So
there I was wearing nothing but Nicole Kidman's lips and Tom
Cruise's jealous gaze, watching the repeats of Muppets Tonight
when something occurred to me. The first five guests in the
series were Michelle Pfeiffer, Cindy Crawford, Sandra Bullock,
Heather Locklear and Paula Abdul. Am I wrong in sensing a theme
here? How to explain it? What could be the link between all these
attractive women? Hmmm... What do people know about the people
behind the Muppets? Jim Henson- dead. Frank Oz - Yoda. Not
wanting to speak ill of the dead unless there's humour, cash,
money, women, moolah, or just a general sense of well-being, our
evil efforts must concentrate on Frank Oz. Star Wars sucks (but
let's be objective here). Yoda is the stereotypical epitome of a
convicted sex offender. Draw the connecting lines yourself; it's
not hard... yet. (Sorry. Easy jokes must be done sometimes, even
if they aren't funny). Fiction and reality are one and the same,
as I was saying to my platonic female friend Joan Cusack - or a
non-Star Wars Carrie Fisher. Therefore we can draw the safe, and
hideously libellous, assumption that Frank Oz is a sordid little
pervert. Not wanting to besmirch Frank Oz's good name by
insinuating he likes to look up women's skirts, the fact remains
that the Muppets are operated from below. All these
puppeteers can while away the hot summer's days gazing longingly
up the skirts of artificial Hollywood women. I like besmirching.
I'll try doing more of it I think.
Which
is all well and good, but is it art? Or more importantly, is that
so wrong? If Frank Oz, I, or any other depraved pervert wants to
create a multi-million pound industry around balls of fluff just
to be able to look at famous balls of fluff, shouldn't our
entrepreneurial spirit be applauded? Especially in a world where
people can get paid £1000 an hour for selling hamburgers (New
York Times 12/04/2000 p.4) and no-one bats an eyelid, except for
the mistrusting fools who claim that a) it never happened and b)
the New York Times never printed a story like that. Oh and c)
Frank Oz isn't really a pervert and he only ever looked up one
skirt while Muppeting, and she was asking for it anyway. I don't
really know what my point is. Maybe it is ok to look up people's
skirts against their will, as long as they don't find out; maybe
it's not weird to have three or four glass coffee tables in every
room for... y'know. I'm gonna have to bow to the superior
knowledge of the Muppets. As always. Fozzy tells me what to do.
Wokka wokka.
Oooh
back to the main bit again. Muppets. Muppets. Muppets. Right.
Um... Muppets. What to say? Ummm.. Old stuff better than the new
stuff - cept for Nine Inch Snails. Animal a hero and spiritual
inspiration to us all. Big people that watch it are probably
hideously immature and in a state of arrested development. Umm...
all sorts to say about the Muppets. None of it interesting. None
of it anywhere as funny as calling Frank Oz a pervert. (Which of
course he's not... well, he might be... but to the best of my
knowledge he's not. I mean, I've never met him, so I don't really
know if he is or not. You can look at him and he looks like a
pervert, but what does a pervert look like? I know many perverts
who look normal, and many normal-looking people who are perverts.
Which of course is all lies. I know no-one. And the people I do
know look like perverts and are perverts. Many of them look a lot
like Frank Oz. No no no, I'm talking about a completely different
Frank Oz, who coincidentally lived an identical life to the one
who might get pissed off that I'm calling him a sex offender and
steal my tickets to La Boheme. It's an opera). As you may well be
able to tell, I started drinking after the first paragraph. It's
the England Romania match tonight and the idea of an alcoholic
coma is rather attractive. Unless I die as a result of an
unbelievably deep paper cut, I'll be back next time with
something a lot lot better. Every time I say that it gets worse
for a couple of things, then good shit happens again. You've
gotta take the good with the bad, much like a rotten orange.