SATURDAY, AUGUST 21, 2010
KLMNO Celebritology Jen Chaney and Liz Kelly A fight over naming rights Three celeb-centric stories on our radar this weekend . . .
Material Girl, is infringing on its brand. According to Reuters, L.A. Triumph says in court documents that it has been selling clothing under the same name since 1997, and that the singer — who, for the record, has been dubbed the Material Girl since 1985 — does not “have the right to trade in the same space under this brand.” The suit was filed Thursday in U.S. district court. Madonna has yet to comment on the matter, nor have reps for Macy’s, the department store where Material Girl apparel is sold. Madonna designed the ’80s-reminiscent line with her 13-year-old daughter, Lourdes.
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facing two counts of fraud after allegedly making unauthorized charges to the credit cards of famous clients, has pleaded not guilty online. On the Facebook page for the salon Chez Gabriela, a status update says, “You are invited to remember that everyone is innocent until proven otherwise. Chez Gabriela will be exonerated of all allegations soon.” In the meantime, Perez is currently under house arrest after being released on $50,000 bail. According to the New York Daily News, Perez, 51, racked up more than $200,000 of unauthorized charges to two of actress Liv Tyler’s American Express cards, and another $68,000 in unauthorized charges to a card belonging to a high-end jewelry designer. She faces up to 25 years in prison if convicted on both counts.
2 f SAID IT: YOU
Celeb salon owner asserts innocence: Maria Gabriela Perez,the Beverly Hills salon owner
Patterson 3 Meyer King
What, novelists make money? The term “struggling writer” clearly does not apply to the scribes who rank high on the rundown of 2009’s highest-paid
authors. Forbes — a magazine that specializes in publishing lists of people who make more money than you do — has released its new ranking of revenue-generating authors, which is topped by crazy-prolific thriller-generator James Patterson, who earned $70 million last year. In second, not surprisingly, is “Twilight” author Stephenie Meyer, whose vampire-oriented earnings totaled $40 million. And in third is another crazy-prolific man, Stephen King, who made $34 million. Despite all these impressive numbers, the publishing industry is apparently still doomed. You know, just in case you were wondering.
GLAD RAGS? A clothing company is challenging Madonna’s right to use the name Material Girl on her own line.
A ‘Material’ suit: A clothing company has filed a lawsuit against Madonna that claims the pop megastar’s fashion line for teens,
POLL OF THE WEEK
A ‘SWITCH’ ASSESSMENT Post film critic Ann Hornaday gave high marks to “The Switch,” the new Jennifer Aniston/Jason Bateman rom-com, which leads us to believe the movie is entertaining. Still, some have questioned the ethics behind the movie’s premise: a guy hijacks the pregnancy of his best friend by replacing the donated sperm for her artificial insemination with his own. We asked readers what they thought about the plot. Their responses:
57% 24%
Creepy 19% Cute on
washingtonpost.com
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washingtonpost.com/celebritology for more celeb and pop-culture news. Send tips to
celebritology@wpost.com.
POP CULTURE PULSE: ‘LOST’ Wait, “Lost”? Didn’t that show end in emotional but not entirely conclusive fashion back in May? Yes, but the tropical puzzler is again attracting attention, for reasons including: the auction of “Lost” props and memorabilia this weekend in Santa Monica, Calif.); Tuesday’s arrival of Season 6 on DVD and Blu-ray, with the much-debated 12-minute epilogue to the show; and the fact that the series will compete in 12 Emmy Award categories Aug. 29. Toss in fresh buzz about “Lost” star Josh Holloway being considered for the lead in a “Rockford Files” remake, and it’s just more proof that, while the island may move, it hasn’t disappeared from the zeitgeist.
A SELECTION OF NOTABLE READER COMMENTS FROM THE PAST WEEK...
