I Didn't Say It ...

Marsha Warfield, comedian and actor, her rise back-up as she steps back into the shoes of Roz Russell, the tough-as-nails bailiff on Night Court, and her life as a lesbian in Hollywood:

“I wasn’t Ellen. I wasn’t Rosie. I wasn’t Wanda. I was in the professional closet with the glass door. You’d show up on the red carpet with your ‘assistant.’ When asked who you were dating, you’d say, ‘Let’s not talk about my personal life.’ That’s how it was done. When I came out to [my mother] in the early ‘80s, she said, ‘I know.’ And I was pissed. ‘If you knew, why didn’t you say something?' and she said, ‘I love you, but do me a favor and don’t come out while I’m alive.’ And honestly, given the time, that didn’t seem unreasonable. I wasn’t one of the brave ones, but today, I’m on a mission to honor those who never got to be their full selves. So many women my age never got to explore who they were. They came out later in life, 50s, 60s, 70s. And some never did. For them, the question was ‘Can I be me?’ And for so long, the answer was no. I took time off to survive. I didn’t call it trauma at the time, but that’s what it was. [In 2015 I started working again [but] I had 20 years of stage rust. I wasn’t the same comedian. I wasn’t the same person. I had to reintroduce myself to myself. A lot of people think they can just take 20 years off and go back to it. It doesn’t work like that. There’s courage in just being in show business. You stand up there and say, ‘This is me,’ and wait to be judged. And you do it again. And again.”

And now she is back, not like the former Marsha but as a fully realized version of herself and one that met her current wife, Angie, while she was performing at a comedy club in Vegas.

“She heckled me, and I’ll stop there because she hates when I tell that story. We had our first date four months later, and then she married me five years later.”

I remember her days on Night Court and even though her character was never identified as gay, you somehow knew she was, and then surmised that maybe Marsha Warfield was, too. I’m glad she has the chance to be herself and come out into the light as her fully realized self.

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Scott Galloway, public speaker, author, and clinical professor of marketing at the New York University Stern School of Business, on The Felon’s failures with the economy:

"First off, America is the second largest manufacturer in the world and the Cato Institute—we romanticize manufacturing—the Cato Institute did a survey, 80% of us believe that we should have more manufacturing but only 20% of us want to work in manufacturing. There is no line to get in and have work at an assembly plant in Lansing, Michigan. What we want is high-paying jobs. Quite frankly, if this president cared about young men and trying to up-level people we'd go to a minimum wage of $25 a hour. And by the way, if minimum wage had kept pace with productivity and inflation it'd be somewhere between $23 and $27 an hour …  If you want to go back—he talks about the great era of the late 19th century—guess what? When we didn't have indoor plumbing? Where we had child labor? I'll take Netflix and Novocain. We have a habit because of social media to talk about how terrible America is [but] there are [one hundred and ninety-five] nations, they would all trade places with us. Do we have income inequality, we have polarization, do we have struggling young people? A hundred percent, but guess what? This nation is less bad than any other nation except if you want to take us back to the past. That makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. We have the greatest inflow of capital, which drives our stock up, which lets us borrow money at a lower cost. We have the greatest inflow of human capital. What do the best and the brightest in the world have in common? They want to come to our universities; they want to live in America. And part of that is that the American brand is risk aggressiveness, it's rule of law, it's consistency. Rule of law has gone out the window. Right? We've now decided to defy court orders … We are rounding people up with the wrong tattoo and shipping them off without due process to essentially hellscape prisons … Consistency? The tariffs are on, they're off, the tariffs are on, the tariffs are off. We're alienating nations that love us and we love. When did we decide to go to war against Canada!? Canada!? You know what Canada did? … Canadians hid us in the [Iran] hostage crisis. The Canadian embassy hid six Americans and if they'd been found out they would have been hung by cranes. We're going to war against Canada!? They are our true friends. We can't even articulate why we're angry with them. We are going to war with everyone at the same time. The big winner here, if there is a winner, is China over the medium and long-term, who says 'You may not like us, but you can count us’ … When he paused the tariffs yesterday, he took the knife halfway out of the economy's back, but the injury will take years, if not decades, to heal. The definition of stupid is doing something that hurts yourself while hurting others. This could not be more stupid."

