Puglovers love . . .

So You Think You Can Dance

Those nearest and dearest to Ramona Narrow know that from May to August, she lives and dies for Fox's So You Think You Can Dance. She's been to a taping - twice. She votes. She posts critiques in the online community. She cries when the kids she likes get voted off. She once approached a dancer who had been kicked off and announced that his departure was "a travesty and injustice." Similar in format to American Idol, it's a dance competition featuring dancers doing all styles. It's far better than AI, however. First of all, the judges aren't there to humiliate the contestants. All of the judges seem to genuinely like and support the dancers; their critiques are based on dance and the body. Second, the dancers are all spectacular. Finally, all of the dances performed are original choreography, which means that instead of hearing some nineteen year old from Texas with bad highlights sing "I Will Always Love You" like she's several gin and tonics in at a karaoke bar in the Milwaukee Marriott, you get to see something you've never seen before. Ms. Ramona has been without a tv for the past five months, but, as of last week, you can find her on the treadmill with the attached television at her community center, pissing people off by exceeding the 30 minute cardio machine limit, every Wednesday and Thursday from 8-10. To kick off the new season, Ramona has chosen her top five SYTYCD auditions of all time.

1. BRANDON BRYANT

2. PHILIP CHEEB (and no, this is not sped up. That's how fast he dances)




3.BENJI SCHWIMMER AND HEIDI GREUNEWITZ

4. EVAN KASPRZAK

5.BRANDON NORRIS

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Puglove quote of the day

From T.S. Eliot's "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock"

There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

Eliot could be so moving. And yet, at 69 years old, he married a 32 year old blonde named Valerie Fletcher who just adored him. Even Nobel Laureates want trophy wives.

Famous portrait of Eliot done by Wyndham Lewis in 1938.

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You know you have puglove when . . .

You exalted upon finding out that JT Leroy was a fraud.

Before there was James Frey (A Million Little Pieces). Before there was Margaret Seltzer/Jones (Love and Consequences). Before there was Nasdijj/Tim Barrus (Geronimo’s Bones). Before all of those other pseudo-memoirists were found to be fakes and many of them forced to endure the pop culture version of waterboarding – interrogation at the vengeful hands of Oprah-- there was JT LeRoy.

JT LeRoy was an early 2000s sensation who authored two novels, The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things and Sarah, and one novella, Harold’s End, about a nameless teenage male prostitute with a pet snail named Harold and an older client who (and here we are going to give away a major plot point!) wants the narrator to dump the contents of his enema over his head. Ramona knows this because it is the one thing she read by LeRoy and it was enough for her to decide that she didn’t need to read more. Sarah and The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things both center on a male child’s experiences as the son of a lot lizard (truck stop prostitute) whom his mom dresses up like a girl and pimps out. No thanks.

The crazy thing was that LeRoy was twenty and twenty-one when the novels came out. All of these really famous people known for loving the quirky – Gus van Sant, Winona Ryder, Courtney Love – wanted to hang out with him, and he developed intense phone relationships with literary heavyweights like Mary Gaitskill, Dennis Cooper, and Mary Karr. He was known for being extraordinarily odd, rarely materializing in public at all, and on that rare occasion when he did, appearing always with huge sunglasses and a wig. He was not too shy, however, for a Vanity Fair pictorial and interview with Tom Waits.

Ramona and a friend learned of LeRoy in the spring of their senior year in college. Sitting at a PF Changs, they all of the sudden became aware that, if they wanted to do something meaningful with their lives, the clock had started ticking; our generation’s prodigies were emerging. Sarah had come out the summer before and a major publicity whirl had been kicked into gear for The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things. They were already feeling anxious about their post-graduation plans and now this? Really? Someone younger than them had already written a critically acclaimed novel, with another coming out? We thought we had until we were thirty (ha!).

Well, shit.

But here’s the thing – several years later some nosy reporters got it in their minds that something seemed off about the whole JT LeRoy thing and did some investigating. Turns out there is no such person as JT LeRoy. It was a pen name for a forty year old woman named Laura Albert. She had her ex-boyfriend’s little sister, Savannah Knoop, play the role of JT.

Whoop of triumph. Turns out we weren’t so behind the curve after all. We were not failed writers yet. Greatness doesn’t necessarily go hand in hand with youth, a belief that puglovers hold sacred.

