Salon.com > Ron Feemster

Nasty girl

Wed, 26 Jul 2000 19:00:00 +0000

Like a true queen of country, Tammy Faye Starlite fairly floats down the aisle on her way to the stage. Clutching the train of her white wedding dress in one hand, she seems propelled by the sinuous strains of a pedal steel guitar. Her regal posture and virginal gown recall the stage shows of Loretta Lynn, one of Tammy's musical idols and inspirations.

The choreographed entrance is as much a part of country lore as the waltz, the shuffle or the two-step. But this night, in a small downstairs lounge of New York's Knitting Factory, the slender woman wearing bleached-blond tresses and too much body glitter has anything but sycophantic fantasies in mind. Tammy Faye Starlite has come to skewer country music, to kill the thing she loves, to take all those ballads of pious, overworked women with too many babies and drunken philandering husbands and twist them into sometimes-pornographic satire.

Football's cattle call

Wed, 12 Apr 2000 16:00:00 +0000

There's a lot at stake when 350 nearly naked buff guys take turns climbing a platform to have their physiques rated by experts. This isn't a dream date on an MTV vacation special. This is professional football. Every year, the National Football League invites top college players to Indianapolis to have their bodies and minds probed and tested by the pro teams.

"It's a medical meat market," said Rob Huizenga, a former team doctor for the Oakland Raiders and author of "You're Okay, It's Just a Bruise: A Doctor's Sideline Secrets About Pro Football's Most Outrageous Team." The test results can make or break an NFL hopeful. Coaches say the medical information is the most valuable intelligence they get at the scouting combine -- even more important than the bellwether 40-yard dash.

The combine is something like a mass job interview for college football players who hope to be selected in the NFL draft, which will be held Saturday and Sunday. The young men who make it to the NFL will last, on average, three to four years. With minimum salaries of more than $190,000 for rookies, and signing bonuses that totaled $142 million for the 31 top picks last year, teams are understandably careful about whom they hire. At the combine, months before the draft, players are put through physical tests to assess their aptitude and durability for one of the most violent of sports.

Jar-Jar Binks unmasked — for charity!

Wed, 29 Sep 1999 16:00:00 +0000

In a world where good deeds seldom go unpunished, the latest benefit CD for Kosovar refugees seems like one that will escape the lash of lawyers and critics alike. Assembled with little interference from major record labels -- something Pearl Jam and the Beastie Boys can't say for their high-profile efforts this summer -- the eclectic CD reflects New York's quirky, unregimented downtown music scene.

The CD is called "Refuge," and it appears on Orchard Records, a new label founded by the Net-based record distributors of the same name. The project was conceived in a casual e-mail by Michele Stuart Rubin, the 30-year-old poet and public-school teacher who founded Artists Responding to Crisis; her spontaneous impulse to "get some New York musicians together and do a compilation album fund-raiser" took flight when she called Joy Askew, a vocalist who has backed up Peter Gabriel and Joe Jackson.

Naked city?

Tue, 01 Jun 1999 16:00:00 +0000

An unpaid traffic ticket resulting in a suspended driver's license was all
it took to launch Carlos Morales on a 20-hour trip through judicial hell.
The 33-year-old hotel worker didn't know his license was suspended, but the
officers who stopped his laundry van for a broken taillight in midtown Manhattan two years ago
did. They arrested him, charged him with a misdemeanor and sent him to
Central Booking, a warren of crowded holding pens attached to the Manhattan
criminal
courts. There, New York City corrections officers strip-searched Morales in
front of jeering prisoners, threatened him with rape if he didn't disrobe
faster, tossed his shoes down a crowded cellblock corridor and forced him
to retrieve them naked. When Morales finally saw a judge, he was fined $75
and sent on his way.

How to save yourself from Y2K doom

Mon, 10 May 1999 16:00:00 +0000

One new Y2K fix is so elegant that it makes you long for the problem. For once, the fate of a tiny section of the wired world isn't in the hands of faceless computer technicians cleaning miles of code. Saving yourself from sure malfunction is now as easy as reprogramming your VCR.

An oft-forwarded e-mail, traced through Channel 13 in New York, a university in Florida and back to a New York real estate broker, suggests that VCR owners whose machines won't accept the date 2000 reset the year to 1972. The year of the Watergate break-in shares the same days of the week and month as 2000, which is all the advanced recording function of your VCR needs to know.