Hedda is nearly floating among the clouds in anticipation of this year’s Mardi Gras. How we love the floats, the revelry, the music, the drinking and the low rent drunken pageantry of it all! Mardi Gras is the true American holiday; stolen from another culture entirely and transformed into an excuse for alcoholic debauchery and tasteless displays of the most prurient vulgarity that our Cotton Mather culture can suppress. What’s not to love!

Hedda is powdering up the bead magnets and renting a U-haul to bring back all our plastic booty. Hedda has that unique Bette Midler ability to work both sides of Queen Anne Street, pitching and catching for more teams than Terry Mulholland (google it sports fans!). Let’s just say that when it comes to Mardi Gras, Hedda likes to see all quarters visited, French or otherwise!

And the au courant beverage this year? Why, Hurricanes, of course!

We have had two major events since we last chatted. We’ll dispense them in order from the most to least pleasant.

First, Hedda of course had a prime seat at the Democratic debate. All the Holly-royalty were front and center with the Senators, and Congress-people and all the other political rabble sequestered in the balcony. We never miss an opportunity to show them who really governs Tinsel Town! You might have caught a quick glimpse as the camera panned to Jason Alexander. There was Hedda seated in between Pierce Brosnan and Kathy Griffin. What a delightful evening! Charming, statuesque, Kennedy-esque, Sidney Poitier–esque, and a whole bunch more esques too numerable to list Barak Obama against our poised, stoic, bull-esque same-gender contender Hillary in what was billed as a battle for the ballot cage match. Needless to say, in Hollywood terms what was anticipated as a blockbuster slasher extravaganza quickly melted into a feel-good date movie. If it weren’t for the star studded company and the liberal flow of the gratis cocktails, Hedda might have been disappointed. But the gears were sufficiently lubricated to endure the syrupy Ebony and Ivory tone of the event with only one minor blip, when Hedda was quite graciously restrained from repeatedly yelling “Get a room!” by Ms. Griffin.

Hedda wishes to officially endorse Mr. Obama at this time. Although always down with the sisters and anxious for the first poonanny POTUS, Hedda feels that Hillary / Billary is retro before it’s time. One must wait a sufficient period before re-exploiting a trend. Just look at the disastrous premature attempt at repackaging Disco! We should have known that it couldn’t happen until a substitute for Quaaludes could be found! The Hill is just so last decade! It’s time for a young, virile, GQ stud to take the reigns! Barak, YOU rock!

On to more somber things: Brittany! Our poor little trailer park Cinderella has finally dumped her humpty! It all started with an OJ like barricading of her wee children in her plush home and engaging in a 6 hour stand off with the police and paparazzi. Reports have Brittany parading around in her underwear, flashing her v-jay and rambling incoherently. All the things that endear her to us! But it was locking the poor little angels in a tiny gymnasium sized room with nothing more than Nintendo, Play Station 3, a fully stocked pantry, a surround sound system with a 56 inch HD flat screen, two nannies and private chef that made the authorities realize something was very wrong.

Brittany was finally convinced to seek medical treatment and the family of course enlisted the best medical advice Hollywood has to offer, Doctor Phil. However Brittany, being a Doctor Laura fan, took exception to Dr. Phil’s method of treatment which required multiple guest appearances on his show during sweeps week and he was forthwith dispatched.

After returning home it was merely a matter of time before the tabloid eclipsing notoriety of her sister’s pregnancy pushed poor Brittany over the edge once more. In Grand Hollywood style she was escorted by 20 police cruisers, three fire trucks and two helicopters to the Stewart & Lynda Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital at UCLA. Reports are that Brittany is in a padded cell and despondent.

Of course she’s despondent! Brittany is one gal who has never needed padding of any kind in her life! The court has given guardianship to Brittany’s parents and they immediately issued a restraining order against her manager. No word on whether Doctor Phil has been restrained.

Hedda wishes Brittany the best and our heart goes out to all the paparazzi and tabloid journalists who feed on her misery like parasites and are now contemplating the enormous losses their industry will suffer if she’s actually cured.

Oh well, that’s show biz!

TTFN,

Hedda

Hedda’s halls are decked and bells are a jinglin’ in festive anticipation of the Holidays! (And a big crack of the nuts to Bill O’Reilly if he doesn’t like our one-size-fits-all holiday greeting!)

X-mas is upon us with all the gaiety and celebration a puritanical consumer based culture can muster. The streets are festooned with flashing, throbbing, pulsating lights and myriads of high tech dancing care bears and singing Santas and prancing reindeer and fully animatronic nativity scenes complete with a programmable baby Jesus. Oh, the sheer joy of waltzing these flamboyant boulevards on just the right mixture of Christmas cheers lends one to poetic waxing and a semi-epileptic rapture!

