Dy’all ever watch Ruby? (Or as I call it: “Rube-Y”?) It’s a show on the Style network about a morbidly fat woman in Savannah, Ga., trying to get her weight down to the state of being just, say, merely fat. I like this show. It’s not so much about how to lose weight (though she has shed a hundred pounds — only about 125 to go and she’ll weigh what I do).

Ruby is a nicely-crafted character study of a somewhat dim, damaged American woman living in the South, trying to make sense of the world (and not getting too far, but as her people say, bless her heart. It’s a whole hour of bless her heart, every week. I’m sure her actual heart would have something to say about all this, and maybe one day, the arterial blockage will make way for it to be heard). As reality TV goes, it’s surprisingly gentle; almost like a novel in the making, about a woman who at last submits to the power of positive-Oprah-style living around her.

The other night, it became clear that Ruby had not been to the gynecologist in, well, maybe ever? Too embarrassing, she says. But Ruby’s weight-loss doctor demanded it. So Ruby went to what she calls … are you ready for it?

The Christmas Doctor.

Genteel Ruby is afraid of the word vagina. She calls it “Christmas,” because, she explains, “it’s supposed to be a surprise, a special gift.” In the waiting room, nervously fidgeting (call it “exercise” in her case) Ruby noticed a translucent plastic model of the reproductive system: Y’all, she said, it’s Christmas!

Pretty soon she was in the stirrups, and doc had a look up the chimney. (While I ate my dinner!) Here’s a clip if you want to watch too. (It’s a clip from The Dish, doesn’t show the actual visit.)

That’s what my mother (and maybe yours) called the television set — the idiot box — and begged and then nagged me to turn it off already, go outside, go play. Her point was, there’s a whole world out there! I’d get out there, barefoot in the grass, have a look around, and then wonder, what’s on?

Mom, I’m sorry to tell you that today I was made a television critic by the Washington Post. They asked me what I’d be most interested in doing next, and it seems like I’ve been in training for this since, well, since Mister Rogers first told me I was special. Here’s the deal, which went out in a Post memo today and got picked up by media blogs.

I do want to say something about Tom Shales, who has been the paper’s TV critic since 1977. The man’s a genius and made so much possible for TV and pop-culture critics today, and I am nervous about stepping into his place, and glad he’s sticking around with a weekly column and other contributions online and in print.

And since the subject of this blog is so often (or supposed to be) Christmas-related, let us just enjoy one of the things Tom did so well — the annual torching of the Kathie Lee Gifford Christmas special! Finally Kathie Lee admitted defeat. Take a moment and just savor this wassail:

What’s the difference between the 24-hour flu and a Kathie Lee Gifford Christmas special? Twenty-three hours. The actual title for this year’s exercise in false piety, faked sentiment and aerobic grinning was “Kathie Lee Gifford: Christmas Every Day,” an appalling prospect any way you look at it. This is the kind of television to be watched not from the couch, as it were, but while peering out from behind it and using it as a shield, as if perhaps an air raid or some other sort of massive bombing were in progress.

“Kathie Lee: Home for Christmas,” Kathie Lee Gifford’s second annual CBS Christmas special, is perhaps even worse than her first — a sickeningly saccharine vanity production that should really have been titled “O Come, Let Us Adore Me.” That ghastly Gifford grin, ear to ear and back again, seems steeped in self-esteem and almost blinding in its show biz phoniness.

Kathie Lee Gifford sings songs like she’s mad at them. What did they ever do to her? Maybe she was frightened by a song as a child. And by Christmas, too, because each year on television she wreaks a bit more revenge.

Somewhere out there is a beginning nursing class that would be so relieved to see this walk into the classroom for the introduction to finding-a-good-vein-for-a-blood-sample day. Have at it class!

Also, pictures like this must drive heroin dealers WILD.

(Photo by Flynet, via TMZ.)

This afternoon (Sunday), Michael and I drove up to Rockville, Md., to the home of my friend Linton Weeks and his wife, Jan Taylor Weeks. We had to park a block away. Dozens and dozens of people had come to their house.