The sad thing is that LeRoy/Albert never said her work were memoirs; she always labeled them as fiction. If (s)he deceptively presented a persona to the people around her, that’s between her and those people. So (s)he said in interviews that most of what the books were about was true and that they were highly autobiographical, so what? People lie all the time to the press. Have you seen that picture of John Edward's mistress's baby? If that's not his baby, then I'm 5'10. And children, let me assure you, Ms. Ramona didn't even break 5'2.

The fallout from this situation was, in our humble view, way out of proportion to its seriousness.
It’s not like she was Misha Defonseca who made up an entire childhood that included surviving the holocaust, killing a German soldier, and living with wolves. Or even poor James Frey, who turned a few hours in jail into a several month long sojourn in prison. Besides, after watching Oprah cut Frey’s balls off and hand them back to him in a jar on television, we figure he’s paid his penance. We wanted to put a clip up of that particular show but, alas, it’s not available; Oprah keeps her shit locked down, you know?

A PS about Oprah, one that Ramona warns her parents, friends’ parents, and all other easily offended adults to definitely avoid. So stop reading here.

Ramona believes that Oprah once uttered the best line on television ever to be delivered throughout the history of the medium. She was doing a special on women who were sex addicts. While one woman was detailing her sexual preferences, Oprah interrupted her and said, with an unparalleled degree of disgust,

“You mean, you let strange men cum on your face?”

When Ramona is feeling sad or like she hasn’t accomplished enough or like she will never be a writer, she just remembers that JT LeRoy was actually a forty year old woman and that Oprah once used the expression “cum on your face” and all feels right in the universe again.

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Puglovers Icon: Carolyn See

Carolyn See is one of those rare puglover icons who meet both our criteria: she was not successful until well after thirty and at seventy-five, she is still kicking ass with a love for margaritas and a long-time crush on Owen Wilson (beginning before he was the Butterscotch Stallion and had embarked on a tumultuous relationship with Princess Goldzinger herself, Kate Hudson). See has written several bestselling novels, three non-fiction books, numerous articles for publications like The Atlantic Monthly and Esquire, and a number of mysteries under the pseudonym Monica Highland. She is currently the book reviewer for the Friday morning edition of The Washington Post and has won both Guggenheim and Getty fellowships, as well as The Los Angeles Times Robert Kirsch Body of Work Award. Yet her first novel wasn't published until she was thirty-six, one which, in her own words, "sank like a stone.” See was in her late thirties and early forties when she started to make it as a writer, and in her fifties when she really made it. Plus, after two failed marriages before the age of 35, she wrote off the institution as a whole and lived as boyfriend/girlfriend with the erudite and illustrious John Espey (search him on the New Yorker’s website,www.newyorker.com, to find some of the best stuff that ever came out of those rarefied halls back when they were on 45th street) for thirty years until the time of his death in 2000. We here at thirtyboppers are totally down with bucking social expectations and choosing instead to live in sin, so to speak. Because sinning is usually a lot of fun.

For puglovers who feel like things just haven’t worked out for them (I have a law degree – why am I still in the mailroom?) or that it is too late to start pursuing their dreams without looking pathetic, the general philosophy that it is never too late to get it together that emerges in See’s work is both inspiring and comforting. As See says, “When I started to write I was relatively old, and lived in California. So I was the wrong sex, wrong age, wrong coast. Luckily I was too ignorant to know it.” And it’s a good thing she was because three of her books are absolute must-haves for thirtyboppers everywhere.
Making a Literary Life: Advice for Writers and Other Dreamers is for those who secretly yearn to write. It’s for normal people who live normal lives but harbor desires to create something extraordinary; in the words of See herself, “this book is for the timid and forlorn and clueless . . . students just coming to this discipline, older people who wanted to write in their youth and never got around to it, folks who live in parts of the country where the idea of writing is about as strange as crossbreeding a tomato and a trout.” Written with great humor and warmth, thirtyboppers who always wanted to write but felt like because they didn’t get an MFA at Iowa or Irvine or didn’t intern at Harpers their junior year at Princeton, it just wasn’t in the cards for them will greatly appreciate this book which covers everything from creating a writing ritual to handling rejection to being your own publicist to not pissing people off when your first book comes out.

