Psinister Psychic Friends Network

Whatever happened to those psychic hotline commercials that were ubiquitous throughout much of the '90s? You couldn't change a channel without seeing one of those odd clips, shot over green screen or in a gaudy studio, with loud graphics and some supposedly clairvoyant host waving her hands, adorned with long fingernails, around a crystal ball. The 900 number would flash on the bottom of the screen, with a slightly smaller print below, telling you that you had to be 18 to call, that this was "for entertainment only" and that the first minute will cost you $3.99 (or more).

It wasn't just some random psychics offering their gifts of foresight, but celebrities too -- either hawking their own hotlines on tv or giving testimonials to others'. You had LaToya Jackson and her "Psychic Readers Network," Dionne Warwick's "Psychic Friends Network," Nell Carter had "Nell Carter Psychic Hotline," and Esther Rolle (the mom from "Good Times") implored viewers to call her "Caring Psychic Family" (such a welcoming name; doesn't it just make you feel warm and fuzzy?). Even Vicky Lawrence, Billy Dee Williams and Phillip Michael Thomas of "Miami Vice" appeared in ads, giving their thumbs-up to some 900 number.

But the Grand Puba of them all, the most unforgettable hotline psychic was, no doubt, Miss Cleo of the Psychic Readers Network. "Kohl meh now for yer free reeden'," she would tell you, in an almost chiding tone, in her Jamaican accent (though she was actually a native of Los Angeles, and not a Jamaican at all). Cleo kept it real, she told the truth, honey -- be it good or bad! "Ye no' aboht dee gal he's seeing raht now? She's a little hoochie mama," Cleo would break it down, no-nonsense style.


Hearing that kind of sage advice could become addictive to some people, and that's why those 900 numbers became such big business. (Our girl Cleo earned a reported $13.5 mil from her hosting duties). Some callers would get their fix on LaToya's line but then also get a "second opinion" with one of Dionne's seers, and so it would continue. The psychic hotline addiction could become as powerful as a gambling one. One woman even wrote a book about the insatiable craving to receive guidance on life's decisions from what, in fact, is just some average joe with no real psychic abilities, sitting in his or her living room in pajamas.

In fact, in the late '90s, as part of Giuliani's welfare-to-work program, New York City trained welfare recipients for jobs as psychics for the Psychic Readers Network. The only other requirement was having a high school equivalency degree, "a caring and compassionate personality" and English speaking skills. Within a few years of this ingenious (and so successful!) effort, both Cleo's hotline and Dionne Warwick's would be buried under various lawsuits and bankruptcy. The newly imposed Federal Communication Commission's restrictions on 1-900 numbers certainly didn't help matters.

So when one combines all these psinister psychic factors -- potential for addiction, deceit on the part of the psychics and plain old fashioned greed -- it's not hard to understand why those colorful commercials we were once so accustomed to seeing are now buried in the same 1990s pop culture graveyard as grunge and Vanilla Ice. We can only hope that, one day, they will not attempt to rise from the dead and try to eat our brains...again. Until then, we'll just keep watching those entertaining Extenze ads and their equally lofty promises.

Le Freak C'est Chic

Back in 1932, a dark little film called "Freaks" was released by MGM studios to the masses. The story revolved around a gold-digging trapeze artist who seduces and marries a sideshow little person in order to get her hands on his large inheritance. Eventually, she poisons him, starts having an affair with an average-size man, and when the rest of the sideshow performers learn of her deceit, they viciously attack and mutilate her and her lover in a macabre and unforgettable climax.


The movie was highly controversial then and still is, because the cast consisted almost entirely of people with real-life deformities and illnesses. They included a multitude of dwarves, a pair of conjoined twins, the Human Torso (i.e. a man with no limbs), who in one scene lights a cigarette with matches, using only his mouth. You'd think that this kind of exploitation for entertainment's sake could have only come out of an era before color televisions, Civil Rights, computers.

