,” sniffed the New York Post. Infidels, every one.

Of course, religious sorts had kittens over the whole thing from the start. Devout Christians howled in protest at Webber and Rice’s blasphemous gospel, which puts Judas squarely at center stage and doesn’t include the Resurrection. (Which is, after all, sort of the point of Christianity.) When the show opened on Broadway in 1971, religious groups protested en masse. A pamphlet put out by the Faith Free Presbyterian Church in Greenville, S.C., cautions the faithful to keep their distance from JCS:

“‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ is a conscious blasphemy against Christ … If you do not wish to fill your mind with Satan’s evil misrepresentation of the Son of God, you should avoid ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ … Tim Rice plainly stated that he did not believe that Jesus Christ was God … His opera constantly drives home this denial of the Son of God. He has Mary Magdalene say, ‘He’s a man, he’s just a man.’”

Ironically, it was that very possibility that led me and so many others to delve deeper into the scriptures. That, and the fact that Jesus was not merely a man but, you know, a total fox.

Sadly, my quest to have the Lamb of God for a boyfriend was never fulfilled, although I spent much of my teens hooking up with one scruffy longhair after another. None of them ever measured up to my first glimpse of Neeley’s Jesus, although more than a few whined just as convincingly as Neeley does when He’s asking God why He has to go through all this passion-play stuff anyway. Of course, my loser boyfriends were usually whining for blow jobs. But still.

As I’ve made abundantly clear, my personal JCS obsession has lasted for years. On a tipsy evening during a girly weekend getaway last year, I popped my own copy of the 1973 film into the VCR and, God help me, lectured to my bemused friends about recurring musical themes, pausing the video at key moments to pontificate.

I told them about how, in the early ’90s, when a stage revival featuring some of the movie’s cast was making its way around the country, I talked some editor or another into letting me do a story when the road show came through San Francisco. Of course it was all just an excuse to meet Jesus and Judas in person.

I ended up spending an enchanted hour alone in a room with Neeley and Anderson, drinking hotel coffee, nibbling stale breakfast rolls and babbling fan-girl nonsense. While my tapes of that conversation have gone missing — for the best, no doubt — I vividly recall that Neeley was wearing a deep-blue silk shirt with the top two buttons undone. A tuft of chest hair peeked out. I wanted to touch him but restrained myself, just barely. I told him how he’d made me feel sitting there alone in the dark when I was 12. He laughed, flashing blinding white teeth, looking all Jesus-y.

“I wish I could have come right down off that screen and sat next to you in the dark,” he said soulfully. I swooned.

OK, I didn’t actually swoon. But still. Holy shit. The Son of God was flirting with me.

In 1995, a group of Atlanta musicians got together to do a few performances of “Jesus Christ Superstar” both in their hometown and in Austin during the annual South by Southwest Music Conference. Of course I had to go, even though I didn’t really have an assignment, as I’d just quit my job as music editor of an alternative San Francisco newspaper after it had been bought by an evil chain. But I wasn’t going to miss the Indigo Girls doing JCS, damn it, so I cashed in some frequent-flier miles and headed off to Texas.

Ever the groupie, I talked to the project’s organizer, Michael Lorant of the band Big Fish Ensemble, before I saw the show. He told me that he’d been into JCS since he was a little kid. In fact, as a Jew, it taught him everything he knew about Christianity. “I always identified with Judas,” he confided. “Jesus, not so much.”

The subsequent album — “Jesus Christ Superstar: A Resurrection” — which featured the Indigo Girls’ Amy Ray in the part of Jesus and her bandmate Emily Saliers as Mary Magdalene, got decent reviews and raised money for gun-control issues, but for Lorant, who played Judas, the project was never about fame or fortune.

“Judas spoke out to me as very Jewish. He was misunderstood, a tragic character who didn’t get a fair shake in history,” Lorant said. “He did what he thought was for everyone’s good, turning in someone he loved.”

That night at the Austin Music Hall, a thousand of us watched, enraptured, as Lorant opened the show, taking his turn as Judas. This time out, Judas had long sidelocks and a yarmulke. And the part of Jesus, of course, was played by a lesbian folk singer in carpenter’s garb, complete with tool belt.

As usual, I found myself half in love with her. Once they’d crucified her, just as they always do, and Ray came back out on stage for the bang-up climax, now dressed in blinding white overalls, I swooned all over again.

Call it my own version of a messiah complex, but there’s something about me and the Son of Man. Even when He’s a girl.