A novel actually about puglovers. Growing up working class in Los Angeles, twenty-nine year old Bob Hampton has artistic aspirations: he wants to paint. Buying into the mythology that great artists must migrate to Paris, the so-called art capital of the world, Bob arrives there only to find that it is a world closed off to people like him, people with cousins who live in trailers and mothers who live in dark studio apartments on Vermont. He returns to Los Angeles and begins to work as a handyman to pay for his art supplies while he figures out what the hell he is going to do with his life now that he thinks he’ll never get to be a real artist. His dreams crushed, he finds redemption in the people whom he encounters as a handyman (although initially he is about as capable of fixing things at Miss Ramona, which is to say, not at all) and finds a way to be a different sort of artist. A testament to the transcendent power of art, The Handyman is profound but not pretentious. Note: the first few pages are a bit confusing but will totally make sense once you finish the novel.

This book is Miss Ramona Narrow’s favorite book of all-time. Miss Ramona has read a lot, in large part because she endured a thirteen year awkward phase from the time she was seven until she was twenty which left her seeking solace in books while her friends dated cute boys, so hopefully that should count for something. Of course, it is debatable whether this awkward phase really ever ended, but whatever. All in all, she has read it cover to cover at least ten times. When Ramona is feeling sad, sometimes she will open up to a random page of Dreaming and read a bit. She always feels better afterwards.


Dreaming is See’s memoir that loosely focuses on the ways that alcoholism and drug addiction have pervaded the lives of almost everyone in her family. The general but unspoken thesis of the book is that the prevalence of alcohol and drug addiction in this country is in part due to the disappointment we feel when we find out that, for the vast majority of us, the myth of the American Dream is just that – a myth. We work hard, we do what we are supposed to do and then are left to ask “Is this it?” Or in the words of one of the most gifted song writers alive today, Isaac Brock, “Life handed us a paycheck and we said, ‘we worked harder than this’.” This is a classic puglover feeling when in self-pity mode.

Beginning with her troubled childhood in Los Angeles, the book introduces us to See’s fun-loving but hard-drinking father who abandons the family when See is ten, leaving her under the care of her half-crazed, mean-spirited, hard-drinking mother. In the face of grave adversity and huge obstacles, we journey with See as she works her way through college (despite getting pregnant at twenty by her Chinese-American boyfriend and having her daughter, Lisa, who herself is a hugely successful writer) and graduate school. Trading in her first husband for a second, See moves to Topanga Canyon and live a happy, hippy-ish existence, replete with crazy friends and marijuana-fueled (is that an oxymoron?) parties. When her second husband leaves, See must figure out how to take care of business herself, part of which is getting really serious about pursuing writing, even though she is now a heartbroken, broke single mother of two girls.

See does get it together. But what is so great is that getting it together for See does not mean giving up on fun or becoming “an adult” in the boring, serious sense of the word. She follows no one’s path but her own and finally decides to hang it up at forty, but for See, hanging it up means giving up acid and meeting the aforementioned John Espey, and it is at this point that her career really gets going. This is, in a nutshell, why Caroline See is an über puglover: through example, she shows us that our lives are what we make of them, that even given a crappy lot in life, you can take it, polish it, and have a damn good time. Read more!

Puglovers remember . . .

Creepy 80s Sitcoms

Do sitcoms even exist anymore? Miss Ramona can only think of three – Two and Half Men, The George Lopez Show, and How I Met Your Mother – and to be honest, she is not sure if they are still on or what they are about. Ramona and Fonda LaFondue would probably be most inclined to watch How I Met Your Mother only because of Jason Segel, for whom an appreciation runs deep among our circle of friends. He totally got the best lines in Knocked Up which we quote all of time, namely “I’m gonna go make a protein shake now” and “Well, gynecology is just a hobby of mine . . .” Plus, we went to a New Years Eve party at his house once (where Ramona was sassed at the bar by Sacha Baren Cohen and was so unnerved – it was right after Borat came out and he is totally tall – that she started to ramble and then mid-sentence turned around and ran away) and he was a very gracious host, despite having no idea of who we were (acquaintances of the co-host).
We digress.

