Anne & Lenny – Column

Anne & Lenny

1600 words, one paragraph!

by William Ham

Everybody in the liberal community is slapping themselves on the back when they see Anne Heche – hey, look, a lesbian and I’m neither amused, horrified, nor strangely aroused! That’s her secret appeal, you see, the cute-but-not-too-cute Sapphist. Looks good with short hair without being mistaken for some sort of strange ’50s anachronism – I mean, look, if you knew a guy who looked like k.d. lang or Phranc (and what the hell has Phranc done lately that makes her such an immediately-recognizable Sapphic synonym?), you’d be rolling your eyes at the flat-top, the pompadour, the buzz-cut (it all comes down to the top of the head, my friends) and chortling over the faux-fur-collared leather jacket (sure, your road-company-of-Grease reject buddy’d be wearing a real one, but it’s the look we’re talking about here, not the texture or the smell. Uh, think I’ll leave it at that), the blocky pegged-pants and the two-tone bowling shoes. Good lord, get an era. Anne Heche’s particular innovation is that she looks exactly like what the “acceptable lesbian” – to the degree that anyone can be universally acceptable in this society – should look like. Forget Ellen; she’s funny (or used to be, at any rate – her mistake was being too lesbian for the room. She’d better die like Lenny Bruce pretty goddamn soon if she wants anybody to remember her fondly in spite of her current incarnation as stymied comic martyr. Let’s be honest here – Bruce is regarded highly mostly because he died a broken man. Nothing legitimizes your life better than a swift drop from success and a double-gainer into the gutter. He was fun when he was foulmouthed and infantile in his obsessions, but when he got downed by law he became a fucking bore. Try, just try and watch that Lenny Bruce Performance Film sometime – they build it up beautifully with a few shoddy black and white shots of Our Comic Messiah Who Died For Our Sins Although I Don’t Recall Booting A Half-Billion Ampoules of Methedrine Into My Bicep And Letting It Rot Before Falling Out A Window on DMT, Not That I Really Know What the Fuck DMT Is, I Mean, It Could Be A New Mode of Supersonic Transport or A Brand-New Video Format That Allows You To Slap The Actors In Any Movie You See If They Start Getting On Your Nerves, Which, These Days, Would Be Just About Every Fucking Last One Of Them For The Mere Fact That They’re Actors And Are Therefore Surely Having A Better, More Interesting and Lucrative Life Than I Am, Yeah Even Eric Roberts Who Admittedly Usually Gets My Smackin’ Hand In A Twitching Frenzy For Other Reasons Completely Unrelated To His Fame Wealth Or Ability To Pork Women With Large Pink Nipples, Okay Maybe The Last One, I Mean Fuck, I’m Just Being Honest Here, But Anyway I Have The Feeling That The Guy Or Guys Who First Thought Up Virtual Reality Came Up With It So It’d Bring Humanity That Much Closer To Actually Being Able To Step Into That Hotel Room In Star 80 And Dangle That Annoying Fuck, A Twice-Intensified Annoying Fuck Now That I Think Of It, ‘Cause That Paul Snider Wasn’t Exactly A Prize Himself, Out Of The Twenty-Sixth Floor Window And Watch The Puke Drop Onto His Ugly Plaid Sports Jacket Or Maybe That Was The Pattern, Hey I Digressed Myself Into A Vacant Lot But Not Really, I Just Realized That Both Paul Snider And Lenny Bruce Were The Subjects Of Bob Fosse Movies! I Bet Bob Fosse Never Knew What DMT Was Either, He Was A Goddamn Choreographer For Tharp’s Sake So, You Know, Maybe Lenny Bruce Did Die For My Sins After All Because He’d Often Hold Forth On Stage Babbling At Insensate Length About A Lot of Shit He Didn’t Really Get Either, God Help Us All If I Should Ever Get My Hands On Some Real Speed, Huh?, with an audio track with some horrendously shoddy (read: “authentic”) acoustics behind them as he blabs about what an offensive comic he is – “Dirty Lenny, the pornographer’s coming on” – then the Presence takes the stage and it’s like watching Elvis stumble-stammer through “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” from that concert a few weeks before he went out almost exactly the same way that Lenny did! – it’s deeply, unforgettably embarrassing, a ten-car pileup on the Dying Hipster Turnpike, and while not as heart-rending in its pathos as E.’s Last (Day He Could Still) Stand, the audience reacts in almost the same way, or as close as possible given the size and sensibility differential between a mid-’60s San Fran club audience