On Thursday night, Linton and Jan’s two sons, Stone and Holt Weeks, were killed in a horrible car wreck on I-81 in Virginia. Stone was 24 and Holt was 20. They lived in Houston (Holt was going to be a junior at Rice University; Stone, a University of Delaware alum, worked as a researcher at Rice for the historian Douglas Brinkley). They were driving home to Maryland for a visit and to attend Brinkley’s book reading. They were almost there — maybe another hour away. A slowdown on the interstate. A tractor-trailer failed to stop and slammed into the Weeks brothers’ car. Their dog died too.

I’ve known Linton a long time. He was a writer in the Style section at The Post and part of my regular lunch posse. He’s one of the nicest, even-tempered and funniest people I’ve ever worked with, just a real gentle soul and a very clear writer. And such a great dad. Because I wasn’t close to my own father, who died in 2007, I’m always impressed by the men I know who seem to have really worked hard at being fathers, how part of it is luck and part of it is steadiness and determination.

Linton took the Post buyout offer last year, left Style, and was immediately scooped up by National Public Radio, where he’s a national correspondent for their web site. I was in the NPR building doing a show about two weeks ago, and when it was over, I stopped by his cubicle and we talked and laughed for a while. He walked me down to the lobby.

Sunday, Linton and Jan were in front of their house greeting all the people who came by. I hugged Linton and he remembered that we’d just seen each other at his office. He told me: I will never be that person again.

I wished I’d had something better to say than “I don’t know what to say.” Because I do know what to say, now, hours later: Linton, you just be here, be whatever person you can be, and I’ll take it.

Wakes are a powerful thing. Walking up to the house, you brace yourself for the unspeakable grief within — a couple has lost their only children.  And, yes, it’s there, but so is the love. My God, those people are loved.

The funeral is next Sunday at the National Cathedral. I feel sorry for whomever has to give the sermon. People of course want to know the impossible; why horrible things happen to good people. I suppose that part of the problem is that the world is mostly filled with good, nice people, ergo the odds. But we’re talking about the very worst thing and the very nicest people. That’s what I can’t get my head around.

Nice to know Robert Wilonsky at the Dallas Observer opens his mail!

I’ve been taking the movie cure lately — the only affordable answer to stress. Here are my capsule thoughts:

(500) Days of Summer: Call off the Stuff White People Like movie deal because here it is, finished and done. Almost scientifically twee, happy-sad picture about a doomed relationship. I thought Joseph Gordon-Levitt — all grows up — did a nice job of channeling that guy from your office who has no idea how sexy he is. (Like the one I live with.) Zooey Deschanel, on the other hand, encourages snacks to leave hand and hurtle toward movie screen. I admired the assembly of the movie — the herking and jerking of chronology. Hated, as usual, the easily avoidable lapses in set direction: Two people in their 20s, born in the 1980s, both have Super-8 home movie clips of their childhood? Bullshit. It’s just that the filmmaker knows Super-8 looks cooler. And that’s this movie’s problem: hipitude over verisimilitude. Watch in astonishment how Brooklyn-y downtown LA and Silverlake have become. (Again, prove it.)

And hey, millennials: what’s with all the tweeting birds, the branches, the pen-and-ink scribblings, the cute girl-women with baskets on their bicycles, the eco-chirpy spring pastels and sing-songy tra-la-la? You buy all this shit at Urban Outfitters? Why do you want to be hippies and technogeeks and the 1950s all in one? You want to be ’70s (Atari, old stereo components) until you want to text or play Wii? Everything’s your thing, I guess. It’s weak.

On that note, also saw Away We Go: See above, just change some names.

