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BEAUTY SHOP TALKby
Vicki Charmaine Bunch
The word gullible is not in the dictionary. Neither is duh. That's why I'm such a sucker for anything with both an x and a y chromosome.
Girls I know about. I know that no matter how much bubble gum and blue eye shadow you buy them, no matter how many Barbie dolls and Gucci handbags are strewn across the bedroom floor, no matter how many pints of blood you sell to buy them the latest video games, they will turn on you and pelt you with Beanie Babies. I've raised two hellcats. I know every trick in the book.
Males are another matter. A boy's so cute and innocent when he bats those big brown eyes. He didn't say "bitch" he said "itch" and you run for the calamine lotion. He didn't mean to shoot holes in the neighbor's tractor-trailer rig. The only reason he took that car was so he could drive a sick classmate to the doctor.
Why pick on boys like that?
Speaking of "bad boys," everybody's talking about those two movies with John Travolta that are on at the theater. He plays a lovable rogue in both of them. He's so cute with all that poofed up hair, you can't help but adore him no matter what he does. My girlfriends and I saw Grease and Primary Colors Friday night, one right after another.
I thought I would faint from the irony. Toward the end of Grease, Eve Arden, addressing the graduating seniors, says, "Among you young men may be a Joe DiMaggio, a President Eisenhower, or even a Vice-President Nixon." I bet she never dreamed that twenty years later John Travolta would be President Clinton.
But even then, Travolta had what it takes to become president.
Remember Harrison Ford's role as mystery drag racer Bob Falfa in American Graffiti? The guy who wipes-out in his bad ass Chevy with the skull hanging from the rear view mirror? Who would have dreamed Ford would come back as commander-in-chief of Air Force One? Falfa and Travolta's Danny embody the characteristics Americans drool over. They're rebels. They're cool. They're bad.
The world idolizes bad boys on screen as well as off and reviles the goody-two-shoes guys. That's why Pat Boone finally had his nipples pierced. If only archetypal loner James Dean had lived--think of the heads of state he could have played. Slobodan Milosevic. Idi Amin. Gerald Ford.
Maybe someday we'll see Johnny Depp, rockabilly delinquent in John Waters' Cry Baby, playing Newt Gingrich. Or Sean Penn cast as H. Ross Perot.
An angry, brooding, switchblade-toting Richard Nixon is a thousand times more interesting than a bland, preppy square like George Bush. They'll never make a movie about Bush, but if they did, who would play him? The guy who played Niedermeyer in Animal House? Charleton Heston? Jerry Mathers?
Travolta's gluttonous, adulterous rascal is somebody we relate to--he's Cousin Elvis from Marble Falls. He works at the bait shop. He plays steel guitar in a honky tonk band. He's not as boring as the other kinfolks. Only in America can a white trash boy rise from juvenile delinquent to President. From drag racer to leader of the free world.
It's okay for girls to be like Olivia Newton-John's Sandy, branded "too pure to be pink" by hickey-covered bad girl Rizzo. But who wants a guy who's too chicken to rumble?