Salon.com > Sara Kelly

A night of engrams and clears

Wed, 03 Apr 2002 20:00:00 +0000

Imagine my surprise at receiving an invitation to a dead man's birthday party; who knew they even threw those anymore? Birthday boy L. Ron Hubbard -- LRH, in Scientology speak -- would've been 91 if he hadn't "dropped his body" right smack in the middle o f Reagan's second term. The Church of Scientology wanted me to come help celebrate.

A few days after I RSVP'd, a Scientology P.R. flack called back to calmly rescind my invitation. Why? I asked. Hadn't he himself invited me to learn more about his Tr avolta-tainted faith after I savaged the film adaptation of LRH's "Battlefield Earth" in the Philadelphia Weekly? Didn't he relish the opportunity, at last, to represent for "Dianetics"? Actually, no. If I were to write about Scientology again, he implied, it would be on Scientology's terms. Though he offered to meet me personally to explain LRH's mysterious thrall, he said my attending the birthday bash "would not be appropriate." OK, so I'd have to crash it.

Detention convention

Mon, 27 Aug 2001 19:00:00 +0000

It's a hundred degrees in downtown Philly and the Pennsylvania Convention Center is on fire. But it has nothing to do with the weather, or with the electric fence display the Gallagher Security rep claims is "more interesting when it's on."

It has nothing to do with the burnout that can drive thin-skinned prison staff to suicide. And it has nothing to do with the protesters outside waving signs saying "Teach by Example," or with the grubby puppeteers across town, coming off yet another Mumia rally and gearing up for the next day's interruption of the American Correctional Association (ACA) meeting -- an act that will get 12 of their members arrested and incite one suited gentleman to say, "If they looked like you and me, maybe I'd listen."

No, the Pennsylvania Convention Center is on fire with the thrill of cheesy freebies, business card drawings and the 2001 Oldsmobile Silhouette some lucky prison worker is about to drive away in.

It won't be Vince Scott, a friendly rep for a Hackensack hardware firm who's busy taking down his concession. Unlike those giddily swarming the glorified paddy wagon, Scott hardly notices the grand-prize dash. Asked if he noticed the protesters perched outside the convention center for the last couple days, he dismisses them with similar lack of interest.

Tinkerer's paradise

Wed, 20 May 1998 19:00:00 +0000

It took an inventive mind to find the entrance to Monroeville's ExpoMart, a brown metal bunker floating disconsolately in a sea of empty parking spaces just outside Pittsburgh. Perched alongside a twin brown box housing the ITT Technical Institute, this is the Rust Belt's answer to Silicon Valley.

Fortunately for the dauntless hundreds who made it to the Invention Submission Corporation's 14th annual INPEX Invention/New Product Exposition -- the "World's Largest Invention Show" -- last weekend, the building's impenetrable layout did not preclude the sense of manufactured excitement that motivates today's new infomercial-loving invention community.

But even if a would-be INPEX attendee couldn't find the way in, ample excitement was readily available in the ExpoMart parking lot, which for these five days took on the unmistakable air of a county fair -- minus the 1,000-pound pig and throngs of threatening 4-H kids. Here, local thugs bent on demonstrating the Waterless Carwash wandered the aisles with cans of spray foam. When they weren't busy spraying and wiping, they passed the afternoon looking like a pack of menacing tailgaters.

The Vagina Monologues

Wed, 04 Feb 1998 20:00:00 +0000

For some of us, a little vagina goes a long way. Most of us, however, are not Eve Ensler, the woman behind "The Vagina Monologues." For Ensler, not even the limits of the human constitution can keep a determined vagina down. And that, in essence, is the point of this literary adaptation of her Obie-winning one-woman show. Assembled in seemingly random fashion from interviews with "a diverse group of over two hundred women about their vaginas," the monologues, their author contends, are for our own good. The intent is purely missionary -- to reclaim the much-maligned "vagina" for women the same way the gay community has reclaimed the term "queer."