Moon: Michael just about fidgeted out of his skin during this one, and said it was too long, and he was right. Flawed but lovely (and depressing) anti-corporate rumination about a guy who works alone on a moon mining rig. Sam Rockwell’s pretty good in it, but paltry Sunday night audience was a-sigh. Marketed inappropriately for July 20 anniversary hubub. Let me just ask this: What does Hollywood have against space exploration? Does it _ever_ go well for the Earthlings? Forty-one years after 2001 and thirty years after Alien we are still getting movies where working in space is just a fuck-all. The computer (HAL, Mother, and I forget what Moon’s computer is named, but it’s voiced by Kevin Spacey) can’t be trusted, there’s no way back around to the airlock from here, people start seeing ghosts or succumb to some other cuckoo-causing virus, the whole thing’s gonna blow and we have no way to fix it before the oxygen is out, and nobody will shaddup and just DO WHAT RIPLEY SAYS, etc. I command Hollywood to make a space movie where things are fine, all systems go, etc.

The Hurt Locker: Blew my shit away, if I may use the vernacular. Now THIS is a movie about Gen Y, even if the lead character is Gen X. This is a movie about the 2000s. And it’s the best Iraq movie AND best action movie I’ve seen in a long time. Almost perfect, but be warned — if you’re like me, you will be sick with worry through the whole thing. But hang on. I totally ate up Jeremy Renner’s portrayal of Sgt. James. One tiny misstep by director Kathryn Bigelow and writer Mark Boal near the end, two scenes I would easily snip out, and then it would have been even more perfect, but it’s pretty perfect the way it is.

Photo: New York Times, July 22, 2009

Would your committee that picks the “Bookmarked” titles every month be interested in a book where the very first chapter is titled “Target”? A book that tenderly and curiously and humorously portrays the world of Target’s America? Also, I read here that you prefer unknown authors. Well, can do! (And he’s available for Black Friday signings!)

My friend Linda sent me a link to this Baltimore Sun report, another take on “Christmas in July” sales that are now overtaking a lot of stores. But wait, what’s this? A summer breeze of sanity from Williams-Sonoma/Pottery Barn!

>>But other retailers think it best to leave Christmas where it is. A spokesman for Williams-Sonoma, which also owns Pottery Barn, said that shoppers don’t want to see holiday merchandise too soon.
>>”We don’t roll out holiday merchandise until late in November,” said Leigh Oshirak, a spokeswoman for the company. “Customers like to go in order. They like to celebrate Halloween before Christmas.”

Believe it or not, I’m only slightly embarrassed to dig this up and show you: It’s been 20 years this summer since I was an intern at the Washington Post. This was the summer between my junior and senior years of college, the same summer I turned 21. In some ways, it feels like five minutes ago, and in some ways it feels like an eternity.

Will you humor me for a minute? It’s my blog, right? I’m feeling blue tonight, and tired, and a little old.

Yes, the hair: More Belinda Carlisle than Bono, right? The glasses don’t help either. And the only reason I’m not smiling is because it’s my first day at work and I am scared shitless.

I was assigned to be a reporter in the Style section. I’d worked on The Maroon, my college weekly, and for an alt-weekly in Oklahoma City before this. The Post was my first experience at a daily paper. It was the first time I’d been sent out to cover a story and had to rush back and file 800 words in an hour or so. I had never even been to Washington, DC, before this. I was a rube with a ponytail.

In 1989, the Post newsroom still somewhat closely resembled the All the President’s Men movie set from the ‘70s. It was crowded and noisy and thrilling. They sent me to cover all sorts of things – the Folklife festival, the plight of Chinese dissidents in Washington (during the Tiananmen protests), a party at the Library of Congress, a bowling tournament for kids. I rode around with an insurance adjuster in Bethesda for a day after one of those summer storms where all the trees fall over. I wrote a profile of Sinbad (remember Sinbad?) and also of Damian Einstein, the WHFS deejay who lost his job because of his stutter. I hung out in Rep. Mickey Leland’s office the day his staff learned he’d been killed in a plane crash.

