Vampyros lesbos
by Jon Worley

Like 42 millions others, I watched Ellen last week. And I got the toaster joke, though not the same way Ellen did.

I think it's nice that a mainstream network television series has its first "out" lesbian lead character. This happened on cable long ago, but the realms of HBO and Showtime are much "safer" for that sort of conduct.

Now that this hurdle has been jumped, I demand a series based on people who are just like me.

All you need is a man with unusual hair (long, mohawk, shaved in little patterns, whatever) who will understands what it means when another character says "Did you hear the Palace crack in Grosse Pointe Blank? Funniest joke I've heard in years."

I'll deconstruct this for those who have missed both the movie and the band. Palace is music act that consists of Will Oldham, who does all the songwriting and singing, and a revolving cast of side men and women. The joke in the movie is that the Palace show at Cobo Hall (a sizable auditorium in downtown Detroit in the same complex as the Red Wings hockey arena) has sold out, but you can get tickets by calling up this little station.

A few years back, Newsweek called Palace's sparse, harsh, folk-tinged musings "the future of country music". While a devoted following has certainly evolved, massive sales have not ensued. Indeed, I saw Palace a couple months ago at the Rubb in Tampa at a free midnight show. The night's headliner, a local band called the Hazies, had attracted some 500-600 fans. They left and Oldham and two other members took the stage. By the time Palace finished three songs, the crowd was down to 30 or so. And we appreciated the hell out of the concert.

But the joke is, you see, that Palace could never sell out Cobo Hall.

So what I want is a TV series built around a cool, young white guy with impeccable taste in music and movies. Discussions of Citizen Ruth and Waiting for Guffman interspersed with the pure thrill of opening up the new Fear Factory remixes and tossing the disc in the machine for a test spin.

Talk about your minority programming.

The fact of the matter is, though, that the idea of lesbians being real, live, regular people has been accepted for some time. Indeed, there is a certain lesbian chic flitting about, as documented in the (mostly bad) movie Bar Girls, where a character in a children's cartoon comes out, much to the delight of the program distributor's marketing department. Looking back, there was a bit of prescience in that whole scene.

So as happy as I am that Ellen Morgan can now finally get off properly (off camera, off course), I can't say I'll be watching much. I'd seen exactly three episodes of the show previously (one when it was known as These Friends of Mine), and my only real reaction was that Ellen was wearing way too much brown polyester, a fabric that makes just about everyone look horrible (and yet, I see it everywhere). It was kinda funny, which is much better than my general reaction to network fare, which is to holler at whoever is nearby, "You know why these shows suck? Guys from Harvard write them!".

Yes, I know, there's a tradition of erudite television humorists, going at least as far back as Monty Python, which had its pitched battles along the Cambridge/Oxford lines (pity American Terry Gilliam, who couldn't take part). And I don't think you'd have to be gay to write funny stuff for a lesbian to say. In fact, my guess is that Ellen Morgan will act just about the same way she did before she realized she was gay.

A lot like real life, actually.

Perhaps I might watch just one more episode.

Jon Worley shops for his cheap petroleum-derivative fabrics in Central Pennsylvania, the outlet mall Mecca of the eastern seaboard.

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