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Roxanne Roberts and Amy Argetsinger
LOVE, ETC.
Split: American Idol runner-up Crystal Bowersox, 24, and that cute boyfriend they kept showing in the audience (turns out he’s Tony
Kusian, 26).
The breakup — mutual, she said — came Tuesday, hours before her final competitive performance, after he wea- ried of the Hol- lywood scene, she announced
Two losses
Thursday on Ryan Seacrest’s radio show. “He went home. He wasn’t cool with the lifestyle,” she said. “He’s a small-town guy. . . . I’m a small-town girl, but I want this more than anything. . . . Some peo- ple can hang with it and some can’t. I’m fine with it. He’ll be all right.”
ASSOCIATED PRESS; PHOTO ILLUSTRATION/ SUSANA SANCHEZ — THE WASHINGTON POST
AL GRILLO/
No housewarming party?
THIS JUST IN
Mary Podesta, the lawyer wife
of Clinton White House chief of staff John Podesta, suffered serious injuries Thursday when she was hit by a car in downtown D.C., friends tell us. She’s expected to make a full recovery but will be in the hospital for a while. M.I.A. was so unhappy with a new New York Times magazine profile that she posted author Lynn Hirschberg’s cell number on Twitter to her 100K+ followers Thursday. Hirschberg, deluged by calls, told the New York Observer she’s surprised the outspoken British rapper would highlight a story she hated, but “she’s a provocateur, and provocateurs want to be provocative.”
So how exactly did author Joe McGinniss end up renting a house in Wasilla, Alaska, directly next door to his latest subject, Sarah
Palin?
He hasn’t responded to interview requests, so we turned to his son — awriter in Washington — to explain this real estate situation that’s led to accusations of stalking, the Palins’ construction of a new fence and a blurry image of McGinniss plastered on Palin’s Facebook page.
Joe McGinniss Jr. says it’s a
LARRY BUSACCA/GETTY IMAGES
M.I.A.: In a fury over a profile.
lucky accident. He told our colleague Monica Hesse that his dad had been couch-surfing with friends ever since arriving in Alaska, where he had ties from researching a previous book. “Then, he’s contacted by an older woman who says that she happens to own the house next door to the house where the Palins live. . . . And of course, he’s like, Yeah! And he’s paying, what, $1,500 a month?” A steal! (Well, it’s “a really modest, none-too-attractive place,” or so he has heard.) The son said the landlady had passed up more lucrative offers from tabloids but decided to cut his father a break since she
knew his work. The younger McGinniss said he chose to speak out to defend his father’s honor after hearing public vitriol over the living arrangement —particularly after Palin told Glenn Beck that McGinniss “better leave [her] kids alone.” “He’s a 67-year-old grandfather,”
McGinniss Jr. says. “The idea that he’s holed up in some dark little house next door” spying on children “is laughable.”
“Joe is doing what reporters do, which is go to the source and get as close to them as possible,” says David Drake of Broadway Books, a division of Random House, which will publish McGinniss’s book. “He is reporting it from up close and personal, which is something he is very good at doing.” Indeed. The veteran political
FACEBOOK.COM
Sarah Palin’s house in Alaska, top, is next door to author Joe McGinniss’s newly rented house, above, shown on her Facebook page.
writer (whose 1969 “The Selling of the President” set a new standard for campaign coverage) once bid more than $60,000 for a charity-auction lunch with Palin (he lost). In the 1980s, he became roomies with Jeffrey MacDonald while the latter was on trial for murdering his wife and two daughters; MacDonald later sued the author for pretending to be his friend while writing a book that trumpeted his guilt. “I look sometimes at his body of work,” says McGinnis Jr. “He wrote about Nixon. He wrote about a triple murderer. He wrote about a boy who killed his stepfather. He wrote about the Kennedys. If you swim in all those waters, you’re going to come out smelling like . . . well, like something.”