Thirtyboppers remember that back in the 80s, sitcoms were where it was at. Most of these thirty minute morality plays aired on weekend nights, back when getting a Friday or Saturday night primetime slot was a coup. Now, Friday and Saturday nights are kind of like the tuberculosis sanatoriums of television: places where things go to die while no one watches. Oddly, many of these shows revolved around depressing premises, usually involving a dead/absent parent or being orphaned by the deaths of both parents (Silver Spoons, Out of this World, Punky Brewster, Full House, Who’s the Boss?). Not content to be outdone by killing off a child’s parents, some shows (Diff’rent Strokes, Gimme a Break, Webster) threw in an interracial component that usually involved a poor, black person coming into a wealthy, white person’s home to provide comic relief with his or her ebonics-tinged speech. You have to wonder what possessed some television writer to think, I know, I’ll take a little black boy (preferably physically challenged so that at 15 he looks like he is 5), kill both his parents, and send him to live with one of his deceased father’s white friends where he will address the mother figure as ma’am for the duration of his childhood (Webster). That’ll be shits and giggles all around!

If you remember these shows, then it is very likely you also remember the “special” episodes that aired every once in a while that were supposed to teach the kiddies watching at home a lesson. The problem is, instead of serving their intended didactic purpose, they almost always ended up in traumatizing us. Ramona Narrow dares you to bring up Cherie from Punky Brewster to someone who watched the show without that person screaming back in enthusiasm over your shared dorkyness, “do you remember the refrigerator episode???” In a two-part episode remembered by anyone who religiously watched Punky Brewster, Punky’s friend Cherie hides in an old refrigerator meant to be thrown out during a game of hide and seek. Unfortunately, she can’t get out. Henry, Punky’s foster father (her dad walked out on her as a child and her mom abandoned her at – get this – a shopping mall with only her golden retriever, Brandon) and Cherie’s grandmother (her parents are also missing) Betty aren’t too concerned initially. I mean, I guess when a little girl disappears for thirty minutes or so in urban Chicago after playing in the yard, it’s not too much of a stretch to assume that it’s all good. However, we know that Cherie is stuck in the refrigerator, for we hear screams of “help me” coming from inside the refrigerator after everyone else goes inside after looking everywhere in the yard except for the absolutely most obvious place – the empty refrigerator. When Punky and the gang finally find Cherie, she is unconscious and collapses out of the refrigerator. Luckily, Punky paid attention to the CPR lesson at school during the first part of this dramatic episode and so is able to use her mouth to mouth skills to revive Cherie. This episode teaches us that, umm, CPR is important to know.



Webster also had a number of frightening episodes. One involved a teacher at school who touched the girls too much and another had the creators of Webster getting their Faulkner on and getting all "A Rose for Emily" with Webster finding a secret passage in his house to a hidden room that had a rocking chair with a doll in it that was supposed to serve as a shrine to the previous tenant’s runaway daughter. You need to check out the link below to get out creepy this was. Then there was the episode where, oops, Webster burned down George and Ma’am’s apartment, clearing the way from them to move to the house with the secret passage ways. However, the episode that really stuck with both Ramona and Fonda was the one in which, for the first time, Webster gets to stay home alone with a babysitter. After bragging about it at school, “robbers” who turn it out to be the bullies from Webster’s school, break into the house. Thankfully, there are those secret passages throughout the house and Webster is able to evade them. Nonetheless, it was terrifying and neither Ramona nor Fonda wanted to every stay home alone after that


Diff’rent Strokes was a show that had not one, but several “special episode” shows. In fact, when Arnold became convinced of the fact that kids were selling drugs at his upper crust prep school, Nancy Reagan herself came on the show to let everyone know that we should all “JUST SAY NO.” Alas, this lesson hasn’t stuck with Ramona and Fonda as much as the others. Diff’rent Strokes produced the two creepiest episodes of sitcom television ever. In one, Arnold and his pal, Dudley, get lured into the apartment of a man who owns a bicycle shop but who is really a pedophile. He gets Arnold to take polaroids of a shirtless Dudley riding his back like a bucking bronco. It's gross. Later in the series’ run, we learn the dangers of hitchhiking (because it is such an epidemic on the upper-eastside of Manhattan) from Kimberly and Arnold, who, frustrated by their inability to catch a cab after fifteen seconds, decide to hitchhike instead and get in the car with a guy who seems nice but then holds them hostage in his apartment with the intent of raping Kimberly and perhaps killing Arnold; he remains gagged and bound in the bedroom while the man forces Kimberly to slow dance with him while he serenades her with “Strangers in the Night.” Luckily, Arnold busts out the window, gets help, and Arnold and Kimberly make it home to celebrate Mr. Drummond’s birthday. Because who doesn’t feel like celebrating after an attempted rape?