Now in her mid-40s, she’s long since stopped waiting to be rescued. “I don’t believe there’s a prince coming anymore,” she laughs. “I’m just sick of the whole thing.” On the phone from her Los Angeles home, Germano sounds incongruously upbeat for a self-described “fairly dark person,” but she blames her perkiness on morning coffee. Her demons tend to come out at night.

Boy, do they. Germano’s latest effort, “Lullaby for a Liquid Pig,” delves into those bleak hours before the sun comes up with raw emotion that’s calculated to disturb. Stark, gorgeous songs weave a spell of deep-seated loneliness coupled with unceasing introspection; the album is a gut punch from the first hanging, ethereal note. “These are your secrets, hidden inside,” she murmurs on the opening track, then lays them out, one by one, like canapés at a suicide’s farewell party.

The tone is hardly unexpected, as Lisa Germano has never made music for the faint-hearted. For the last decade, the multi-instrumentalist (violin, piano, recorder, guitar, voice, etc.) has specialized in delving into the deepest crevices of her psyche, exposing nerves, tendons and viscera until she reaches the white gleam of bone. While critical acclaim has been lavish for album after album — six since her self-released 1991 debut — audiences have not flocked to buy Germano’s records. This is a crying shame, as her intimate, near-whispered delivery and spare arrangements tower above your average chart-toppers’ best efforts.

Germano’s chosen subject matter doubtless has something to do with the elusiveness of financial success, especially in the context of a recording industry that celebrates superficiality. The bleak “Happiness” (1994) explored the depths and valleys of depression and relationships with breathtaking directness. (“You wish you were pretty, but you’re not … ha ha ha/ But your baby loves you, he tells you so all the time/ Oh, that must be why you’re so happy together.”) Yikes.

Her subsequent full-length release on 4AD, the harrowing “Geek the Girl,” is an even more devastating dose of raw sensation. (Liner notes describe the record as the tale of a girl who is “constantly taken advantage of sexually” yet who still dreams of “loving a man in hopes that he can save her from her shit life  What a geek!”) That album’s pièce de résistance, the nervous-breakdown-inducing “A Psychopath,” culminates with a recording of an actual 911 call made by a terrified woman as an intruder breaks into her home. It’s deeply chilling and more than a little creepy.

True to form, 1996′s “Excerpts from a Love Circus” was a muffled scream, as Germano wielded her sweet, often-tentative voice with a surgeon’s precision. The matter-of-fact self-loathing of “I Love a Snot” reveals flashes of humor and self-knowledge: “Tubby tubby butt, tubby tubby face, tubby tubby stomach when I am with you  Icky icky breath, each and every kiss  you’re a snot, and I adore you.”

But honesty doesn’t pay the bills. 1998′s “Slide” turned out to be her last with indie label 4AD. In spite of reviews lauding the work and a burgeoning sense of hope woven through the record, it ended up selling a disappointing 6,000 copies. “They’re still my friends, but I understood,” Germano says about 4AD’s decision to drop her. “They’ve got to pay the bills.”

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Still, the muse doesn’t stop coming just because payday’s been canceled. Germano’s been tinkering with “Lullaby for a Liquid Pig” for the past three years — in spite of having no record label and no money.

“I don’t even want to make a lot of money. Just enough,” she says. “I don’t know how people make it. I’ve stripped away my life so I just live in a room.” (Her income comes mostly from her day job at Book Soup on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, where she’s worked on and off for five years.)

So in true DIY fashion, Germano recorded “Lullaby’s” 12 songs at home — a practice she’s become accustomed to over the years — and ultimately put them on the audio-editing software ProTools so that she could send tracks to various musicians to get their input from a distance, since a lack of finances prohibited working together in person.

With contributions by former Crowded House frontman Neil Finn, ex-Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr, and Wendy Melvoin (Wendy and Lisa/Prince), “Lullaby for a Liquid Pig” is an excellent — albeit deeply disturbing — addition to the Germano catalog. It’s slotted to be released in April on ArtistDirect’s new Ineffable label.

At first listen, one would think that the album is unambiguously about the seductions of booze (specifically, red wine). And while it’s true that many of the songs on “Lullaby for a Liquid Pig” have to do with alcohol, Germano says that in talking about the album, she’s come to the conclusion that it’s not really about drinking at all.

“I’ve had to figure out what it is about,” she muses. “You strip away and strip away and strip away until you get to the real meaning. And even though some of the songs are about alcohol, it’s mostly about loneliness, about being thirsty, being thirsty for more than you can get — than you should get — it’s about being needy, about being a pig.”