Well, think again. Because the popular channel TLC -- best known for its "family-centered" reality shows like the mega hit "Jon & Kate Plus 8" -- has become the main purveyor of a slew of documentary programming that can only be described as a kind of modern, repackaged version of "Freaks." And their growing popularity says a lot about us as the audience.


On an average night, usually after 8 p.m., you can learn the true story of Tony, the 750 lb teenager, or Hayley, the girl with progeria -- the disease of rapid aging; or Zahra, the woman who was pregnant for 45 years and didn't know it, or Ronnie and Donnie, the oldest living conjoined twins, or Sharon, the primordial dwarf (tiny, but proportionate). And just like the bluntly-titled "Freaks," the titles of these TLC shows offer no mystery about the contents that await. Here is a sampling:

"The 650 lb Virgin"
"The Tiniest Toddlers"
"Dwarfs: Standing Tall"
"The Smallest People In The World"
"The Girl Who Never Grew"

TLC has tapped into that corner of our psyche that is simultaneously repelled and drawn to human oddities. And although the deformities they feature are no less unusual than the ones displayed in "Freaks," TLC has made theirs somehow more digestible to middle America -- in some cases, even endearing. I mean, who is not going to melt into a puddle of goo when they watch a little primordial dwarf that weighs 11 lbs and stands at about 28 inches, at age four, talk in her tiny voice and wave around her miniature hands, and bat her teeny tiny doll-like eyes? Especially when you have a woman with a gentle, sympathetic voice narrating the whole affair.

And so, the shows play like this, for hours, daily, peppered with commercials advertising everyday people stuff like prescription drugs and Verizon cell phones, as the average American sits there and watches, eyes open wide in both shock and curiosity, secretly thinking, Damn, my life is not so bad.

Bad Brains

Yesterday, the world surveyed the memorial service of all memorial services, the most lavish send-off of a dead man known to our modern times, the only kind of send-off worthy of THE KING (of pop).

Celebrities made speeches, singers sang their songs, retrospective videos played on enormous screens, and throughout the fast-paced ceremony, one thing remained static and conspicuous and that was the shiny casket bathed in fresh roses. Inside it, of course, was Michael himself, perhaps adorned in his signature Thriller jacket, sparkly glove, penny loafers and white socks, the hair on his jet black ladies wig falling elegantly at his shoulders. But what most spectators and performers didn't know was that beneath that wig, and further still, under his skull, there was nothing but empty space. Yes, Michael was being buried without his brain.

It seems rather ironic that the man who sang about zombies would end up taking his final journey without that one piece of anatomy zombies like to feast on. The irony gets even thicker, given that Michael played the brainless Scarecrow in The Oz.

But there is a good explanation for his brainlessness. You see, having reached no definitive conclusion regarding the nature of his death after the autopsies, pathologists requested his brain for further examinations, which could take up to three weeks. That was the choice faced by the Jackson family: let Michael's body sit in a freezer for weeks and wait for his brain to return back from the lab, or go ahead and put him into the earth, hollow-headed. They chose the latter.

So what do the scientists hope to discover when they slice and dice through Michael's gray matter? Well, for one thing, they're going to dig for evidence of past drug use and whether he has suffered other overdoses, in addition to any other hitherto unknown diseases.

But that is all standard stuff. It seems that these pathologists have a golden opportunity on their hands -- to go beyond the boring drug stuff and try to understand what REALLY lay inside this mysterious man. Did he lie about having only two plastic surgeries (picture Michael making a peace sign during the infamous Bashir interview when asked that same question) in his life? Did his calm, peaceful Little Prince-like demeanor hide a raging temper? I suppose we can only wait and see.

The family still has the option of burying his brain later. Which begs the question: Will the brain have its own ceremony?

Incest—Common Practice?

When I think of incest, I picture the little redneck boy strumming his banjo in the film Deliverance, looking out of his little black eyes with a blank stare.