Janet Duckworth was my editor that summer. When it was all over in late August and I went back to New Orleans for the fall semester, she told me to stay in touch, and I took her seriously, and pestered her for years to read my clips. We became good friends. Janet lives in L.A. now, and when I’m there I love to crash on her couch. We always eat fabulous meals and go to movies or just flake off and listen to records. (Janet has hipped me to so much music that I’d missed or ignored before: Carla Bley, Moondog, Harry Nilsson, Charlie Haden. In the summer of ’89 she lent me a cassette dub of the Pixies Surfer Rosa and Come On Pilgrim albums. I still think of her when I hear “Gigantic.”) She’s still one of the coolest people I’ve ever met, and one of the best editors anywhere – writers who’ve worked with her would agree with me.

The other interns and I used to get pretty smashed drinking pitchers at the Post Pub. According to Guild scale, we were paid $421 a week, which after taxes was $295, which I would cash at the Riggs Bank every Wednesday and then dash to my apartment to put it in my sock drawer, certain I would be mugged along the way. I lived in an apartment at 1525 Q St. NW, which I sublet from someone I knew from Loyola who shared it with Rene Sanchez, another Maroon alum a few years older than me who worked at the Post as a reporter. My half of the rent was $525 a month, which seemed astronomical. (I was paying $175 in New Orleans.) About a year ago, that very same apartment was listed for sale in the Sunday Post (asking $549,000!), and I dragged Michael with me to the open house. We stood in the empty bedroom I’d had two decades ago and admired the view from the windows. In ’89, I used to stare out the windows all the time (no Internet — bliss!), fascinated by all the apartments I could see into, the alleys and back decks. It was very time-warpy to stand there again.

That summer I explored a little bit of Washington, but with caution. I read City Paper and the Washington Blade religiously, cover-to-cover.

The crack wars were going on and people kept telling me where not to go – “never go east of 14^th Street,” for example (!!). It took all the courage I could muster to go by myself to the old 9:30 Club on F Street to see … I can’t remember now. Camper van Beethoven? They Might Be Giants? (I’ve forgotten at least some things.) I also got up the nerve to go to Tracks in Southeast D.C.

That $295 paycheck had to stretch pretty far. I let myself buy one cassette tape a week at the Kemp Mill in Dupont Circle: Doolittle by the Pixies came out that summer and so did Cosmic Thing by the B-52s. So did Prince’s Batman soundtrack. Every morning I blow-dried my hair to Like a Prayer – don’t make fun. I bought one magazine a week (usually Spy or Esquire or Movieline, sometimes Harper’s) and went to one matinee a week, usually at the Dupont 5. Any books I read that summer were probably borrowed from Rene or turned up on the freebie table at the newsroom. I read Raymond Carver that summer and one or two of those Quarterly anthologies edited by Gordon Lish.

It’s nice to discover, at age 21, the thing you most want to be: Washington Post Style section reporter. It took 10 years, but I got to come back to work at the Post in 1999.

Now it’s been another 10 years. I’ve had a depressing few weeks in the newsroom this summer and I’m as clueless as anyone about what the future holds for the newspaper — or for reporters everywhere. Being a Style writer is still a real gas some days, but obviously a lot has changed. One reason I dug around for this old press badge – it’s one of my few real keepsakes – is that we have two Style interns this summer, Kate Kilpatrick and Ruth McCann, who are both a little further along in life than I was as an intern. I wonder how it’s going for them. There’s been so much change in our department in the last few weeks and I worry that we haven’t given them enough attention and challenging story assignments. I hope they’re having fun. It’s not worth doing if it’s not fun.

I used to think it would be great if I could go back in time and tell the Hank Stuever in this press badge picture that life is going to work out just fine. He worried all the time, about everything.

But now I wonder if that Hank shouldn’t come visit me here and now, and give me the same sort of boost.

Deadline, that is. This morning, an editor at the Post’s Sunday magazine was supposed to have a lovely, clean draft of a 4,000-word article by me, from me, in her basket. I’m only about half done. Blog’s going to have drift. Keep trying to clone myself so I can do my job _and_ everything else. The results of the clone experiments are quite horrible and always die. I keep them in formaldehyde jars in the lab. They taunt me.