Germano believes that drinking every night masks a deeper void. “There’s something about alcohol that’s either ‘I’m a big drunk alcoholic’ or ‘Let’s go out and have some fun,’” she says. “But it’s really about the behavior. A lot of us have this need, this behavior. We have our vices. Some people have sex with a million people, some do heroin, some drink, but it all comes from the same lonely place.”

She laughs and tries to lighten the mood. “To mock your own behavior makes it less sad. Even the title [of the album] is mocking myself, that ‘Everything is about me’ thing, being so self-consumed. There’s just too much me sometimes.”

Of course, “too much me” is the very essence of Lisa Germano’s work, and “Lullaby for a Liquid Pig” is no exception. The hazy, almost underwater vocals of the opening track, “Nobody’s Playing,” are accompanied by a hesitant melody picked out on piano keys. When she murmurs, “Circles and circles/ Places to drown/ All that you feel/ Is you’re going down,” there’s a doomed inevitability, a noose that only grows tighter as the album progresses.

The discordant opening of “Liquid Pig” is a rumination on morning-after regret, Germano’s accusatory whisper “Who did you call/ What did you say” a precursor to the certainty that whatever you said, whatever you did, you’ll doubtless do it again — and feel like shit the next day. The delicate prettiness of “Pearls” is laced with self-loathing (“Hurry world/ Whirl and whirl/ Stop when you fall down”) and the siren call of home.

“That song is about alcohol,” Germano says. “When you look inside, you see some really bad shit. But then, as you’re getting drunk, you feel like you’re home. But that’s not right, getting drunk to do that. It strips it away and then puts it back in. When you hate yourself, all sorts of stuff grows, but in the end there’s nothing to learn from alcohol.”

There’s a raw quality to Germano’s voice on many of the songs here that she freely admits is owed to her vices: “I like some smoke and some wine when I sing,” she says. “It makes me like the sound of my voice. It doesn’t make it gravelly, doesn’t make me turn into Marianne Faithfull. It just deepens it.” She almost sounds giddy on the song “Party Time” when she drawls, “And I smell like wine, most of the time, a big red wine.”

The album’s title track flirts with the idea of going cold turkey before quickly backpedaling: “Well, if I do stop/ Or if I don’t stop/ It doesn’t matter/ I probably won’t stop.” A fluid segue into the next song, the almost dizzy introspection of “Into the Night,” finds Germano making a laundry list of denial: “What not to see/ What not to hear/ What not to be/ When you begin seeing your sins.”

A slender hint of hope snakes through the album’s last track “To Dream,” tempered with a heartbreaking fragility. Of course, after all that’s come before, the listener clings to lines like “Don’t give up your dream/ It’s really all you have/ And I don’t want to see you die,” hoping that wishing might just be enough — just this once — to make it so.

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Germano’s labor of love is coming out on veteran record producer Tony Berg’s newest venture, Ineffable Records (billed as a “creative collective” of artists). The release will almost certainly not change Germano’s immediate financial situation; she had to plunk down nearly every penny she got as an advance to pay the vet bills for her ailing cat, 12-year-old Miamo-Tutti. “The cat got really sick really quickly,” Germano says. “I had to feed him by hand and give him medicine a couple of times a day.” The sick kitty meant that she had to postpone a planned tour with former Crowded House frontman Neil Finn, a decision she says Finn supported wholeheartedly.

“John Cougar probably would have had me arrested,” she laughs, imagining telling the hard-rocking Mellencamp that she couldn’t go on the road because she had to nurse an ailing kitty. Since nearly every article ever printed about Germano mentions her one-time affiliation with his band as a fiddle player, she kicks herself for bringing it up. “I’ve tried so hard not to have the press mention it!” she laughs.

Besides her dark past as a backup musician for heartland rocker Mellencamp, Germano has another incongruous skeleton in her closet. In high school, she was a cheerleader. “I didn’t expect to make it and was shocked when I did,” she recalls. “Even then I was not a positive person. I got yelled at every day for not smiling, so I quit.” She laughs when she tells the story, but she sounds as if she’s still unsure as to what went wrong. “I thought I was smiling,” she says ruefully.

Sadly, Miamo-Tutti (who Germano describes as a “very Italian cat), ultimately didn’t make it. (“I’m sure [he's] having a big party with all the other cats up there,” she says in an update on her Web site.) Perhaps he’ll make an appearance in a future Germano song; a likely scenario, given her penchant for turning episodes from her own life into art.

