With Sugar Cane. (Or Is He?)

Hey, it looks like Vanessa Williams is coming on the show in a few days. Stay tuned for deets!

Meanwhile: Well.  Slap my ass and call me Sally. Here I was thinking I have completely fallen out of lust for Cane, what with him having become so sugary with this whole horrific idea that he and Lily are a great couple marriage to Lily, when doesn’t he say his vows with the “model”, and then have a quick flashback to that phone call we ALL remember he made ages ago where he revealed he was clearly up to no good?

TURNS OUT HE WAS TALKING TO PHILLIP! The dead one! No, the second dead one! From drunk driving.  No, the dead one from second drunk driving! Who turned out not to be Jill’s son, but Cane was.  

Or is he?  Suddenly Sugar Cane just got a lot tastier.

Meanwhile across town, just as I’m thinking to myself how WELL Adam is looking, how robust, how well- worked out he appeares, doesn’t everyone at The Genoa City Prison For Wayward Bastard Children the Newman Ranch start telling him the exact opposite!  Like, Ethiopia, the way they’re carrying on.  

And I guess they know better than me, sitting at home, ’cause suddenly he’s lost enough weight to slip the Martha Stewart ankle bracelet (a popular blue light special item at K-Mart) off and go anywhere he wants, and it’s here we learn he is behind the motiveless torturing of Ashley, who, BTW, everyone has quickly dismissed as nuts without much prompting, so plan working!  

We also learn Adam isn’t really blind, but, instead, is injecting something into his eyes which we don’t particularly enjoy watching ’cause suddenly we want to call our dealer only don’t have that kind of time in our life anymore.

Jill, Gloria and Jeffrey learn they have lost all their money thanks to Victor Newman … Paul proposes another round of VD marriage to Nikki … Sharon continues to behave like a skittish cat her descent into madness, clinging to Tree Nick for dear life as Phyllis tries to pry her fingers off her husband with everything she’s got.  Alas, Mary Jane Benson Patti Williams isn’t helping much, hellbent on keeping Sharon with Nick so she stands a chance at Jack …  Nina comes to town to propose writing a screenplay version of Katherine’s memoirs, as all of Hollywood is apparently very interested. “Angelina Jolie is dying to play you!” Nina tells the duchess … Daniel becomes an art spy for the FBI …

And The Last Word goes to … A phone call for Ashley, courtesy of Adam’s mad braille computer skills! “This is Sabrina.   Death is coming.  This is Sabrina.  Alone.  It is a cruel death.  Terrifying.  Next.  It is hopeless. There is no escape.  Next.”

Soaps.com's Christine Fix And I Rushed To Jack's Side On The Weekend To Convince Him Not To Get Back Together With Bimbo.

Child!  What a week in Genoa City, where things continue to get curiouser and curiouser.  Jill, devastated by the revelation that Kay is not her mother, pours salt on her own wound by moving back into the mansion.  She tries to spoil a dinner Kay is having with the Wisconsin governor, whom Kay is wining and dining in order to obtain Kevin’s inevitable pardon for that whole awful chipmunk storyline robbing banks while under psychotic duress.  However, the new Mr. C, Murphy, wearing a hat covered in wobbly fishing lures, holds up the evening’s main course: two giant Wisconsin catfish, the governor’s fave.  Jill runs from the room, wishing she had quit the show after all screaming …

The wedding issue of Restless Style continues to come together in a way that would make Anna Wintour shit her pants laughing proud.  Chloe gets the great idea to photograph Cane and Lily at their orange-hued home for the magazine.  ”The world cannot get enough of the people in this city!” she declares.  A photoshoot ensues.

Our new favourite character (after Phyllis), Patti Williams Mary Jane Benson, skulks after Jack under the guise of being a “PR virtuoso”, but nearly cracks her own head open with rage whenever she sees Sharon toying with the Jabot exec.  Which is often, as Jack has decided the three-headed hydra baby within her is his (BAD idea) and that they should therefore get together again.  Sharon (BAD idea) concurs.

Speaking of which, as expected, no one who knows Sharon has barebacked three different guys so far this spring – one of whom is Billy, who only this week was described by Chloe as having “slept with countless women” – has made the suggestion: “AIDS test?”, probably because as we all know, straight people don’t get AIDS that’s not the direction the writers wish to go.  But we wonder if this would be the case if Raf, the only gay in the village, suddenly had such an active sex life as we all know, AIDS is about the gays, but we digress.

Let’s see, who else is worth talking about?  Oh!  We’re enjoying the storyline of the spooky Newman ranch, where someone is messing with Ashley’s mind, planting evidence that the ghost of Sabrina is alive and well, if only via memerobillia.  Could it be Estella, the employee who we’re told has worked there for years and never liked Ashley even though we’ve never seen her in our decades of watching the show?  Or is it Adam, who surely is faking his blindness.  It seems like he’s the likely suspect, the catch is – how could he mastermind all this given he’s got a Martha Stewart accessory  ankle bracelet monitoring his every move?