Headline: “Cameron Diaz tops list of riskiest celebrity online searches.” Comment: “Oddly enough, my search for “©@mron dl@z” presented no risks at all, plus I got great rates on international prescriptions.” — td_in_baltimore
Headline: “Recently separated Fred Armisen reportedly dating ‘SNL’ co-star Abby Elliott.” Comment: “Fred, you play Barack Obama, not Bill Clinton. ” — yellowjkt
So stupid I don’t know why we’re having this conversation
S BOOK WORLD
Comic book adventures of a different variety
by Dennis Drabelle W
hen I was growing up, there were essentially two kinds of comic
books: the funny and the horrif- ic. The graphic novel had not been invented yet, and few if any artist-writers would have considered panels full of drawn figures and speech balloons as vehicles for putting characters through ordeals like fighting against big- otry or coming out of the closet. If anyone had been crazy enough to invest time and energy in produc- ing something like “Stuck Rubber Baby,” Howard Cruse’s long, complex, meticulous- ly drawn account of racism and homopho- bia in a town that looks a lot like Bir- mingham, Ala., in the 1960s, he would have restricted its circula- tion to a small group of friends. All that had
won him a pair of international awards. His protagonist is Toland
Polk, a college-age white guy who rarely sets off anyone’s gay- dar. This can be an asset in that time and place: While swishier friends get taunted and beaten up by rednecks, Toland rolls right along. On the other hand, it’s easy for him to fool himself into thinking his attraction to men is just a phase, and in do- ing so he not only re- tards his own devel- opment but makes his girlfriend miser- able. (To assert his “manhood,” he gets her pregnant after the condom he has carried around for years proves inade- quate to its task — hence the book’s ti- tle.)
STUCK RUBBER BABY By Howard Cruse Vertigo. 210 pp. $24.99
changed by the 1990s, when “Stuck Rubber Baby” was first published, but even then it had birth pangs. Cruse, who is best known for his gay comic strip “Wendel,” explains that his own high standards were almost his undoing. When he started out, he recalls, he thought the book would take him two years to complete. He adds tersely, “It took four.” To keep going — to keep producing the densely shaded, profusely dotted draw- ings that give depth to his set- tings and flesh tones to his characters (that last is an im- portant feature, given the sub- ject matter) — Cruse had to find a source of funding. Several friends, including playwright Tony Kushner and novelist Ar- mistead Maupin, agreed to buy pieces of the art intended for the book “at higher than mar- ket value and in advance of its even being drawn.” Thanks to that infusion of cash, Cruse was able to finish the book, which
At the same time, local black citizens are losing patience with the Jim Crow South. The book’s two threads entwine at a local bar where just about everyone
is welcome — whites, blacks, gays, straights — but which is also a favorite stop for rednecks wielding baseball bats. The ac- tion climaxes with a hanging, the aftereffects of which Cruse conveys on a harrowing two- page spread in which a much older Toland looks back on the event with a horror he can’t for- get — so traumatized that his head splits into sections. If occasionally “Stuck Rubber
Baby” seems almost too ambi- tious for its own good, we should keep in mind what it commemorates. There wasn’t a lot of subtlety to the heroism and villainy of the civil rights era in the South, and for that reason comic-strip art may be especially well suited to evok- ing it. “Stuck Rubber Baby” makes for a gripping way to re- visit those lurid days.
drabelled@washpost.com
Drabelle is a contributing editor of Book World.
While swishier friends get beaten up, the protagonist rolls along.
We’ve run out of time to talk about my lightsaber dating from C1
prom. The event was hosted by a plump, costumed Anakin Sky- walker who went by Giganakin. His real name is Ryan Glitch, 23, of Gorham, N.Y. He had hosted a similar event before at a conven- tion called Dragoncon, but the speed-dating had been unsuc- cessful, which Glitch attributed to the crowd being too heteroge- neous. Darth Vaders wound up across the table from Captain Jack Sparrows. “If you don’t like ‘Pirates of the Caribbean,’ your date is over,” Glitch explained. Even here, someone had creat- ed a minor disturbance by show- ing up in a “Star Trek” uniform. Rules of geekdom have long spec- ified that coming to a “Star Wars” convention dressed as Captain Kirk or Jean-Luc Picard is the equivalent of showing up at a Ma- rine Corps barbecue dressed as Osama bin Laden (except there are international laws that would restrain the Marines in such cases). The ages of the speed-dating
participants at Celebration V ranged from 18 to 54, but most appeared to be in their mid-20s. The women were, by and large, attractive; most wore street clothes. Of the men, no more than
three were openly carrying light- sabers, and in general, they looked less like Jabba the Hutt and more like Luke Skywalker than might have been expected. “The women who show up are looking for someone to make a connection with,” Glitch ex- plained. “Most of the guys are just like, ‘I get to talk to a girl! Fab- ulous!’ ” This year marks the 30th anni-
versary of “The Empire Strikes Back,” the second “Star Wars” film, and the first in which a love story features prominently. For many who showed up at the con- vention to celebrate it, this seemed to be a key part of its ap- peal; couples wandered the con- vention floor sporting paired T- shirts with Han and Leia saying, “I love you” and “I know.”