When asked what it’s like to perform such personal material live, Germano is matter-of-fact. “These songs really work best when I have a sense of humor,” she explains. “It lets the audience think, ‘This is hard, but at least she’s all right.’” While she doesn’t get stage fright, she does say that wine can help her to focus better. “It’s important that I really start breathing before I go on. My voice is all breath. Without the breathing, there’s nothing there.”

You see, before the theatrical release of the film, two distinctly different sets of Jerry Maguire ads were all over television. During viewings of girly-fare like “Beverly Hills 90210,” we cut from Brandon Walsh and his girlfriend of the week (Tracy), to clips representing the film as a gauzy love story. Radiant romantic interest Renee Zellweger sighs, “I thought that I was in love enough for both of us.” Cruise, looking sweatily intense, coos back, “You complete me.”

But for primarily male viewers of the Holy Three — Seinfeld, Simpsons and Sports — “Jerry Maguire” looked like a completely different movie. These ads showed lots of football footage, high-fives in locker rooms, as well as shots of a deranged-looking Cruise screaming about money into the phone and grooving along in his car to rock and roll.

The movie’s Web site, for its part, features flowery cursive writing, spelling out the slogan: “Everybody loved him. Everybody disappeared. The journey is everything.” What this has to do with the actual movie I can not tell you, but I suppose it reads well.

What matters is that everybody loved him — or, at least, an awful lot of somebodies did. The film’s careful marketing paid off — in this case, to the tune of $17.1 million over the first three days. And, as the L.A. Times was to report, this “romantic comedy set in the sports world … appealed primarily to women — the actor’s core audience — but attracted more men than usual for a Cruise project, according to a source close to the film.”

It’s easy to imagine the conversations that went on in planning this orchestrated cut and paste: “When couples will browse through the paper looking for a movie that they can both agree on, they’ll wind up settling for this one. It’s fool-proof.” While this approach isn’t entirely unprecedented — as evidenced by the marketing of the Kevin Costner love-meets-sports movie “Tin Cup,” released in August of this year — it is more than a bit misleading for Joe and Jane Schmoe, who just want to see a movie they’ll both enjoy. I suspect, given the film’s high gauzy content, any Joe expecting a sports flick will feel more than a bit disgruntled when the lights go up.

In a chat with Mr. Showbiz, 35-year-old writer/director Cameron Crowe, (an early-bloomer who went undercover as a high-school student to research “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” more than a decade ago), complained: “My stuff is never that easily marketable. … And even now, with Tom Cruise playing Jerry Maguire, I still sit in that room and hear guys say, ‘We don’t really know how to market your film.’ … Now I’ve accomplished something — I’ve made a Tom Cruise movie that they don’t know how to market!”

But clearly, marketers McCann-Erickson worked something out: a blitzkrieg, divide and conquer approach. The box office numbers show that it’s succeeding. And now that the movie has reached number one, the TV ads have morphed into something new, naturally enough filled with accolades snipped from thither and yon.

Still, the previews at the theater where I saw the movie suggested that the marketers hadn’t quite figured out who the audience sitting in the dark would be. Just to be on the safe side, they veered schizophrenically from the boy-pleasing giant bugs, action and guns of “The Fifth Element” to “The Evening Star,” the sequel to the ultimate tear-jerking chick flick, “Terms of Endearment.” Just like grade school: Boy, girl, boy, girl.

Hey, whatever works. But next time, I get to pick the movie, OK?

EXTRA! Soccer Moms Destroy Civilization!

This week’s most stunning journalistic revelation comes from the pages of the conservative Weekly Standard. Apparently the Second Sex has taken over America, or so Christopher Caldwell’s cover story whines. “Women now constitute a class — a dominant class,” Caldwell pules in a massive screed titled “The Feminization of America.” And they’re making sure that everything — from the outcome of elections to the coverage of the Olympics — is designed to fit their overemotional and irrational whims. Caldwell is ticked off plenty about the “soft focus” coverage of the summer games, which transformed a nice manly contest into a “big sob story about cancer and dying fathers.” (Actually, we thought that was John Tesh’s fault.) Even worse: even though the ladies “are less interested in politics and don’t know what they think about political issues … they are likelier to turn out at the polls than men.” It seems that Caldwell hasn’t learned the manly art of losing gracefully.