It is with great pride and purpose that Ensler invokes the "V" word. Like a precocious child, she repeats those telltale three syllables guaranteed to get a rise out of the grown-ups. "I say 'vagina,'" she explains, "because I want people to respond." And they respond, she says, because they know they shouldn't. Since learning the word's liberating power for herself as an adult, Ensler has hardly tired of its cryptic joys. "I say it in my sleep," she boasts. "I say it because I'm not supposed to say it. I say it because it's an invisible word -- a word that stirs up anxiety, awkwardness, contempt and disgust."

Media Circus: Bacon bits

Tue, 11 Mar 1997 20:00:00 +0000

Taking the mike to ponder the significance of the first-ever Kevin Bacon film retrospective, the 38-year-old actor referred to an intimate moment late last week when he and his wife were lying around (in bed, presumably) discussing his impending trip to the Philadelphia Weekend Film Festival. "My shirt was off and my wife noticed a gray hair. I only have four hairs on my chest and one of them is gray. That means a quarter of my chest hairs are gray ... It's like the chicken and the egg. Which came first, my first gray hair or my first retrospective? Either way, I'm absolutely thrilled about both."

In its annual tribute to all that is right and good about show business, the Philadelphia Weekend Film Festival picked its 11th year to go stark-raving Seventeen magazine crazy on us all. After a decade of kneeling at the altar of such esteemed filmmakers as John Schlesinger, Sydney Pollack, Richard Brooks and Arthur Penn, this year the Fest heads opted to honor ... Kevin Bacon. With some 30-odd (some very odd) films under his belt, the man was clearly ripe for a retrospective.

Losing It

Thu, 16 Jan 1997 20:00:00 +0000

Laura Fraser's "Losing It" not only debunks every weight loss myth you've ever heard (and many more you haven't), but also serves up some surprisingly digestible prose. Fraser, a contributing editor at Health magazine, is no fast-talking diet guru -- though she does include a chapter on the subject. She isn't even thin. An ex-bulimic and calorie counter from age five, Fraser has at last made peace with her pudgy (but healthy) body, and advises her presumably frustrated, perpetually yo-yo dieting readers to do the same.

Americans blow nearly $50 billion a year on fad diets and weight-loss schemes, Fraser writes, the best of which don't work, and the worst of which can result in heart attacks or strokes. She fleshes out all those horror stories you've heard -- women who've died from dieter's tea, or who've lost all hope of controlling their bowels after undergoing intestinal bypasses -- with her own sad diet tales. She describes her teenage run-in with the calorie Nazis at Weight Watchers and the hypnotist who programmed her, at age 13, to associate pizza with bony pork gristle and chocolate chips with rat turds.

Promoting world peace through early prevention, intervention and pet therapy!

Wed, 18 Sep 1996 09:44:00 +0000

In Miss America's early days, interview questions were simple enough to accommodate society's moderate expectations of women. Contestants of the '50s (still mostly high school students) were pitched softball queries along the lines of "Where do you plan to continue your studies?" and "What are the qualities of a good citizen?"
No doubt because they tended to elicit the dreaded "promote world peace" response, the questions were dropped in 1972. For the next 16 years, a contestant's best chance at exhibiting native intelligence was not letting Bert Parks adjust her swimsuit. But by the time the questions debuted again in 1988, Miss America's political propensities had come full circle. The young women of 1988's America were self-possessed and confident. They were newly-imbued with hopes, dreams, points of light. And after a few near slips into the orchestra pit, they were at last coming to grips with their true feelings about wearing stilettos with swimsuits.
Unfortunately, and much to the chagrin of Miss America officials, it was soon discovered that pageanteers hadn't gotten all that much smarter in the last 16 years. So the question-and-answer element of the competition was again scrapped, to be replaced in 1989 by rehearsed oral presentations. The evolution from cheesecake revue to political convention soundbite was at last complete. Having perfected their memorized "platform" speeches way back at the state pageant level, the contestants were no longer obliged to publicly humiliate themselves with 30 agonizing seconds of poorly delivered platitudes. Instead, they danced around issues with the skill and shallowness of our nation's leading political figures.