Oh, and we dug the face cream civil suit trial of Gloria, and the monologues on the witness stand pitting her and Ashley against one another, and we dug that Gloria lost and will now have to pay something back. Oh, and Cassie made an appearance in a dream of Sharon’s and it’s nice to see that even in heaven puberty happens her. Oh, and Heather thought it was a smart move to traipse around the house of the man she’s been trying to put behind bars since she came on the show in nothing but his son’s white shirt, but she’s not so brazen when that same man comes into Adam’s room where they have been making ugly love, and so hides in a closet where we wish she’d stay.  Oh, and Nick Tree went back to Newman to work for his father. 

And The Last Word goes to … Ashley! “Gloria you are nothing but a gold-digging narsissitic delusional bitch who manages to kill every man she’s ever been married to!”

Would You Take A Look At The Shiteous Rush Job Done On Decorating The Bannister For Billionaire Katherine Chancellor's Wedding!!!

First things, first!  I’m excited about today’s show!  A few weeks ago I got the nicest letter from a listener named Deborah, who loves the show. She wrote:

“… The other reason I like you is my son has been called “GAY”and “FAT” since he was 4 years old. And not in a good way gay or fat. He’s had a really really hard time but in the last two years – he’s 13 now – 5′ 11″ and size 13 shoe – he’s finally feeling okay about himself. He is at an alternative art school and felt comfortable enough to come out last year. He did say to me this year he likes some grade 7 girls so he may not be gay and I keep telling him it’s okay, he may know, he may not……….and it doesn’t matter when you are an adult. He’s getting more and more confident as time goes on and whatever he figures out he is I’m cool with it and I want him to be cool with it! So thank you! You help him and you help me…………”

We’ve been chatting back and forth since, because her son and his friend were recently part of a school presentation on heroes and heroines, with each lad picking someone and speaking about them. Harvey Milk and local icon Reverend Brent Hawkes were the two heroes these guys chose and today they are coming to the studio today to tell us why.  How great is that that kids are choosing queers as their heroes?

So this morning I’m out for a run through the Rosedale ravine with my dog, Ella, when we suddenly get stopped by police and yellow tape. Dead body.  

Meanwhile, in Genoa City, where such happenings are all part of a day, there seems to be a new hairstylist in town.  Tyra now sports a chocolate brown weave, and Mackenzie has a mane full of extensions.  (Sorry girls, it’ll take more than fake hair to like you!).  Early in the week at Restless Style, the international magazine that only covers Genoa City, it is decided a wedding issue is next. By Friday there is a mock-up. How, we’re not sure, as early in the week Phyllis is arrested for vandalizing Sharon’s room.  But by Friday she is out on the streets and on deadline and she and Nick are celebrating their anniversary. Phyllis buys Nick (whom we think we’ll start calling Tree) bed sheets with a 1500 thread-count.  ”Nice, but you still don’t have Sharon’s vagine,” he tells her. Tree has made for Phylllis a big Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card and gets her some hospital bed type of bouquet (not making any of this up, no need to these days!) …  

Hot rumour!  We have been guessing that Mary Jane Benson is really Mary Jo Mason BUT now we change our bet (based on Christine Fix from Soaps.com’s inner knowledge) to …

… Patti Williams!  I know!  Aaack!  Remember she shot Jack (played by the late Terry Lester at the time) and left town all nutty?  Seems the writers could be playing with our heads and it was just this Friday when Mary Jane ran into (her brother?) Paul at Katherine’s wedding to Murphy and then went a little … odd … upon seeing him.  But not as odd as the final scene that day, where Jill, drunk out of her skull, shows up at the Chancellor Estate to bulldoze the wedding, only to be stopped by yet ANOTHER blast from the past: Nina!

Yes!  Nina is back!  Patti?  Nina?  I feel like a teen again!  Oh, and Sharon is preggers.  Whose the baby daddy?  Jack? His brother Billy?  Tree?  (Now go get an AIDS test while you’re at it, woman!  A gay man would certainly be forced to if he’d been unsafe with three guys in a row!).  Lastly, Ashley celebrates her birthday with Victor, putting on a dress she finds laid out for her on her bed, going down to show it off for the billionaire beau who presumably put it there.  However, it turns out it’s a replica of the dress Sabrina wore when she died.  Hate it when that happens. Victor goes ballistic and we wonder who it is that is messing with Ash: Estella?  ”Blind” Adam?  What we really are curious about is why Ashley is being messed with and not going: “Who the fuck is messing with me?” instead of all fragile like a china doll, automatically assuming she’s losing her mind.  But we believe, we believe …

And The Last Word goes to … Phyllis!  ”A get-out-of-jail-free card.  I guess because I was arrested. Right?”