Incest is what happens in backcountry somewhere, in small towns inhabited by toothless, uneducated rednecks named Bubba. Right? Wrong. With the recent news of a father-and-daughter couple from Australia, John and Jenny Deaves (what an attractive pair!), "coming out" and talking about their seven plus years relationship and the little baby they've produced and are raising, people are discovering that incest is not just a redneck taboo.


Incest comes in many flavors. There is the unfortunate coerced kind—as in, "Hey, honey, it's your daddy, now slide on over in this here bed and be a good a girl." Examples of this type of incest abound in popular culture. Just think of Mallory Knox in Natural Born Killers and her creepy father (who, incidentally, reminds me of John Deaves in the picture above), who tells her to wash up and be clean for him when he comes upstairs.


Or the video for Aerosmith's "Janie's Got a Gun," where Janie finally snaps and shoots the father who has been repeatedly molesting her.


Then there's the accidental or unintentional kind of incest. As in, "Wait, are you telling me that all this time I've been fucking my own twin brother?" Now this one actually did happen recently, as the public have learned. A British couple met and married each other, settling in for a life of happily ever after. Not so fast! One day, the newlyweds discovered that they in fact were twins, separated at birth. Horror and shock ensued and the marriage was annulled.

The final kind of incest is the mutual and consenting kind. In my opinion, it is the most cringe-worthy, because the couple involved doesn't care that they are blood relatives, that they share a parent (or both) or that one of them is the other's parent or child. This one brings us back to John and Jenny Deaves. Unlike the British twins, the Deaves express no horror at the fact that they are immediate relatives. In fact, they embrace it. "We're just like any other family," they say. And, perhaps, the world shouldn't care what these eccentric two do behind close doors...if not for one small fact. Their baby.

Imagine discovering one day that your mommy is also your daddy's baby, and your daddy is also your granddaddy and your mommy is also your...sister? In the sage words of Bugs Bunny, "Nah, I don't think so!"

Brunch — What is the point?

I've always hated brunch. The feeling of brunching is like washing yourself with a washcloth that doesn't get sudsy enough. It's frustrating. It's frustrating because you feel like when you arrive at brunch, starving because you haven't yet eaten breakfast (making room for brunch in your belly), you must choose between true breakfast food like pancakes and lunch food like salad. But you want both! You want both because you've had neither yet and it's already 3 p.m. You know, deep in your heart, that stuffing yourself with pancakes at 3:30 p.m. is wrong. And yet brunch law says that it's ok. But it's not ok.

The other thing I hate about brunch is its pace. You feel like you have to sit around, sit around, sit around, chew...slowly, sip slowly, talk slowly. Everything feels foggy and lazy and so....Sunday afternoon. I don't want to be reminded that it's Sunday afternoon, the saddest day of the week. The day before the workweek begins, the last day of the weekend. I want to lounge in bed late, shuffle over to the kitchen and make my instant coffee with a heaping of creamer, eat in front of my computer, crumbs falling everywhere, in my t-shirt, sleep still in my eyes. Instead, I'm sitting in some restaurant, trying to look awake and interested, surrounded by other lazy brunchers eating the kitchen's leftovers.

Yes, leftovers. I always suspected that brunch food is not the freshest food on the menu, and recently learned that I was right. In the restaurant business, brunch actually makes chefs downright angry. As one former chef describes: "I hate the friggin' sound of the word Brunch. It's a nice way to sell off your old leftovers, scraps, rejects, stuff on the verge of going bad and outright trash covered with a bit of Hollandaise to the gullible."

And finally, by the time you're done with brunch it's nearly 5 p.m., sometimes later. Dinner is just around the corner. But you don't want to think about food again. And yet you have to, because brunch is dinner's long shadow, always too close behind.

Women's Faces and the Terrible Things They Do To Them

Women do strange, unforgivable things to their faces. Women are mean to their faces. If their faces had a separate soul, they would tell these women: Please stop deforming me, please stop injecting stuff in me, please stop pulling and tugging on me, please stop starving me. If the faces had a voice of their own, they would ask to be left alone.

