It all started when I was looking for some new blogs to read in my copious free time. (I think that's the first time I've used that phrase literally, without sarcasm.) I ended up at WowOWow, a site with a lot of famous and accomplished women who write about news, politics, relationships, health, etc. I bopped around the site sporadically for a couple days before I decided it wasn't very interesting. But on one visit, I decided to look at all the biographies of the women; some had vaguely recognizable names I couldn't quite place.
Jane Wagner was one of them and I read that she had helped Lily Tomlin develop the Edith Ann character for "Laugh-In" and that the "creative alliance between writer and actor has lasted to this day." Many other mentions of work with Tomlin through the rest of the bio.
So I go to Tomlin's bio, which is shorter than Wagner's and closes with "Lily lives in Los Angeles with her partner, writer Jane Wagner."
What the...? Lily Tomlin is a... lesbian?
I have no problem with this fact, except to say: how in the hell did I not know this? It isn't really that surprising, and while I'm not a huge fan, I do, you know, keep up with what's happening in Hollywood.
The strangest thing for me was the absence of what I call my unconscious "knowing." Like at my first job when a colleague told me that she suspected the director had a problem with alcohol and I thought "oh yeah, I sort of knew that." It wasn't a conscious thing, I hadn't even given it any thought until she mentioned it, but on some level I had sensed it. (And it wasn't like he was careening around the office fully loaded; it was not obvious.) It was banging around back there in the recesses of my brain until someone explicitly mentioned it. The "knowing" doesn't happen all the time, but often enough that I've grown used to it. I assume everyone has this on some level. The Lily Tomlin thing is exactly the kind of situation where the "knowing" would come into play, and I was surprised it didn't.
It did, however, come into play with two other Hollywood lesbians this past week. I saw a photo online of Sara Gilbert, little Darlene Connor from "
Roseanne," holding a baby. A baby? Hmmm... Off to trusty Google where I discovered she's in a lesbian relationship and has not one, but two children. The lesbian thing didn't surprise me, but how did I miss
two babies?
And then Heather Matarazzo, of "Welcome to the Dollhouse" fame--and she also had a recurring role in the final season of "Roseanne" I might add--got engaged to her girlfriend. At least I was fully up to speed on this one.
Switching over to babies, other shocking revelations have included: Salma Hayek was engaged? Pregnant? And had a child? Halle Berry was pregnant? And had a child?
Where have I been? I blame the fact that I no longer read People magazine. As far as I can tell, they do not carry it at the news agents here in England, can you believe it? I suppose it has to do with the fact that England is the epicenter of the trashiest tabloids in the entire world and on the British trashy tab scale, People magazine just doesn't rate shelf space. People still has the occasional microscopic smidgen of journalism within its pages, something which the British tabs abhor and have eliminated completely.
I refuse to succumb to the British tabs. I have some standards. I will just have to accept my reduced knowledge of Hollywood gossip.