and a late-’70s Vegas get-up-front-where-the-King-can-see-ya-hon-and-maybe-you’ll-get-one-o’-dem-scarves crowd: like they’re watching the greatest show of all time, the bill that God himself would’ve booked if everyone didn’t know that this was Don Law’s turf (he’s a local concert promoter – feel free to personalize this sentence [which one are we up to now? The second?] with a regional semi-celeb of your own: a free service of this magazine) even though he’s muffing the classics they came to see (“My Way” in the King’s case; say, “Father Flotsky’s Triumph” in Big Len’s) and spending the rest of the time mumbling and meandering about subjects known and understood only to themselves, and let’s be honest here, probably not even to them – hey, kids! Here’s a fun rainy-day project I just thought up: score vinyl copies of Having Fun With Elvis On Stage and, lessee, I’m Not a Nut, Elect Me! and intercut them line by line: it’ll sound like an actual conversation! Sure, it’ll sound more like a coupla drug fiends rambling on without giving a tinker’s fuck about what the other is saying, but come on, admit it, you’ve had way too many conversations like that yourself. So, anyway, my point (and I do have one – just proving to you I remember, if dimly, what I was talking about before this parenthesis began. Not this one, the one this one is in) is that after performances like those, dull and tedious and interminable, the best thing – the only thing – they could do to save face was to tip over on the commode and do the only literal rug-munching these two had ever done. Maybe all you Colonel Tom Trailer Parkers out there are right – maybe Elvis isn’t dead; he’s just waiting for the heat to blow over. If you’re out there, E., I’d hold out a while longer – you’re gonna need a little more time to live down Change of Habit. So, Ellen, seeing as you’ve become a self-lacerating snake-handler in your decloseted age, take my advice and off yourself. Now. Ah, fuck, scratch that – Fosse’s dead, Albert Goldman’s dead, and tumblin’ off the toidy with a needle in your arm is so declassé these days. Guess you’re stuck ’til we figure something out for you. We really don’t have a system set up whereby you people [that is still a term we can use, right?] can self-immolate resonantly yet. To be honest, you kinda caught us off-guard. The blueprints – or should they be pinkprints? Or is the use of a commonly-masculine color an ironic or an empowering statement for you, uh, “guys”? See the kind of problems we’ve been having? – haven’t been drawn up yet), so it really doesn’t matter what she looks like as long as she’s odd-looking in some way. (You know the old schoolyard gag, “You’re funny. Funny-looking.”? Guess what? That wasn’t a joke. It’s the criterion for membership. Don’t worry, I’m closing it now.) But if you’re a non-joke-cracking, non-guitar-playing celebrity, you have to fit certain fixed notions of outer beauty. At least if you’re a woman. Even if you’re wearing a Brooks Brothers suit. Even if they do come in women’s sizes these days. But you can’t be too gorgeous lest you fall into the Howard Stern lesbographic: you need to be just beautiful enough, not voluptuous, kind of tomboyish (the sophisticated kind of tomboy: the kind who wants to hang out at all the boys’ cocktail parties – the Four Seasons is nothing more than a really expensive treehouse, I tell you), yet with strong, semi-soft features so everybody’ll feel comfortable with you. (Except if you’re making out at the White House – then again, it could have been an executive order.) Being lesbian’s the best career move Anne Heche could ever make – it fits her appearance so well, her cosmetologist might have suggested it to her. She’s a safe lesbian. Not quite a lipstick lesbian, more like an occasional-hint-of-rouge lesbian. The kind that plays to our prejudices exactly like certain black entertainers did just before (and just after) the civil rights movement or certain gays did a little while longer after Stonewall – a step up from the burnt-cork/fake-eyelash stereotypes, but still “other” enough to be a vehicle for our own self-congratulations. I like Anne Heche, but I’m not too impressed with her “accomplishment” (for which both she and we are complicit in staging). Not until the day the first mole-ridden butch dyke over 200 pounds makes the cover of US or sits on the panel with Conan will I consider lesbianism to have “arrived.” For now, I’m just thinking of how nice Anne would look in a faux-fur-collared leather jacket.