Love
Is a Pain in the Ass
isn’t clear anymore,
not like the furniture
that always reaches out to
grab that pain and tuck it
neatly away.
She had lots
of leeway, that Bette Davis.
Her eyes (and it’s no wonder
Kim Carnes not only sang the
song about them [enormously
more successful, in fact, than
Jackie DeShannon’s original
version which came out in 1974];
that song, Carnes’ version, was,
per Kasey Kasem, the biggest hit
of 1981, spending a whopping
9 weeks at #1) could fluctuate
instantaneously between whip-
poorwills floating in and (mostly)
out of them and spinning nails of
ice being shot at deviant, even
lethal, speeds emerging from her
tiny black pupils. Did you know,
by the way, that Nathan Lane
(for whom I’m often mistaken,
as you well know) stringently
studied under the original
Nail of Ice, who, sadly, died
yesterday after suffering (but
briefly) from a horrible squirrel-
bite that had left a rather large
hole in the middle of the top-
less bar tattooed under
his left forearm. Nail
was a fairly unknown guy.
Nutty, though, just like Lynch,
who’d just cast him the new
season of
Twin Peaks, which
was nevertheless released as
originally scheduled (just
as the poor, dead Ms. Palmer
had assured those of us who were
alive enough to stick through to
the end of the beginning, which also
transpired...and, sadly, quickly exp
ired...in the early 1980’s) in 2017 on
Showtime.
But, boy, what a show the
original was, much to the chagrin of all of us
when we gleaned that Nail of Ice’s death was
but
a red herring lain to keep the gaunt actors who
played
the aging agents from discovering the truth
(any truth at
all, in fact). A glance at one of those very herring’s ear
rings literally twisted Alfred Hitchcock’s gait. He was
filming a glass of wine and, immediately, like a corkscrew
turned from the camera and walked hastily away ——
in precisely the opposite direction of his
camera’s gaze.
