In praise of Carrie Fisher

I've always admired unusual people and by unusual I mean truly, deeply bizarre, the kind of folks who talk without any sort of verbal inhibitor, rendering them deeply funny and truly honest in the process. That's why, to me, Carrie Fisher just keeps getting more and more superb with each passing year. She reminds me of a classier Mae West or a Dorothy Parker without the cruelty and so much spilled Vermouth.

Currently, she's touring the U.S. with a new one-woman stage show called "Wishful Drinking" in which she talks about her life, her career, "Star Wars," and the mental health challenges she's faced. As a result, she's doing a lot of press and with each interview I read, my girl crush grows. To wit, here's what she has to say about her interaction with the audience during "Wishful Drinking" (from a Q&A in The Washington Post):

The first row gets a lot of action from me. And someone comes up on the stage to help me with a life-size Princess Leia sex doll. I tell them that it's handy, because if someone in the audience tells me to go (expletive) myself, I can take it home and give it a whirl. But in case the doll is heterosexual, I ask for a male volunteer.

And in response to what she hopes to do next:

There's a book of the show, and I owe another book to my publisher, Simon and Shuster. I'm doing a horror film coming up [a remake of The House on Sorority Row], just because I've never been killed on screen before. I was nominated for an Emmy for 30 Rock, that's a first for me. I do a lot of things -- some more rewriting of screenplays, though that has evolved into a weird gig. I try to be a Renaissance chick as best I can. So I can afford the shopping.

She also did a recent interview with USA Today. Here's what she says about winning awards:

Q: To what do you owe this overdue recognition?
A: I have no idea, having not seen the other performances. I don't watch much TV except 30 Rock. It's incredibly well written, and those are the only kinds of parts to play.

Q: You have had trophy opportunities, including a BAFTA nomination for the Postcards From the Edge script
A: I don't really pay attention. I don't have a good memory anymore. I know I got a Los Angeles Pen Award for Postcards the novel, and I get a lot of awards for being mentally ill. It's a lovely combo.

As you can see, there's no real point to this post of mine today except to give you as much evidence as possible to back my unflagging belief that Carrie Fisher should be a hero to women everywhere. How can you not love a woman who runs an ad like this to promote her show? And yes, I totally forgive the cue card reading:

And finally, I leave you with her words from a Baltimore Sun review of her show:

"If my life weren't funny, it would just be true...and that would be unacceptable."

Can I get an amen?

Ten reasons to be thankful for Star Wars

Thanks to Star Wars, we got a million sci-fi rip-offs, some of which were good and some of which were Flash Gordon.

Thanks to Star Wars, we’ve all secretly tried to use the Jedi Mind Trick to get out of traffic tickets and move coffee mugs using the Force. I swear I made a pen wobble once.

Thanks to Star Wars, America wins the best missile defense name contest, beating out France’s Toulouse-Loutrec Missile Defense System (where the rockets, you know, just fall short) and Canada’s Maurice “The Rocket” Richard Defense System (where the rockets just go to Tim Horton’s and order a small coffee).

Thanks to Star Wars, writers everywhere learned that even if Steven Spielberg is your best friend and you shed thousand dollar bills the way other humans shed dead skin cells, God in the form of Roger Ebert will still punish you for writing a character like Jar Jar Binks.

Thanks to Star Wars, Joseph Campbell sold a few million more books and earned ten solid years of nerd fame (“Bill Moyers loves me!”) before going to the Great Archetypal Beyond.

Thanks to Star Wars, millions of Americans have a tight-pant-wearing Harrison Ford and a metal-bikini-wearing Carrie Fisher to thank for jumpstarting their collective puberties.

Thanks to Star Wars, the world has lots and lots of action figures – all of which eventually get lit on fire by your brother.

Thanks to Star Wars, children everywhere have spent the last 30 years making whooshing noises and clubbing each other with brightly colored sticks. We call these lightsaber battles – and HMOs love them!

Thanks to Star Wars, asthmatics are no longer shunned but rather celebrated for their spot-on Darth Vader impressions. Inhalers be damned.

And finally, thanks to Star Wars, we learned what it meant to fall deeply, madly in love with a movie.

Wednesday tid-bits

Here are a few things to tide you over while you wait for the season finale of Lost tonight and polish up what to say in case Charlie finally, FINALLY, gets offed. (Personally, I’m trying to decide between, “Don’t let the Shire door hit your ass on the way out” and “Better you than Vincent.”)

* Today in The Washington Post, Tom Shales gives a number of reasons why I should probably just erase the new Mark Burnett/Steven Spielberg-produced reality show “On the Lot” from my Tivo, including the sad fact that most of last night’s fledgling directors couldn’t tell a story to save their lives and seemed clueless about that pesky three-act structure thing. Sadder still is the fact that the always cynical and always wonderful Carrie Fisher didn’t get even more snark time.

* This past Friday, a bunch of doctors and science types got together to decide if Abraham Lincoln could have survived his gunshot wound if it had happened in 2007 instead of 1865. The answer? Yes. He just wouldn’t have been writing any more Gettysburg Addresses. Or talking. Or, you know, moving much. Still, they think he could have finished his second term. So I guess our presidential expectations have diminished just a wee bit over the last century and a half, eh?

* And finally some good news. Maybe. The Addams Family is being turned into a Broadway musical, slated to open in the 2009-2010 season. Written by Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice, who penned the 2006 Tony winner “Jersey Boys,” the show will include Gomez, Morticia, Pugsley, Wednesday and the rest of the gang. I’m looking forward to seeing who plays Thing because eventually, one day, I'd like to hear this conversation: “Really? You were on Broadway? What did you play?” “A disembodied hand.” "Did Andrew Lloyd Weber put you up to this?"

Also, how does a disembodied hand sing? Should I just not worry about it?