‘Women are picky’
At the start of the speed-dating session, a Darth Vader appeared and volunteered to stand in the back as “eye candy.” In any other context, a man breathing heavily in the back of a speed-dating event would have been politely asked to leave. But we ladies were elated. “I want to speed-date Darth!” someone shouted. Interactions would last three minutes. No names. No places of residence. No personally identi- fying information. Usually the
conversation came easily. We compared prior conventions. Of course we mainly talked “Star Wars”— our favorites among all the movies, objections to the pre- quels — complimented each oth- er on our costumes and admitted we’d never been speed-dating be- fore. In any other context, you could
never roll up your sleeve to show off your Boba Fett tattoo to score points. But here, nights spent camping outside theaters to await the opening of “The Phan- tom Menace” ceased to be deal- breakers and became common touchstones. Then the bell rang, and the men moved on. Everyone went by number. At the end of the event, you could write down your contact infor- mation (e-mail or phone number) next to people’s numbers as the Force directed you, then wait to see if any prospective date want- ed to reach you. As someone with limited short- term memory and no speed-dat- ing experience, I found that all the numbers blurred together. Was 44 the one who had said that his favorite parts of “Star Wars” were “the aliens and the explo- sions” and then fell abruptly si- lent? Or was that 16? Not everyone found the droids
they were looking for. Still, I left the event with a sheet loaded with contact info.
Although the odds for a wom-
an trying to meet men at a “Star Wars” convention might seem ex- ceptional, some still had difficul- ty.
“Women are picky,” Glitch ob-
served. Men, on the other hand, favor the “shotgun method,” dis- tributing their contact informa- tion indiscriminately to anyone and everyone. (Although some biological imperative might have been at work here, too.) A bikini- sporting Slave Leia was deluged with contact information. The more conservatively dressed women around her didn’t fare as well. Few, however, departed entire-
RED HUBER/ORLANDO SENTINEL VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS
THE FORCE OF LOVE: Alli Kappmeyer, left, and Karina Sofia, conventioneers from California, availed themselves of the chapel.
ly empty-handed. And except for one incident after an earlier ses- sion, when a man reportedly lurked in wait outside the room
for the woman of his choice and raised security concerns, things went smoothly. Some hit it off right away. Glitch reported that two couples from dating sessions earlier in the weekend had already pledged themselves in the Star Wars Com- mitment Chapel. Located down- stairs on the main showroom floor, the chapel consisted of a white trellis festooned with pink and white lights. When I visited
it, a couple stood before an Obi- Wan Kenobi impersonator who was cramming as many “Star Wars” references as he could into a semblance of wedding vows. (“Remember, in relationships, size matters not.” “But fear not, I sense much love in you.”) It was like a slightly more
tasteful Elvis chapel, but without the legally binding effect. It even consecrated interspecies rela- tionships. On one of the conven- tion days, a woman committed to her R2 unit. For many fan couples, the peo- ple who order wedding cakes
shaped like deceased tauntauns or name their children Luke and Leia, “Star Wars” serves as a com- mon bond. But so far, I haven’t mustered the nerve to contact any of the Jedi or Sith lords whose contact info I received. The Force may have been strong with the host. Glitch, who is single, reported that several female participants had offered him their contact information. Maybe next time he’ll wind up at the Commitment Chapel himself. Until then, if you’d just as soon kiss a Wookiee, he can arrange it.
petria@washpost.com
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