From stilettos to soundbites: Miss America enters the '90s

Tue, 17 Sep 1996 09:37:00 +0000

As the Sunday morning sun breaks through the smog, a smelly shroud of salt air and pee descends over the Boardwalk. Even in the absence of mid-summer's heat, the air is cloying. Every piece of metal touched -- a park bench, a pay phone, a newspaper honor box -- coats the fingers with a thin drizzle of rust-repelling WD40. Hairdos go frizzy in the humidity, and Boardwalk strollers must resign themselves to feeling dirty.
Welcome, Delegates, to America's most degenerate shore town -- Atlantic City, New Jersey, the 19th-century playland of the rich and powerful, killed by Donald Trump in the '70s, eulogized by Bruce Springsteen in the '80s, and populated by poor people forever and ever -- or at least until the next wave of casino development plants them firmly on the sidewalk.
Welcome to the spectacular site of the Miss America National Convention 1996.
"Thank God someone's finally decided to do something about this place," visitors remark as they pass the glassed-in model of the new Atlantic City Convention Center, on display in the lobby of the decrepit old convention center. The new place, under construction at the end of the Atlantic City Expressway, will complete an uninterrupted ribbon of highway that runs from Philadelphia, to Burger King, to the new Convention Center.
The old Convention Center, a concrete art deco monument whose ceiling tiles fall to earth with regularity, is inscribed with the following cryptic words:
"A PERMANENT MONUMENT CONCEIVED AS A TRIBUTE TO THE IDEALS OF ATLANTIC CITY BUILT BY ITS CITIZENS AND DEDICATED TO RECREATION SOCIAL PROGRESS AND INDUSTRIAL ACHIEVEMENTS."
Just what the ideals of a city that long ago sold itself to Donald Trump and various mob figures from Pennsylvania and Nevada might consist of is unclear. It's a question that would be worth posing to those benighted folks who still think the Miss America Pageant -- now in its 76th year --is a beauty contest. And there are many. In crowds throughout the Convention Center, the shrill intonation of catty female attendees can be heard echoing the same familiar complaint: "Miss Montana, she's a dog. What is she doing here?"
The point is -- as any pageant official will be happy to inform you (but won't, because only Miss America Organization CEO Leonard Horn is entrusted to handle such essential press questions as "How many times will Regis Philbin change his clothes during the show?") -- Miss America has changed.
She's spruced up her airhead image and gone the moralizing-Republican-career-girl route. It's a move, says CEO Horn, that the pageant made some years ago to honor the "intelligent, sophisticated and goal-oriented, yet wholesome, genuine and truly compassionate" young women currently in fashion on this particular part of planet earth.
And it means, much to the relief of the less attractive women of America, that today's contestants can be borderline dogs. In fact, judging by the judges' decisions in recent years, being ugly just might be a contestant's biggest asset. Ever since profoundly deaf delegate Heather Whitestone took the Miss America mantle in 1995, disabilities have been all the rage. And ugliness, it seems, is this year's hottest cause.
Like the awarding of the Nobel Prize for literature and the inscrutable rise and fall of Kremlin leaders in the old Soviet Union, fashions in Miss America go in cycles. Miss America's first move toward progressiveness was introducing African-American women to the pageant mix. The move toward black started in the late '70s and peaked in 1984, with the crowning (and subsequent defrocking) of Penthouse poser Vanessa Williams. She was replaced -- in the last two months of her reign -- by runner-up Suzette Charles, who was also black. Having crowned two black Misses since then, the Organization apparently feels it has proven its point: Miss America's black thing is now officially over.
After last year's Oklahoma City bombing, was there any doubt the Sooner State would clean up on collective national guilt? Sure enough, the judges predictably worked the disability angle by selecting Shawntel Smith, a freckle-faced redhead from Oklahoma, to represent their romantic vision of America as a land of survivors. Besides, it had been 52 years since the last red-haired Miss America was selected.