A very familiar feeling, but not quite deja vu
Reggie Love was thrilled to be at the White House when the reigning NCAA men’s basketball champs visited Thurs- day — because he was there, too, the last time the Duke Blue Devils visited. It was nine years ago, when the man who would go on to be President Obama’s personal assistant was a freshman on the 2001 championship team. “It was just as hot!” he said of the
weather. He and his teammates had a tour and a ceremony with George W. Bush. “There weren’t as many crises go- ing on as there were towards the end of the administration,” he said, “so it was still a jovial time.” The possibility that he’d return to the White House as a staffer “never once crossed my mind.” As an ’05 graduate, he didn’t overlap with the team he greeted Thursday, though “I was a recruiting officer with Lance [Thomas, a graduating senior] — I’m dating myself here!”
FRIDAY, MAY 28, 2010
BOB JORDAN/ASSOCIATED PRESS
White House aide Reggie Love dunks on Virginia’s Adam Hall in 2001.
HEY, ISN’T THAT . . . ?
Stacy Keach catching “American
Buffalo” at Studio Theatre on Wednes- day night. Actually walked in with the show’s star, Ed Gero (longtime pal, fre- quent Shakespeare Theatre co-star), to pick up his tickets at the box office. Greenish blazer, golf cap turned back- ward.
Darryl “DMC” McDaniels, the hip-
hop legend turned foster-child-adoption advocate, strolling through the lobby of the Renaissance Dupont Circle Hotel on Thursday morning. T-shirt, jeans, but minus his signature hat.
GOT A TIP ? E-MAIL U S A T RELIABLESOURCE@WASHP OST . COM. FOR THE LA TEST SCOOPS, VISIT WASHINGTONP OST . COM/RELIABLESOUR CE
BOOK WORLD
very novel is a novel of ideas, but this one is especially so. Irish au- thor Deirdre Madden has written one chock-full of them. The heroine is Molly, which must ring an Irish bell, and the action takes place over the course of one day, which must ring that literary bell yet again. It’s Molly Fox’s birthday, which suggests the passage of time, but that birthday occurs on the sum- mer solstice, which by its very length, suggests that we have all the time in the world. The three main characters here, best friends, are all active in different arts: Molly is one of Ireland’s finest actresses; An- drew worked first as an art critic and now appears on television sharing his lofty thoughts with the masses; and the unnamed narrator has written 20 plays. The first 19 were great successes; the last one a flop. The narrator is staying for
Three Irish artists, true to their own selves?
E
by Carolyn See
a few days in Dublin, in Mol- ly’s house, which, though small, is something of a do- mestic jewel. It’s filled with all the art objects and bric-a-brac of a life well- lived. The actress is out of town, but the front hall has been made into some- thing of a shrine to the public “Molly Fox,” with posters and portraits and good notices and so on. The furniture throughout is well-chosen and one-of-a- kind, except for one jarring note at the back of the rear garden: a tawdry, shiny, fiberglass cow, in among the fragrant flowers and flowing vines. There is also a real-life cat and an elusive hedgehog, exotic and darling, who casts an eerie, magical spell over the whole landscape. The narrator spends this solitary day doing ordinary chores, encountering a series of people she has known forever or is meeting for the first time. And she ruminates upon the lives of the three best friends: Molly, Andrew and herself. All three of them have brothers. “I be- gan to think a lot about the idea of
MOLLY FOX’S BIRTHDAY
by Deirdre Madden Picador. 221 pp. Paperback, $14
brothers,” Andrew says toward the end of the book, and somebody mentions earlier that nobody talks very much about brothers, although many of us have them. The brothers here function as alter egos, dark sides or simply other sides of what these three people in the arts represent or strive for. Molly’s brother is Fergus, a troubled man who has drunk too much and done time in mental institutions for clinical depres- sion. Molly seems to slip ef- fortlessly into the characters she plays, maybe at consider- able cost to her own “self,” and Fergus is a concrete manifestation of this. While Andrew was study- ing hard at Cambridge to for- mulate his ideas, his brother, Billy, lived as an unregenerate layabout. His parents loved this errant son, but he’s caught in a skirmish between different Protestant military factions. As Protestants, Andrew’s family would have scorned the narrator if they’d ever got- ten to know her. She comes from a large Catholic family who all love life and get along very well. The narrator’s only
personal problem is that she feels she can never fit in with them. She is an out- sider, as is her older brother, who is a Catholic priest. He lives a life of great loneliness, but in the act of saying Mass is involved in theatrics every day. Thea- ter in itself is deeply sacred, or it can be, and that is another of the ideas floating around in this novel. You’d think that with three people —
two women and a man — there would be a sexual triangle, and there is, but it’s very low key and muted. (In that way, if no other, this is a very Irish book.) When Molly asks the narrator if she’s ever been to bed with Andrew, she reacts with indignation: “I could hardly be- lieve her cheek.... If there was some- thing one of us wanted to share with the other, she would tell it in her own time.” Considering these women are in their 30s when Molly asks this question, it seems . . . well, what does it seem like?
