One Person’s Joyful Card Is Another’s ‘Carbuncle’
So now we know that Queen Elizabeth II has OK’d it for Prince Charles and his estranged wife Princess Diana to divorce.
We also know that he’s vowed never to remarry (sorry, Camilla Parker Bowles).
But none of that is as important as the Christmas cards Chuck and Di sent out - separately, of course. His portrays him sitting on a stone bench with sons William and Harry peering out from huge urns on either side. Hers is a soft-focus study of her with the boys resting their heads on her shoulders.
And the reaction? “Diana’s is a warm family portrait of a beautiful mother and her two sons,” editorialized the Sunday News of the World. “Charles’ is a carbuncle among Christmas cards. In whose hands would you place the future of the House of Windsor?” Thank you, Dr. Freud.
Loose talk
Boy George on style and conversation (in Seconds magazine): “Dressing up can be a way of disguising the fact that you’ve got no personality. I can meet an old lady at a bus stop and have a much more interesting conversation with her than I can with a drag queen.”
In some skits, he had us all tied up in Don Knotts
Steve Allen turns 74 today.
She not only acts well, but she can write good
When the Golden Globe nominations were announced on Thursday, Emma Thompson pulled off a first: She was nominated both for Best Actress and Best Screenplay for “Sense and Sensibility.”
And he didn’t write about romance and covered bridges
If you checked out the New York Times best-seller lists on Sunday, you may have noticed that author Richard Paul Evans came up with a rare double. His novel, “The Christmas Box,” was No. 1 on both the hardback and paperback fiction lists.
For example, did you know Saturday night’s for fighting?
You’d think that it would be possible to exhaust interest in a celebrity. Tom Stanton, for instance, thoroughly researched his subject to write “Rocket Man: The Encyclopedia of Elton John.” Yet he encountered fans who could never know enough about the rock star. “One of the amazing things is that you think you’re a huge fan,” Stanton says, “and then you find people more obsessive than yourself.”
The rain in in Spain falls mainly in… Argentina?
Madonna sounded like Keanu Reeves delivering his Elocution 101 final during the recent “VH1 Fashion & Music Awards.” As dialect coach Sam Chwat told Entertainment Weekly, “It’s a very snobbish, elegant accent that’s actually called ‘Classical or Elevated American English.”’ It is, apparently, a holdover from her role in the forthcoming “Evita.”
Watch it tumble into ratings oblivion, but watch it
Finally, a seasonal slight at the expense of his rating-poor network, courtesy of David Letterman: “During this, the season of giving, remember the needy,” he told his late-night television audience. “Watch CBS.”
, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 Color Photos
The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Compiled by staff writer Dan Webster