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 don't
mention this very often, but in between writing wickedly perceptive
opinion columns and lecturing on the religious traditions of the
Western world, I'm kind of a cheese head. I produce the stuff: I
co-wrote a book called First Lady of Wrestling, the no-holds-barred
memoir of Missy Hyatt, late '80's prototype for today's scantily
clad, surgically enhanced, professional-wrestling valets. More to
the point, cheese-wise, I'm an aficionado. And last week, in case
you missed it, was a banner week for cheese.
Last Wednesday
brought Fox Network's Celebrity Boxing. For openers, there
was Danny Bonaduce of The Partridge Family versus Barry Williams
of The Brady Bunch. I was sold the moment Bonaduce predicted
(correctly, as it turned out) the fight would be a Very Brady Beating.
The main event was originally supposed to be Tanya Harding versus
Amy Fisher — two gals who tried to K.O. the competition. But
Fisher's parole officer nixed the idea, so into the breach leapt
Bill Clinton accuser Paula Jones — whose keen eye for detail
failed to note that Harding, even with her trailer-park baggage,
was nevertheless once a world-class athlete. Jones spent the three
rounds doing more dancing and back-pedaling that Clinton's feminist
defenders.
The entire
hour was pure cheese, right down to the dot-com tattoos on the fighters'
torsos — though in reality it was probably no more lowbrow
than an average episode of Politically Incorrect. Huge ratings,
in any event, promise future celebrity fisticuffs; the names Darva
Conger and Joey Buttofuocco are already being mentioned.
Oh, the humanity!
The Big Cheese,
however, came over the weekend with the invasion, five blocks from
my midtown apartment, of Liza's Wedding. The fourth Mr. Minelli,
a rather chinless refugee from the Pre-Nuptial Agreement Farm named
David Gest, started off the festivities on the wrong foot Friday
night by dissing a gaggle of Liza-with-a-Z drag queens who showed
up outside his bachelor's party and begged for a photo op. He declined;
it was an unpardonably uppity moment from a fellow who, in an alternate
sexual universe, might pass for the love child of Truman Capote
and Rosie O'Donnell.
Rosie herself,
having established the previous week that no closet could hold her,
represented the token mortal among a guest list of living dead that
included Gene Simmons (still of KISS), Phyllis Diller, Jill
St. John, Debra Paget, Ben Vereen, Mia Farrow, Joan Collins, Gina
Lollobrigida, Janet Leigh, and Carroll Baker. Or, as my undergraduate
students would call them collectively: "Who"? Performing
at the ceremony were Robert Goulet, Little Anthony and the Imperials,
the Doobie Brothers, and Natalie Cole. So many has-beens were crowded
into that church that the entire neighborhood seemed to slide into
the present-perfect tense.
Last but not
least came the wedding party. Liza's first maid of honor was Liz
Taylor — who has lived long enough, married often enough, detoxed,
and relapsed conspicuously enough to pass through the stage of Doddering
Old Bat into a kind of sublime absurdity of flesh hitherto known
only to ancient Roman emperors. Liza's second maid of honor was
Marisa Berenson who must have done something notable once though
no one seems to know what. And moonwalking the bride down the aisle,
to the lactose-rich strains of "The Greatest Love of All,"
was the King of Pop himself, the Sultan of Sleepovers, the Major
of Minors, Michael Jackson.
The bride,
I'm told, wore white.
I'm guessing
a lukewarm and slightly runny Brie.
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