Lest we become overwhelmed with exuberance, remember to take the time to reflect upon the true meaning of Christmas. And by that Hedda means PRESENTS!

Hedda always carries a pocket spritzer of water to cool down her credit cards between swipes to avoid warpage. It’s a joyous time to stoke the furnaces of the economy and spend the just rewards of a year’s labor (and next year’s and the year’s after that!). Extravagance is the true measure of love and one must show the one’s you care about the relative dollar figure associated with that amount of caring. This is particularly true for the children. Face it. When you think back upon the warm memories of childhood Christmases, which relative do you remember with the most fondness, the one who gave you the Easy Bake Oven or the one who gave you a savings bond? Impress with excess! That’s Hedda’s motto!

I must tell you I was most pleasantly relieved to find out that the “WEEEE” my youngest nephew was so passionately requesting is in fact a video game and not an alternative life style choice! Not that Hedda frowns on sampling the cookies from one’s own kitchen. Au contraire! Hedda is never above a tasty pastry although the Yule log is her still her favorite! It’s just that we believe that one should come up a bit before coming out. There’s no use choosing “pitcher or catcher’ until your old enough to join the team!

Here’s wishing you a happy holiday season, be you Christian or Jew or Muslim or Mormon, or Wiccan or Hindu or Atheist. Whatever your flavor of delusion, let’s just all take a day to enjoy and appreciate.

Hedda leaves you now in anticipation of that most British of Christmas customs, the “Nog and Snog”.

The fire is glowing, the music is Cher.

The children are sleeping. The hour is late.

My stockings are flung by the sofa with dare.

Come dear Santa. Your chimney awaits!

Hope you all are fairing well on the flip side of All Hallows. Hedda had a splendid time as usual cavorting in her “Flirtatious Florence Nightingale” getup to the delight one and all. Many limp spirits were revived and that which thought dead did arise on a couple of occasions. Hedda learned a valuable lesson about choosing costume accessories wisely due to a rather uncomfortable episode involving tequila and an enema bottle, but all in all it was a joyous affair with dining and dancing, booze galore, tricks turned, and one quite memorable treat slipped into Hedda’s goody bag by an enchantingly statuesque Darth Vader. Let’s just say that for all the morsels of the evening, this one was more than a mouthful and tickled the old “sweet tooth” multiple times!

Well, back to work-a-day world and it seems the scariest monster of this season turns out to be Dog the Bounty Hunter. Who knew what evil lurked behind those sun glasses? If you’ve been in a coma, Dog, our celebrity belligerent of the month, was taped by his son in a phone conversation in which he was voicing his displeasure at his son’s choice of color in significant others. Well, let’s just let Mr. Dog speak for himself, shall we?

“I don't care if she's a Mexican, a whore or whatever. It's not because she's black, it's because we use the word ni**er sometimes here. I'm not gonna take a chance ever in life of losing everything I've worked for 30 years because some fucking ni**er heard us say ni**er and turned us in to the Enquirer magazine. Our career is over! I'm not taking that chance at all! Never in life! Never! Never! If Lyssa [Dog's daughter] was dating a ni**er, we would all say 'fuck you!' And you know that. If Lyssa brought a black guy home ya da da... it's not that they're black, it's none of that. “

My! How enlightened! Mr. Dog doesn’t care if she’s black, a Mexican or a whore! These three things are of equal value to him, obviously. But all would be welcome except for the fact that the whole family uses the pesky “N” word. You see, it’s not racism at all! It’s a vernacular issue!

And he can’t risk a thirty year career on the chance that an ebony Mexi-whore might tape them and sell the tape to the national Enquirer. Imagine his amusement when he found out that his son was taping him and sold the tape to the National Enquirer! I bet that’s one of those familial anecdotes that will be retold at Christmas and reunions to raised glasses and laughter at the witty boldness of the pesky little scamp!

But isn’t the dreaded “N” word inappropriate to describe folks who you obviously have admiration for?

“It's that we use the word ni**er. We don't mean you fucking scum ni**er without a soul. We don't mean that shit. But America would think we mean that.”

I see! Even though “la réputation mauvaise pour le noir” pours forth from the mouths of your kin like the waters over Niagara, you mean it in the nicest sense of the word! And America might misunderstand, because if there’s one word America doesn’t understand it’s THAT one. Americans hardly have a history of that word at all to draw from. How could they comprehend your good intentions?

Hedda’s head reels. When are we going to learn that we simply must stop putting the trailer dwellers on television? Rosanne made it hip and Jerry Springer made it a contact sport, but it’s time to institute a mullet ban, at least as the focus of a show. It’s fine to sprinkle a few in the background of a scene to add a Fellini-esque quality, but by all means, don’t let them speak!

TTFN,

Hedda