Well, we almost made it all the way through the first month of 2017…but alas, another pop icon of my youth is gone. I was too young to fall in love with Mary Tyler Moore as Laura Petrie on the innovative Dick Van Dyke Show in the early 60s, but her endearing characterization of the warm, smart, and fiercely independent Mary Richards on the equally groundbreaking sitcom, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, completely captured my heart and made me a lifetime fan.
She was an admirable person off the set as well, with her dedication to animal rights activism and as a spokesperson for juvenile diabetes.
She was a gifted comedic actor, but had more range than many people seemed willing to give her credit for. Consider this subtly played scene of underlying tension from Robert Redford’s Ordinary People:
Moore received an Oscar nom for Best Actress in 1980 for her work in that film; if you’ve never seen it I highly recommend it. That said, I’ll always be most grateful for all the laughs over the years; her comedy chops are on full display in this classic Mary Tyler Moore Show bit:
It’s OK to laugh. Mary would consider it an insult if you didn’t. R.I.P.
The moment Donald Trump was sworn in as the 45th president of the United States at noon on Friday, the LGBT, climate change, health care, and civil liberties pages disappeared from the website of the brand new Trump White House.
Motherboard, VICE’s website focusing on science and technology, reported that the changes occurred at noon, when the Obama administration turned over the official White House website, whitehouse.gov, to the Trump team.
As I said: bookmark this page. Perhaps a screen capture, just in case?
As if I didn’t already have enough reasons to admire Meryl Streep:
Wow. Truth to power, baby. In case you missed the gist:
“Thank you, Hollywood foreign press. Just to pick up on what Hugh Laurie said. You and all of us in this room, really, belong to the most vilified segments in American society right now. Think about it. Hollywood, foreigners, and the press. But who are we? And, you know, what is Hollywood anyway? It’s just a bunch of people from other places. […]
Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners. If you kick ’em all out, you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts. They gave me three seconds to say this. An actor’s only job is to enter the lives of people who are different from us and let you feel what that feels like. And there were many, many, many powerful performances this year that did exactly that, breathtaking, passionate work.
There was one performance this year that stunned me. It sank its hooks in my heart. Not because it was good. There was nothing good about it. But it was effective and it did its job. It made its intended audience laugh and show their teeth. It was that moment when the person asking to sit in the most respected seat in our country imitated a disabled reporter, someone he outranked in privilege, power, and the capacity to fight back. It kind of broke my heart when I saw it. I still can’t get it out of my head because it wasn’t in a movie. It was real life.
And this instinct to humiliate, when it’s modeled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful, it filters down into everybody’s life, because it kind of gives permission for other people to do the same thing. Disrespect invites disrespect. Violence incites violence. When the powerful use their position to bully others, we all lose. […]
This brings me to the press. We need the principled press to hold power to account, to call them on the carpet for every outrage.That’s why our founders enshrined the press and its freedoms in our constitution. So I only ask the famously well-heeled Hollywood Foreign Press and all of us in our community to join me in supporting the committee to protect journalists. Because we’re going to need them going forward. And they’ll need us to safeguard the truth.
[…] And we have to remind each other of the privilege and the responsibility of the act of empathy. We should all be very proud of the work Hollywood honors here tonight.
As my friend, the dear departed Princess Leia, said to me once, take your broken heart, make it into art. Thank you.”
Stay tuned for Orange Julius Caesar’s 3am Tweet storm…
* * * UPDATE 1/9/17 * * *
Right on cue:
Meryl Streep, one of the most over-rated actresses in Hollywood, doesn’t know me but attacked last night at the Golden Globes. She is a…..