The Chipmunk And The Loon.

Would you believe me if I told you that on the splendid, gorgeous, magnificent sunny Saturday Toronto just saw that I actually ran into someone who COMPLAINED IT WAS TOO HOT?  

Meanwhile, in Genoa City, it’s just as unbelievable, as we are served more of the silver chipmunk and cringe.

And then, as a side dish, we are also served the twist that new character Raf, the lawyer, whose aunt is Estella, the Newman staffer with the hate-on for Ashley, is a … ‘mo!  

No build-up, no drama, it was just Lily trying to fix Raf up with Colleen, with Raf taking a pass because “I’m gay.”  Well.  Knock me down with a feather.  In my decades of watching this show, never has there been a queer character, and here we have one.  Here’s hoping this gets explored properly – if we have to endure the artificial sweetner that is Lily and Cane, please let’s see some guys French kissing.

Speaking of the Splenda couple, Lily buys Cane a Yorkshire terrier and starts carrying it around herself everywhere she goes.  You can almost hear the writers sitting around the table asking, “What can we do to make this bitch more interesting?”  

“Leave town” would have been my answer, but no, it was to carry a small dog around, including into Jimmy’s the dive bar that Cane has suddenly up and bought.  Or dive “baah”, as Cane would say.  

On the plus side, it seems Mary Jo Mason Mary Jane Benson is starting to show her true colours, losing her mind and composure a bit when she spies Jack hugging Steal-It Sharon in public.  She blames her reaction on her ‘concern’ that Jack is spoiling her PR efforts by being seen with the klepto, but we smell looney and love it.

An aside:  Would it be possible for Y&R directors to remind the actors that when they appear at the coffee shop Crimson Lights carrying a coffee that coffee has some weight to it and is generally piping hot?  The way these empty paper prop cups get dramatically waved around by the denizens of Genoa City – in real life by now they’d all be suffering from third degree burns on their faces.  Thank you.

This past week also saw Adam’s birthday arrive.  A motley crue attend the dull event (you can almost see Raf thinking as he arrives: ‘Why don’t straight people ever play music at parties?’), including Heather, the woman who has tried to put Victor behind bars twice and failed, wrong both times.  Just as Paul Williams is the world’s worst detective, his daughter Heather is the world’s worst D.A., and both clearly take a certain pride in that.  Currently she is hellbent on putting Kevin away, and we sigh during all her scenes and stare at her mole, wondering what kind of scar it would leave if she just had a cosmetic surgeon slice it off.

Ashley goes for a walk in the woods – as 50-something women who find themselves miraculously pregnant and told to take it very easy are wont to do – and hears a baby crying from somewhere inside all the plastic trees.  

Or is it the chipmunk?

And The Last Word goes to … Ashley!  ”I’m not crazy!”

One For The Ladies!

Hey, hope your Easter was all that, Bunny!  Today on the show, Bebe Zahara Benet, the winner of RuPaul’s Drag Race joins us to discuss!

Meanwhile in Genoa City, another week, another crash course in the willing suspension of disbelief. Firstly, some housekeeping. Watch for Amelia Heinle (Victoria) to play a plastic-surgery victim on CSI: Miami soon.  She went for the audition as an acting exercise only and ended up with the part. Compliment?  Insult? You decide! Secondly, we remain fascinated by the new Mac, played by Clementine Ford. We wonder: Why ‘Clementine’ and not ‘Tangerine’? We marvel at how very much she looks like her ‘ma, Cybil Sheppard. And then comes the news that Clem has separated from her real-life husband of four years, Chad Todhunter, coming out as a lesbian. What’s funny about the reporting of this, is that pics used to accompany various articles are of … Cybil.  The drama is indeed always on!

If only Mac were this interesting.  But that doesn’t stop Billy from going all McMelty, nor does it stop Chloe and Esther from being overly concerned when Mac makes the unsurprising choice to stay in GC instead of heading to Darfur to continue to save the world. Everytime Billy so much as looks Mac’s way, Chloe hoists Cordelia up into the air.  ”I liked it better when you were screwing Sharon!” she hisses, tossing the kidlet his way like a football.  ”And we’re out of formula!”

Speaking of which, Sharon inspires a bone in Nick that just won’t go down, so he’s out on the prowl like a meth head trolling dark alleys, self-righteous all the while when it comes to Phyllis‘ understandable fury. Only in GC could the two dumbest, flatest, shallowest characters inspire other more dynamic ones – who would normally never have anything to do with such oafs in real life – to crumble like wicked witches freshly doused with water.

