Ripa-ing her a new one

Oh Rosie. Oh Kelly. If you can't get along, how will the Sunnis and the Shiites in Iraq ever learn?

When it was announced earlier in the year that the abrasive, obnoxious, full-of-herself Rosie O'Donnell would replace the slightly less abrasive but just as obnoxious and full-of-herself Star Jones, I had to wonder if Barbara Walters had finally o.d.'ed on the high level of carbon monoxide emissions given off by a fuming, unregulated John Stoessel. What, I screeched (in a moment of distraction from my own self-induced crises), was Babs crazy!?! Why replace one diva terrible with another, changing the diversity angle from African-American to Lesbian-American (not by way of Portugal, please), but otherwise adding nothing to this crazy souffle? Certainly not an unleavening agent.

Surely no one would want to tune in to see one more cranky cohost on this show, I thought. Surely they could write off most of the viewing audience in the South and the West with the choice of Rosie "A League of Her Own" O'Donnell (even if she was late in admitting she belonged in the bull [dyke] pen), pitching themselves to a decidedly Yankee audience, represented by the Northern, uh, charms of Babs, Joy Behar, and now Ms. Rosie. (I've yet to figure out which charms Elisabeth Hasselbeck represents. Aging New England coeds who made good through genetics and marriage? Republican working moms bent on world upper-tier cable channel domination? Smug D-list celebrities who persist in the belief that it is better to look good than actually to be good at anything?)

But this is a little show called The View after all. Its appeal somewhat escapes me--until I think about Blanche, Rose, Dorothy, and Sophia on The Golden Girls, and then all is somewhat revealed.

Plus, it's a TV chat show, not the freakin' Wannsee Conference or a Halliburton board meeting. It would be best to turn my attentions to other, more pressing issues and more deserving topics.

But, dang it all, like athlete's foot and Pat Robertson, The View just would not go away. Every week or so, some website--the start page for my internet service provider or CNN, ferchrissakes--or an Entertainment Tonight-styled TV show (like Hollywood Now! as skewered in the movie For Your Consideration) would feature a "news" item about something Rosie O'Donnell had said, done, speculated about, mud-wrestled Joy Behar over, what have you. It kept drawing me back in, and before I knew it, on the sly I was sneaking a peak at the headlines (goodness gracious, not the show) to see what America's preeminent lesbian entertainer, heavyweight division, had done or said this time.

Then, finally, it dawned on me why Rosie had been asked to join The View, post-Meredith Viera: to draw attention to the aging concept (not to mention the cast . . .), to make headlines, and/or, more simply put, to talk shit. And gosh knows a lesbian who can, with a, ahem, straight face, still gush about how cute android-creator Tom Cruise is, even after a much publicized coming out (hers, not his) can talk some major crap.

Some years ago, there was a sketch on Saturday Night Live with Horatio Sanz playing Rosie O'Donnell. In this sketch, "Rosie" was interviewed during the "Weekend Update" fake news segment by Tina Fey (if I recall correctly; maybe it was Jimmy Fallon; maybe it was both of 'em). Rosie appeared in profile; when she turned in one direction, her hair was long, and she was all sweetness and light; when she turned in the other direction, her hair was short, and she was a fire-breathing dragon. This short sketch perfectly mimicked Rosie's changing personality at that time, from her time as America's "Queen of Nice" on The Rosie O'Donnell Show to her transformation into a stereotypically rabid, frothing, more politically correct-than-thou lesbian. (Editor's note: Save your keystrokes of protest. No, I don't think all lesbians are like this. Really.) Not only that but even the haircut was a perfect parody of O'Donnell's then-asymmetrical and (it must be said) dyke-chic bob. It was two minutes of brilliance, which, sadly, SNL only achieves every so often.

So I think The View represents some sort of major breakthrough for Rosie. She has finally grown her hair out again, so she doesn't look like she's ready to play a supporting role in Boys Don't Cry: The Musical, and thus is attempting to integrate both parts of her public personality, the Good Twin and the Evil Twin. Which makes her as entertaining as an overly ponderous Ingmar Bergman study of a nurse and her patient psyching each other out in black-and-white, minus the Volvos.

A case in point: The latest poopschrift from La Rosie's lips to our ears is her alleged "feud" with fellow New Jerseyite Kelly Ripa from Rigormortis and Kelly, uh, correction, Regis and Kelly, not to mention that lame sit-com with that gal from Murphy Brown, and All My Children.

