THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, April 4, 1995 TAG: 9504040323
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: Medium: 59 lines
Thoughts while strolling:
If I were prizefighter Mike Tyson, an unlikely prospect since I haven't been in the ring in years, I wouldn't sign a $45 million contract with promoter Don King for another bout until King had his hair cut.
Too much of a distraction, getting ready in training camp for the big fight, to have someone in my entourage stalking around with his hair standing straight on end as if he were frightened to death . . .
Not until Monday morning, when I read on the sports page that the University of Connecticut women's basketball team had won the national championship, did it dawn on me that the team wasn't from Yukon.
That's what the announcers kept saying, U. Conn. To compound my misunderstanding, its players are called the Huskies.
I'd been pulling for them - and wondering how in the name of the aurora borealis they recruited players to come to Yukon . . .
In a column defending public broadcasting from aspersions that it has a liberal bias, I failed to note that our station, WHRO-TV, airs the program Firing Line hosted by the godfather of modern conservatives, William Buckley.
Unlike many political pundits of either stripe, he is an original thinker with a capacity to surprise. He appears on WHRO every Sunday at 2 p.m. You'd do well to catch it.
I'm indebted to one of my several editors, Tom Holden, for reminding me of that omission . . .
And from a reader and friend, Jane Lane, comes a correction concerning the column in which I compared spring's protracted arrival to a striptease in reverse, putting on instead of taking off clothes. It's a wonder, I wrote, that burlesque houses hadn't seized on that notion.
Friends, one did.
In 1961, Jane Lane and her husband, Chuck, visited everything in Paris from Napoleon's Tomb to the Eiffel Tower.
They finished at a nightclub, the Crazy Horse. Down narrow stairs in a basement, they and another couple were at a table no larger than a steering wheel.
The strippers were like talented Las Vegas showgirls, she recalls. In the finale, one came on stage without clothes and began arraying herself in scanty attire. A murmur ran through the crowd: a reverse striptease!
Well, I was only 34 years late with the idea . . .
As I walked Sunday down West Brambleton Avenue to the Pilot building, mulling over Saturday's column in which I had confessed to having the ugliest mug this side of the Three Stooges, squealing tires broke my morose reverie.
A young woman, nearly driving her car onto the sidewalk, leaned toward the open window on the passenger side and screamed: ``YOU DON`T LOOK THAT BAD!''
How comforting!
And a lovely note, too, from my primary editor, Fred Kirsch: ``Guybo, you're not that ugly. Not quite. But close.'' by CNB