And only in GC would Amber still wear her goddamn beret day after day after day while being caught up in the who-cares Kevin drama (note the continuing deliberate absence of any detail from this story, truly not worth re-telling), never taking it off to sleep, or even just to heartily scratch a matted knot of blonde weave beneath it. Fortunately, the ‘on the lam’ part of this story comes to an enthralling climax as Gloria descends James Bond-style in a helicopter to rescue her sons from certain doom.  It’s asinine, but we adore Glo’s new red hair colour blowing in the wind of the helicopter blades …

Cane continues to push ahead with his custody suit, and we find this to be an excellent time for a pee break, while Neil throws a spanner in the works of his adoption of that kid no one would really want to adopt by telling a distraught Karen that he not only kissed Tyra once, but that he also auditioned to become America’s Next Top Model he had sex with her, too.  ”Why don’t you and Nick get together as a couple, you’re perfect for one another!” Karen weeps …

Finally, we love Mary Jane, if for no other reason than her wonderful hair and bone structure …

And The Last Word goes to … Victoria!  ”Adam, I wanted to tell you I’m sorry about your eyes.”

Why, Hello! May I Move In, Too?

 

What a wonderful weekend!  Had one of those gorgeous oxygen facials I highly recommend Saturday, and then that evening it was off to The Four Seasons in Yorkville for An Evening With Diahann Carroll.  Lots of local luminaries: Michael King and his beau, David, Salah Bachir, Mathieu Chantelois, Tracey Sandilands, Mark Singh, John Kenyon, Valerie Pringle and hub, Rolyn Chambers, David Walberg, Jann Coppen, Shinan Govani … long list.  Billy Newton-Davis and John Alcorn and Lorraine Segato opened the night through dinner, and then Diahann Carroll took over.

Holy. Shit.  True star, and I want to be like that in my ’70’s.  Sold it from the first note, got the room’s full focus, was sardonic and irreverant and jaw-droppingly amazing.  Her set was over far too soon, then she was gone. Sometimes life hands you the chance to see someone truly remarkable perform, and you’re grateful to have had the opportunity.  This was one of those nights.  My first new column with Xtra! comes out Thursday and it’s all about Carroll.

Hey, it’s spring cleaning time on the show today!  We’ve got an expert coming in to talk about how to attack the mess inside, and our gardening expert Edgar Friars is coming by too to talk about how to attack the mess outside.  Tune!

Meanwhile in Genoa City, it’s a short week thanks to the CFL NHL MLB some “important” sport activity taking over CBS.  We’re grateful, as the Katherine storyline shows no signs of ending.  Jill STILL doesn’t believe it’s Katherine (aaaaaaack!), the DNA tests say she’s not Katherine (meaning she’s not really Jill’s mother, we suspect!), and so Katherine once again takes off … 

So does Amber, in search of Kevin. Oh, sure, cops can’t find him, even when he casually exits banks wearing a huge Chipmunk head, alarms sounding everywhere, but we know Amber will.  We especially know as Christine Fix from Soaps.com told us Kevin will make Amber rob a bank with him at gunpoint this week. Fun!  

Clint, meanwhile, is dead, dead, dead, of a heart attack, it seems.  Kevin has dragged him into the closet he was being locked in, which must start to stink very soon, we think.  But then, do chipmunks mind stink?  

Phyllis spies Billy going into Sharon’s room and tries to get Nick there in time to catch the fun, but Nick arrives too late.  Sharon goes ballistic on Phyllis, but then has a full on breakdown in front of her arch enemy, stealing an ugly little knick-knack on her way out the door.  It doesn’t go unnoticed by our redheaded friend, who licks her lips it’s all so delishus.

Sharon decides to move back into the Abbott mansion with Jack, which is amazing, because Chloe decides to move back into the mansion with Billy.  ”This will make is so easy to bone my sister-in-law,” Billy thinks when he realizes the set up.  

Victor arranges for his son to be released from prison, due to the fact he’s now got Hopeitis and can’t see a damn thing.  Orders the judge: “Mr. Newman, your son is now serving the rest of his sentence as your responsibility.”  ”That’s fine,” mumbles the billionaire.  ”Years ago I locked up my ex-wife’s lover in a dungeon on the ranch.  I am very well-versed on imprisonment.  We’ll do full Martha Stewart; put an ankle bracelet on him!”

Meanwhile, Victor’s new agent in deception, Mary Jane Benson, meets with Jack as step one of Their Plan. “You have an amazing face for television,” Jack tells her.  ”All angles.  By the way, did you know I once knew a Mary Jo Mason?”

And The Last Word goes to … Sharon! “I’ve just been in this strange place lately.  I’ve been in a fog.  I’m waiting for the fog to lift and I can’t feel my feet on the ground!” 

Bonus Last Word goes to … Phyllis!  ”I guess you can’t feel the air under your feet, but you can feel the mattress under your back.”