Recently, when Southern-fried, leprechaunish chanteuse Clay Aiken cohosted with Kelly on her show, he saw fit to put his hand over Kelly's mouth to stop her from saying something. (What, like the big non-reveal that he's a hideaway homo?) A simple gesture, but one to which La Ripa took offense, pushing his hand away and saying " . . . I don't know where that hand's been, honey."

All and all, this seems like a pretty unnoteworthy, if somewhat tacky, exchange of words. I dare say millions of people, including sensitive little moi, would make nothing out of it.

But perhaps a few us still manage to cling to the naïve notion that we live in a world in which what Rosie O'Donnell thinks, breathes, eats, sweats, dreams, etc., does not matter. Clearly, though, we are deluding ourselves into thinking such a place exists in this space-time continuum.

Because the one beard that Tom Cruise hasn't married yet did indeed take offense. "If that was a straight man, if that was a cute man, if that was a guy that she didn't question his sexuality, she would have said a different thing," O'Donnell commented on The View sometime after the non-event.

Hunh?

Ripa explained that what she meant was that Clay had been shaking hands with audience members, and it was cold and flu season, so she was concerned about, I dunno, picking up germs from the great unwashed or something, which apparently was a far more palatable statement to Rosie.

According to CNN, O'Donnell replied, "I understand cold and flu season. I'm just saying from where I sit as a gay person in the world, I have to tell you, that's how it came off to me."

Rosie, baby, from where I sit, you're blocking the View.

Who knows what Kelly Ripa meant? Maybe it was exactly as she explained it. More importantly, though, who cares? In a world, where lots of people, gay and non-gay alike, are routinely slammed (both verbally and sometimes physically), some germ-phobic throw-away line by Kelly Ripa, of all stellar lights, seems like a pretty minor issue to get in a snit over. I'm as sensitive to criticism and prejudice as anyone--sometimes more so, as friends and family could no doubt attest--but Rosie's reaction to the non-incident just seems over-the-top and calculating, carried out for no purpose other than to garner ratings and attention. It also has the additional downside of tarring my little group with the "thin-skinned minority" label, which we don't need because the next time we have a legitimate gripe there will be fewer people interested in hearing it, having dismissed us from the last, less significant, whinefest. You want to get upset over how gay people, hell, all people, are treated unfairly, Rosie? Call me--I'll give you a list. Just ask you internet service provider to increase your mailbox size first before I send you my response.

When the evidence is examined, however, the O'Donnell diatribe doesn't make a lot of sense. For one thing, Clay Aiken has never officially come out of the ol' closet. Oh, it's not like everyone hasn't figured it out already, if from no other evidence that his consistently inconsistent, alternating denials and unresponsiveness. But wouldn't it be funny if he really wasn't gay, was in fact, straight? Granted, so highly unlikely that I think I just made my brain short-circuit at the thought, but there is the cultural assumption that all gay men act a certain way (nelly) and all straight men act another (butch), when, in fact, I don't think it's as clear-cut as that. (Yeah, yeah, same for lesbians.) While I'm not going to claim that the nelly queen stereotype isn't based on some reality, there's evidence otherwise to suggest that you can in life encounter swishy straight guys and hirsute and hunky homosexuals. It's been known to happen, more than once even.

For another thing, who says Clay Aiken isn't cute? He's not my cuppa, mind you, but I know plenty of women and men who think he's adorable and would love to take him home to meet mother or, at the very least, envision other suitably salacious ways to pass the time with one of North Carolina's tow-headed, passion monkeys (the other being, I guess, John Edwards). I tend to view him like a recent episode of The Soup on the E! Channel did--host holds chihuahua wearing a wig and smirks toward the camera, while in the background a photo of Clay appears with him wearing the same hairstyle as the chihuahua.

Nevertheless, I have odd tastes in who is handsome and who is not. Currently, I think it's the very married Steve Carrell from The Office and Little Miss Sunshine, a man who has a nose that could ward off Barbra Streisand at thirty paces. All I can say, Steve, is if you're reading this, I'd never leave you for the #1 Proust Scholar in America.

So my point here is not to further embarrass myself in public with odd choices in unattainable men. It's actually to say that there's no accounting for personal taste. There's nothing wrong with Clay's looks, at least in the eyes of many. Now his self-satisfied, country-mouse-made-good attitude, well, that's a discussion best left for another post.

And, finally, Rosie, let's get real. As we say in the gay parlance, if Claypot is indeed gay, he strikes me more as a "catcher" than a "pitcher," if you glean my meaning. Thus, I don't know that Kelly Ripa needs to worry so much about where Clay's hand has been. Maybe other body parts, but his hand? Not so much.