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Puglovers love . . .

European Condom Commercials

Many puglovers, particularly female puglovers, are getting to the age where they want babies. They see those Gucci diaper bags or those cute little onesies or those ironic baby t-shirt that say things like "silent protagonist" or "they're raising me gay" and think, "Oh, it would be so fun and hip to have a little Apple/Emma/Tate/Aiden of my own to tote around to Mommy and Me Pilates!" Alas, most puglovers aren't in a position to have babies just yet. European condom commercials can help assuage this ache:

If these fail to get rid of those annoying pangs, we recommend a trip to Targe on the middle of a Wednesday. Best. Birth Control. Ever.

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You know you have puglove when . . .

You remember when Paula Abdul was a tap dancing pop star In recent years, Paula Abdul has gained notoriety for, among other things, slurring incoherently through myriad interviews, drinking something other than soda from those shiny red Coke cups that sit in front of the American Idol judges, selling a line of QVC jewelry, starring in a short-lived reality show on Bravo called Hey, Paula (on which she suffered a meltdown during one episode because she was "tired of people not treating me like the gift that I am"), offering totally useless critiques on AI like "I just love your spirit" or "You really made that song yours,” and giving (and then rescinding) a confession to Ladies Home Journal that she had had considerable addiction issues with pain medications, in particular a patch that delivered a painkiller 80 times stronger than morphine.
Who knew such a thing existed? I’m sure cancer patients around the world were left looking over at their morphine drips and thinking, what the fuck?


For those born after 1985, this is the stuff Paula is famous for, even though she did recently perform a single she wants to release (at the age of 46, which, in itself, is a pretty thirtybopper thing to do) on AI. Thirtyboppers, on the other hand, remember Paula Abdul as the artist behind hits like "Straight Up," "Cold Hearted Snake," and "Promise of a New Day." We remember the massively successful video for "Rush, Rush" in which Paula and then teen-icon Keanu Reeves (PS- where did he go?) adapted Rebel Without A Cause into a four minute mini-movie that even had a scene during the song's bridge with Paula and Keanu (as Natalie Wood and James Dean) "acting":

Paula: Can I ask you something? Have you ever been in love?
Keanu: If I was, I didn't know it. And you?
Paula: No. Isn't that terrible?
Keanu: Terrible? No. It just reminds you that we're all alone.

After this shared moment of existential angst, Paula and Keanu skip into an abandoned mansion where they light some candles, play hide and seek, run up and down a staircase, gaze at each other in a mirror, and finally cuddle on the floor. This is a song in which Paula extols her lover’s abilities to turn her senses all around when he kisses her up and down and she both candidly and emphatically insists that no one else has touched her so deep, so deep, so deep inside. Cuddling seems kind of anti-climatic given her lover’s supposed sexual virtuoso.

We cannot diss Paula, however. Aside from still using the chorus of "Rush, Rush" - rush, rush, hurry, hurry - to get her dogs to go potty on their walks, Ramona Narrow, like many female thirtyboppers, was a huge Paula Abdul fan. Saw her in concert. Four times. Still remembers her birthday (June 19, 1962) because she took a 30th birthday card and flowers from her parents' garden wrapped in foil and soggy paper towels to a 1992 concert . A security guard lifted Miss Ramona up to the stage to hand them to Paula and when Paula picked them up, thirteen year old Ramona burst into tears and squealed between sobs, "I love you!" Ramona also used almost two years of allowance savings (originally intended for buying a Nintendo) to go to the 1989 MTV Music Video awards with her babysitter when she found out Paula was performing.

Thirtyboppers remember that Paula was a huge, huge star. She sold over fifty million albums. What we also remember is that while she can dance in that sort of 80’s jazzercise way, Paula cannot sing. At all. The young kids that watch AI (and by young, we mean under 27) don't know that she sounds like a member of The Chipettes (especially Eleanor), Alvin and the Chipmunks' female counterparts.

Secure in our memories of her lackluster vocal talent, thirtyboppers find themselves amused that she is now a judge in a singing contest and wait for the day when some rejected potential contestant snarls at her, "I'm not taking any shit from you, lady. I saw your performance at the 1993 VMAs!"

Here's some Paula for y'all, back in her tap dancing days:



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