Don't Try this at Home, Part 3

I had two other restaurant experiences worthy of note. One afternoon, I visited a trendy midtown Manhattan restaurant and ordered the waitress to clear away the silverware so I could ostentatiously eat with my plastic knife and fork just like Jack Nicholson did in As Good As It Gets. Unlike Jack, who is reviled by the wait-staff because of his cutlery-based idiosyncrasy, nobody in the restaurant thought my behavior the least bit odd. Instead, the waitress treated me the way she would have treated any other customer, laboriously reciting a list of house specials I had no interest in hearing.

It was more of the same when I invited a friend to lunch at the Times Square Olive Garden and began singing "I Say a Little Prayer." If you remember back to what happens in My Best Friend's Wedding once Rupert Everett begins singing the abysmal Dionne Warwick hit to Julia Roberts while they are dining in what appears to be a Red Lobster, everyone at the table quickly joins in, and shortly after that everyone in the restaurant participates in a festive rendition of the sappy chestnut. This was not my experience. No one in the restaurant joined in when I began singing, "The moment I wake up, before I put on my makeup, I say a little prayer for you." Instead, they just tried to ignore me. So did my friend. There was absolutely no sense that everybody in the restaurant had been waiting 30 years for precisely the right moment to publicly display their affection for the long-forgotten vocal stylings of a woman now best known for her affiliation with telephonic psychicry. Everybody just kept eating their food. "You must do a lot of karaoke," said the waitress when she brought my lunch. She said this the way people used to say, "you must do a lot of coke." I also think she thought I was gay.

I'd like to close out this essay by briefly touching on the subject of homosexuality in the movies. In In & Out, Kevin Kline plays a high school teacher scheduled to be married just a few days after a former student (Matt Dillon) unexpectedly "outs" him. Although everyone, including Kine himself, has always assumed that he is straight, everyone, including Kline himself, now begins to suspect that he is gay. To settle this matter once and for all, Kline watches an instructional audio-tape which enables him to determine whether he is gay. The premise is simple: straight men do not, will not and cannot dance. Gay men do, will and can. According to the voice on the tape, "Men do not dance. They work. They drink. They have bad backs." But they do not get down and boogie, and they never, ever get funky. Thus, if the person taking the test could successfully listen to "I Will Survive" without getting the urge to shake all or part of his booty, it would prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was not gay.

The scene in the movie is actually very amusing. Kline, dad in manly clothing--untucked flannel shirt, blue jeans, work shoes-- stands in the middle of the room and tries to resist the infectious beat of the late-70s Gloria Gaynor hit. But gradually his fingers start a-tapping, his legs start a-thumping, his shoulders start a-swaying, and before you know it, he's a-bouncing right off the walls. The verdict is in: Kline is indisputably gay.

Here, once again, Hollywood had gotten things completely wrong. I have a wife, two kids, a Philadelphia Flyers poster, a Van Halen album and an almost pathological dislike of Barbra Streisand. So there's no way that I'm gay. But when I put on the flannel shirt, the jeans and the work shoes, and then cued up "I Will Survive," I immediately started dancing, just like Kevin Kline. I didn't dance well, and I didn't dance for long. But I danced. So putting a scene in a movie suggesting that men who dance are gay is like putting a scene in a movie suggesting that people who talk like John Travolta can learn Portuguese in 20 minutes.

The facts are in and the conclusion is unavoidable: once again, Hollywood is completely out to lunch. Professors at MIT are not consulting janitors for help with complex math problems (_Good Will Hunting_). And nobody in the Irish Republican Army has hair like Brad Pitt or ex-girlfriends named Gwyneth (_The Devil's Own_). When all is said and done, motion picture studios continue to hornswoggle suckers by filling their films with immensely entertaining scenes that bear no relationship to events taking place in the real world. For the third time since 1992, I have undertaken a systematic investigation of this phenomenon, and my take on things now is the same as it was then. Fagghedaboutit. Return to your humble farms and villages, attend to your families and 40 IK plans, and just dismiss from your mind whatever you saw up there on the silver screen. If you try to ride sidesaddle at full gallop the way Judi Dench does in Mrs. Brown, you'll be in traction for six months. If you try to switch your face with the face of your enemy the way John Travolta does in Face/Off, you will die. And if you're thinking about going into a lesbian bar to pick up a chick the way Ben Affleck does in Chasing Amy, you'd be better off leaping headfirst into the North Atlantic at two in the morning on a frigid night in April. You'll last longer, the reception will be warmer, and you'll definitely have a better chance of meeting the girl of your dreams.

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Joe Queenan wrote about Barbra Streisand's Center for Conservancy Studies for the May '98 issue of Movieline.

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