But just because everybody can be skinny (or young, or
blond, or a different sex) on the Web simply by making stuff up, doesn’t
mean everybody wants to. Fat chicks are sick of feeling sick about their
bodies — and they’re as plugged in as anybody. To prove it, I
conducted the following utterly unscientific quest for fat chicks online:

A search at HotBot (accompanied by the helpful message, “searching for fat
women in the Web”) chugged along for a few seconds before coughing up
more than 60,000 matches, the top one being a “body fat calculator
for women.” (No thanks!) But by the second group of 10 hits, you get to the
good stuff. “The Fat?So! Manifesto #11″ calls on people to stop lying on
their drivers licenses since “people have been lying about their weight for
so long that we don’t know a good looking, 250-pound person when we see
one.”

Fat?So! is marvelous for a good many
reasons, not least of which is the main index page. It’s illustrated with
naked butts of many sizes, in keeping with the print zine’s regular habit
of showing photos of actual body parts of people both fat and not fat. Big
butts! Little butts! Medium butts! Jiggling butts! On top of that, you
gotcher Mighty Morphin’ Oprah, Aunt Agony’s Advice Column, and a lively
gabfest area where fat folks can share tips for finding clothing that not
only fits, but looks nice. Just the spot for “people who don’t apologize
for their size.”

Over at Excite, the quest for fat women yields more than a million hits,
with an added bonus of a targeted ad featuring a model’s skinny crotch and
the promise of “25 ways to lose 10 pounds without even trying.” Sheesh.
Reload for the option of ordering the “Home Body Fat Monitor” (as if).
Excite also offers up links to Big Women newsgroup posts ranging from the
clueless (“I have two large lovers. I need more information of how to have
sex with a fat woman.”) to the, shall we say, less-than-charming (“HOW DO
YOU MAKE LOVE TO A FAT WOMAN? ROLL HER IN FLOUR AND LOOK FOR THE WET
SPOT!!!!!!).

Thankfully, Excite redeems itself by spitting out a link to href="http://www.fatgirl.com/fatgirl/">FaT GiRL, the “zine for fat
dykes and the women who want them” in their top 10 hits. Yay. These woman
are pissed off and funny as hell:
“Sick and tired of (having) your family and friends shove their skinny
values down your throat? Well, turn the fat tables on them! Send them a
letter saying how concerned you are about their health. Rant on about the
potentially fatal dangers of dieting … And don’t forget to tell them, I’m
doing this for your own good. But of course I love you just the way you
are.’”

Hee.

Less lovely are the Altavista search results, where we find a festival of
smut right up top, including “huge pictures of fat women with big butts”
and “Absolutely Disgusting Pictures,” a sampling of which include fat
women, farm animals and women with dicks. Altavista also proffers a bevy of
liposuction sites and medical studies, just in case you were feeling good
about yourself for a minute.

At first glance, I thought that Yahoo! might actually have a fat-positive
spin, since the first time I searched for fat women, I was greeted with an
ad reading, “How do I get to the nearest Taco Bell?.” But sadly, I was
never able to pull it up again, so that must have been sheer dumb luck. Too
bad. I love Taco Bell.

Jumping from link to link, I stumbled upon a truly affecting story
of one fat chick’s journey to get a little respect. A self-described “bike
racer of no particular skill,” came across a call for photos for an
upcoming issue of “Bicycling” magazine for “the worst body in Lycra.” The
writer, 5’2″ and 234 pounds, decided to take a 400-mile solo bike ride to
raise a little fat consciousness. It wasn’t an easy trip, with people both
helpful and nasty along the way. When she would carbo-load at the end of a
long day’s ride, “Everyone stared. I was a fat woman eating a lot of food
in public. I wasn’t even trying to hide what I was doing. I was openly,
unashamedly, pigging out.” In the end, Bicycling didn’t run the
article, and the author put her full story online.

Curiously, none of these searches pulled up the National Association to Advance Fat
Acceptance near the top of their lists, which is really too bad.
They’re deadly serious about this stuff and more power to em: there’s a lot
of pain and discrimination that goes beyond bad jokes, smut and Richard
Simmons, and NAAFA is out there swinging for every fatty fatty two-by-four
who ever got teased in school.

Instead of getting teased cause she can’t get through the bathroom door,
these days, fatty-two-by-four has got places to go online, fat-friendly
sites that don’t force-feed diets and sing the praises of liposuction and
tummy tucks. Just a couple thousand fat chicks, sitting around talking.