This year's selection is a bit harder to figure. Tara Dawn Holland of Kansas, an aspiring teacher of "middle school chorus," free-lance vocalist and waitress by trade, is beautiful and clearly not disabled. The more conspiracy-minded of Miss America-watchers see a dark significance in the fact that Kansas is Bob Dole's home state. In all probability, however, Ms. Holland won simply because once in a while, a regular old-fashioned beauty queen has to take the crown. God forbid the pageant gets a reputation for awarding titles to women who really need the ego boost: The pageant would devolve into a freak show in five years' time.
This year's back-to-basics festivities, clearly aimed at restoring the pageant's venerable glory, featured a parade of unimpeachably all-American judges -- Nancy Ann Fleming, Miss America 1961 and star of PBS's Sewing Today; soap opera star Joe Barbara; motivational speaker Barbara De Angelis; oft-fired news anchor Deborah Norville; Olympians Jackie Joyner-Kersee and Janet Evans; and U.S. Air Force Captain Scott O'Grady, the man who, as you may recall, lived off bugs for a week after getting shot down in his F-16 over Bosnia. The whole flag-waving deal reflected the happy confluence of the Summer Olympics, an impending presidential election, a burgeoning war in the Middle East and Regis Philbin's ceremonial dethroning of defunct American (and former pageant co-host) Kathie Lee Gifford.
This year was Miss America's Roots Extravaganza, but next year the status quo will have to go. After all, the pageant must, in the immortal words of Leonard Horn, keep "in step with society today." The most likely coming trends are the selection of Asian and Hispanic Miss Americas. But that demographically-inclusive day might be long in coming, for only one of this year's delegates (Michelle Kang, Miss Virginia) was Asian, and only one (Michelle Martinez, Miss Texas) Hispanic. There were two black contestants -- Veronica Duka, Miss Kentucky, and Michelle Tolson, Miss New Hampshire. The odds were clearly stacked against a minority win, but one thing was clear from the start: Were a minority to snag this year's Miss America title, the odds were pretty good she'd be named Michelle.
But skin color isn't everything these days. As Horn himself is quick to add, the modern-day pageant is first and foremost a philanthropic affair -- the Miss America Organization is the world's biggest scholarship fund for women. And the focus of the pageant's enlightened judges is on the politically-driven insides of a delegate, and not her sequiny exterior. According to Horn, the contest in its present form is all about "providing young women throughout this country with a venue that enables them to achieve their goals." But there are, of course, requirements: every young hopeful must actually possess a goal -- one that she can articulate, preferably in complete sentences; she must not be woefully hard on the eyes (though she can come awfully close); and she must at all times act as if she's vying for a spot in Bob Dole's cabinet.
Actually, Miss America didn't get smart until just after World War II, with the introduction in 1947 of the impromptu question designed to measure contestants' "intellect" and "personality." (It would be, though, another two pageants before -- after a freak accident involving Miss Montana's horse -- animals were banned from the fledgling talent competition.) Who says chicks haven't come a long way in the last half century?

The Inner Elvis

Mon, 19 Aug 1996 19:00:00 +0000

There are a few important insights to be found in Peter Whitmer, Ph.D.'s ultra-serious dissertation about the inner life of America's greatest trailer-trash hero. But even the most diehard Elvis fans may lack the attention span necessary to wade through nearly 500 pages of Elvis-related pop psychology merely to discover that the icon possessed a smaller than average penis and a colon four times larger than most.

"The Inner Elvis" is impressive in its scope, if rarely in its acuity. Whitmer strains for deep-think analyses of such subjects as Elvis' interest in the martial arts: "Psychologically, karate can be viewed as an athletic extension of one's body boundaries, where someone 'invading' will actually be physically harmed, or even killed." Even more loopy is Whitmer's take on Elvis' shamanistic impulses: "In the study of circumpolar shamanism, there is a universally acknowledged 'watch out' sign, an indication of the waning of the mystical powers. Such a decline usually parallels the personal deterioration of the shaman. He finds it necessary, for example, to resort to heavy use of drugs in order to enhance his therapeutic potency. . . Again, Elvis Presley fits the prototype."