If a woman's face looks extreme—whether in its thinness, its smoothness or its plumped-uppedness—it's a safe bet that you're not looking at her true face. Her true face got left behind somewhere before she discovered bingeing and purging, cheek implants and porcelain veneers. A good example is Maria Shriver, the First Lady of California. For so many years we've been looking at her jutting bones and the thin skin draped over them like a silk blouse, her sunken-in eyes, and wrinkles prominent enough to be cut with an exact-o knife that it might seem as if this is her real face.

Not so. If we turn the pages of her face's biography a mere twenty years back, we will find her true face there: robust, plump, healthy, perfectly normal. At some point in her journey, Maria realized that being thin was the way to go, the only way to go, and it's her face that paid the highest price.


A similar specimen in face-mutilation is Faye Dunaway. There is something very Dorian Gray-like about her face. It might seem "young" because of its absence of sag and deep wrinkles, but it is for those same reasons peculiarly un-youthful. Because even in youth, humans have expression lines and they have creases. I've never seen a thirty-year-old without a single wrinkle on her forehead. And yet, Faye's 66-year-old forehead has none.


When one flips through the photo book of her face and sees just what its true state was once, one wants to get mad at Faye on her face's behalf, and say: "Faye, how could you stuff those little cheek implants in me? Faye, you didn't need to pull my eyebrows THAT far up. Faye, I wouldn't have minded if you let me develop normal, human wrinkles. And why did you have to remove my perfectly decent teeth and jab long, frightening veneers in their place?"

What would be her answer? Eternal beauty? Eternal youth? Fear, pain, obsession, boredom? But if one really wants to see the effects of a woman's inability to leave her face alone, one should look no further than Joan Rivers. The story of her face is well-known and oft-told, but it bears repeating here. What makes her case so truly frightening is that these days she wears a mask, plain and simple, but unlike other masks, hers can never be removed.


We will never know what her true face would have looked like at 75, because there is no more true face. It has been sliced, diced, nipped, tucked, stuffed, pulled, peeled clear off and in its place has been inserted this new face.

It looks neither young nor old, and yet both at the same time.

Mario Batali's Crocs

What's wrong with this picture? Well, if you allow your eyes to take in the full view of this rather unappetizing specimen of a man, you will notice something unusual on his feet.

Besides the garish bright orange color, what else seems out of place about these shoes? Consider the fact that the feet inside these shoes are standing on the red carpet of a formal charity event in New York City. Yes, those are Crocs. Yes, they were paired with a blazer and tie. And, yes, they are the only shoes Mario Batali EVER wears.

Just what exactly ARE Crocs, first and foremost? They are "an all-purpose shoe for comfort and fashion," according to the company statement. While the "fashion" part is questionable, there can be no doubt about the comfort of these oddly-designed shoes. Naturally, these kinds of shoes are popular with the following types of people: Dog trainers, Children, Stay-at-Home Moms, Frazzled College Students, Tourists and...Overweight Celebrity Chefs. Or, perhaps, simply just ONE overweight celebrity chef named Mario Batali.

So what is Batali's obsession with them, and more importantly what makes him think it's OK to wear these supremely casual shoes to a formal event? Upon further digging, it was discovered that Batali is not a mere fan. He is a Croc whore, if you will, with a line of his very own designs for the line.


And after the hot Food Network studio lights shut down and Babbo's closes for the day and there are no more charity events to attend, I picture this man with his giant, bloated belly in his sleek chef's kitchen, warbling around in his crocs, rummaging through his Sub-Zero fridge for some late night munching. I see him pulling out a salami and some whipped butter, getting a loaf of bread and sitting at the table, his legs spread wide apart, making little sandwiches and piling them in his mouth, one after another—pinkies curled out—and then licking his fingers, followed by a loud burp. I picture him waddling to his bed and sinking into his cal king plush mattress, his long, thin red hair falling loose at his shoulders, scratching his beard and his crotch, and then snoring himself into dreamland, shiny orange crocs eternally by his bedside.