Screengrab by Various Today in Nerve's film blog: Holiday special - 35 people, places and movies we're thankful for.
The Remote Island by Bryan Christian Michael Phelps indulges Anderson Cooper in some watersports and Dexter makes a 'bitch move.' Plus: the secret of Tina Fey's scar, revealed!
Dating Advice From . . . Engineers by Steph Auteri Q. For optimal functionality, what should go into a first-date emergency kit? A. Fine wine, road flares, a snake-bite kit and Ghirardelli chocolates.
Old
friends who rarely see me in the flesh send emails telling me my life is glamorous. They refer,
of course, not to the geeky, lonerish me they know all too well -- the Melrose Place addict
who naps too much and skips nights on the town to square off with
writer's block at home. They imagine I've metamorphosed into the sum of my coordinates: New
Yorker, entrepreneur, editor of a sex magazine in cyberspace. Cool, but my
West Coast friends would be right to picture me at my desk most Friday nights, ordering in Thai
food and getting down to such genuinely fun editorial duties as sifting through Lisa Carver's
Diaries and scouring photography journals in search of
talent to move you with.
Of course, to properly edit any magazine -- especially one like Nerve -- it's necessary to
leave the deskchair once in a while, see what's shakin'. Lately, professional research has
mandated regular trips to the theater. Yes, the theater! It seems that for each Times Square
strip joint that's barred and shuttered by New York's smut-stamping mayor, a graying Broadway
playhouse flushes with new life. Call me cynical, but I think
this has less to do with a resurgence of appreciation for the arts, and more with an age-old
appetite for nudity -- and celebrities. The stars are coming to Broadway to earn their stripes,
and alongside seasoned stage actors, they're stripping down. But why? Is this mere salesmanship,
or -- now here's where my idealism shines through -- an expression of unpretensiousness, of
intimacy? Are actors simply trying to appear more human in an age when celebrity is God?
In an effort to find out, I spent my January pad Thai and video budget on tickets to
The Blue Room, Broadway's most talked about offering, in which bona fide movie
star Nicole Kidman plays five sexually frustrated characters on various (literal and
figurative) routes to coming undone at the seams: at one point the breath-bated audience is
given a rear view of the actress' birthday suit (it fits perfectly, by the way). In this
much-ballyhooed scene, Iain Glen -- whose own stage-streaking, for some crazy reason,
has not captivated the press nearly as much as Kidman's -- dresses the coltish beauty in
her role as "the model." Kidman is a surprisingly good actor on the stage, and I was
engaged right up to that moment, when her impossibly elevated butt rendered her about as
earthly as Stephanie Seymour in the Victoria's Secret "Angels" campaign. As unfair as it
sounds, Kidman's blessing is also her curse when it comes to playing "mortal." Later, I
read the actress' take in my Playbill: " . . . it's far easier than doing nudity in film.
You're not surrounded by lots of cameras and crew. You're just in the scene with the other
actor . . . " No mention, I noted, of all the other people in the room. Surely there is also an issue
of couth involved for Kidman: the legitimizing, cultured aura of the theater offsets the supposed
trashiness of sharing the goods.
Maybe acting is like real life, where dropping trou on a crowded beach in the French
Riviera is a lot easier, and less effective, than in somebody's apartment. With this in mind,
I went off-Broadway to see a scrappy little production called Killer Joe. I'd heard
the show was graphic, but was nonetheless jolted when the star (an understudy for Amanda Plummer) burst onto the stage
sans culottes. I swear I could see her razor burn from my front row seat. It took so much energy to train my eyes on her face that I didn't hear a word of dialogue
until she put her pants on, but by God, she had me rapt. I appreciate the guts it must take to
face an audience wearing nothing but a T-shirt, night after night, in a tiny, cold
theater. I appreciate that the actor suffered the nics and bumps of shaving her bikini line
instead of having an expensive wax job done, because it's what her character would do.
But it wasn't until I saw a play called Stop Kiss, by Diana Son, that an actor's nudity moved
me. Oblivious to my running nose and brimming eyes, I watched a
character I'd grown to feel real affection for undress her wheelchair-bound girlfriend; I squirmed in my seat
through the excruciating shivering of the handicapped girl while her friend fumbled with
her buttons. And I began to understand that when actors take off their clothes, they're not
philosophizing, necessarily, just freeing up a valuable tool, the body. But for the inspired playwright,
a character's physical unveiling is something more symbolic: the culminant
moment in a carefully orchestrated emotional stripstease.
, featuring curious yet marvelous infusions of cucumber and rose petal.