That last line is the epitaph on The Felon Administration’s headstone and we will take years recovering from the damage that a spoiled stupid man cost all of us.

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Lux Pascal, out trans actor and model, on her older brother Pedro Pascal standing up  for transgender people:

“I’m incredibly proud, but the thing is that I’ve always known that he is a superstar. It’s funny because people have been asking me, ‘Is he as kind as we think he is?’ And I’m like, ‘Yes!' What makes [Pedro] so fabulous is that he wears all of his humanity on his sleeve, and he doesn’t hide who he is and I think that’s refreshing, because usually we move around the world hiding who we are. That’s the main lesson I’ve gotten from him: there’s no reason for me to hide who I am, right? And I think people are seeing that.”

Lux Pascal is the youngest of four siblings in the Pascal family and publicly came out as trans in 2021.Shortly after that her brother, actor Pedro Pascal, shared a picture of his siter with a caption that read:

“Mi hermana, mi corazón, nuestra Lux.”

“My sister, my heart, our Lux.”

Good on Lux for stepping out, especially these days, and good on Pascal for standing with her against the transphobia in the world today.

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Rachel Maddow, MSNBC host, called out The Felon for appointing Paula White-Cain, a televangelist who sells promises of miracle healing, to an official White House position:

“Your tax dollars at work, everybody! In that role, I guess, she would now like you to send her $1,000. She is a special government employee of the United States. She is asking for your money [to] release seven supernatural blessings. Hard-sell, big-money, pay-me-for-miracles televangelism is as old as television but when it’s from the White House, when it’s a person hired as a special government employee of the U.S. government, someone running an office in the White House while selling miracles on the side? Well that’s a whole new day for governance.”

Maddow pointed out that, while White-Cain is selling miracle cures for diseases, and charging thousands of dollars, the new regime is cutting funding for vaccinations.

Don’t trust science, trust the grifter-hired snake oil salesman.

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Tim Gunn, style icon, setting the record straight on whether or not he'll be appearing on the upcoming reboot of Project Runway:

"Heidi sent me a text saying, 'There's talk about bringing Project Runway back with us, with you and me, and would you do it?' And I said, 'Would I do it? Of course, there's not a moment of hesitation in me.' So Heidi and I were texting and texting, and several months later, she sent me a text asking, 'Are you happy with your contract?' I'm a truth-teller. I don't even mince words. I said, 'Well, I haven't seen a contract.’ And she said, 'You haven't?' No. So I called my agent and he knew things were going on, but he contacted the executive producers of this new show, and they said, 'We don't want him.' And [my agent] said, 'Well, he's done 19 seasons of Runway, 16 with Heidi. The two of them won an Emmy together as hosts, and now you're going to separate them?' And they said yes. So I wasn't asked back. However, several weeks after that conversation, they went back to [my agent] and said, 'Well, we've thought about it and we'd be willing to offer Tim a small cameo in one episode.' What do I do? Wave from a bus as the designers are going into Mood [Fabrics]? Heidi comes to see me at the retirement home and we play croquet? So no thank you. And as Heidi would say, you're either in or you're out. And I'm out … [But] I thought, how lucky am I to have had the experiences that I've had over the last 20 years? This is phenomenal. I stopped the boo-hooing. I thought, it's really throwing hubris in the face of an angry God to mourn not being on this new show. So I've come to terms with it. Am I disappointed? Sure. And most of all, it's about not working with Heidi, but we move on and things happen for a reason. I don't know what the reason is yet, but it will be revealed. [Heidi] was really upset and she kept saying, 'I'm fighting for you, I'm fighting for you.' Which is lovely of her and nothing that I should expect. And I said, 'Heidi, just take good care of yourself. Don't worry about me. I'll be fine.'"

Tim Gunn is a class act all the way, and if Disney knew anything about Project Runway, it’s the need to have Tim Gunn on the show, so maybe they should, as Tim would say, ‘Make it work.’

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