You’d think that with three people — two women and a man — there would be a sexual triangle, and there is, but it’s very low key and muted.
Movie reviews
Since this novel is, among other things, all about “selves,” the ladies seem extra- prim, not typical of people who work in the arts.
Other characters appear here, either in present time or in the narrator’s memory. We are introduced to the very handsome and kind David, whose cha- risma has pushed him into a movie ca- reer and whose mediocre intelligence prevents him from ever returning to the stage. We see the beleaguered and men- tally ill Fergus, who tells us what it’s like to be Molly Fox’s brother, and finally, Andrew himself, who drops in for a long monologue at the end of the day to ex- plain how he has reconciled his real life with the art that he cherishes. I think this book has a very definite
market. After a certain age, people get heartily sick of pondering which is their “real” self, but up until that age, they don’t. Intelligent, curious women in their 20s and 30s should love this. It’s about theater and acting, good taste and discernment, time and eternity, and the nature of the self. It’s nicely written, and the physical book is pretty. What’s not to like?
bookworld@washpost.com
See reviews books regularly for The Post.
Sunday in Outlook
What if modern capitalism doesn’t look like us? The unquenchable desire to doubt Shakespeare. How the birth control pill remade America. A potential truce between faith and science. And the evolution of Duke Ellington.
Sex and the City 2
Carrie & Co. ditch the city — and leave behind far too much of the franchise’s appeal. B W33
Survival of the Dead
George A. Romero’s zombies are back on-screen, but you may feel like one in the audience, too. B1
⁄2
W34
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
Jake Gyllenhaal is game for anything in this action-adventure. BB W33
To view movie trailers, read more reviews and buy tickets online, go to
Turn to Weekend for reviews of all the movies opening today, including:
Gary Coleman in critical condition in Utah hospital
salt lake city — Former child tele-
vision star Gary Coleman is in critical condition near his Utah home with what his family calls a “serious medical prob- lem.” Utah Valley Regional Medical Cen- ter spokeswoman Janet Frank said Cole- man, 42, was admitted to the Provo fa- cility Wednesday but she couldn’t release any other details. Coleman’s Utah lawyer, Randy Kester, said he had communicated by text mes- sage with Coleman’s wife, Shannon Price, and that the family did not want to release any additional details at this time. “Anything they could say would be premature because they don’t know the full extent of his condition right now,” Kester said.
Price and her father released a state- ment Thursday to KUTV-TV saying Coleman was taken to the hospital with “a serious medical problem.” The state- ment asks for prayers, adding: “We hope those prayers are answered and that Gary will be able to recover and return home soon.” The former star of TV’s “Diff ’rent
Strokes” has had a string of financial and legal problems, in addition to con- tinuing ill health from the kidney dis- ease he suffered as a child. Coleman has had at least two kidney transplants and receives dialysis. Last fall, Coleman had heart surgery
that was complicated by pneumonia, Kester said.
— Associated Press
DOONESBURY FLASHBACKS by Garry Trudeau
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