Marilyn’s a closet lesbian (and you won’t believe with who)….

Bush’s energy bill passes amid record-high oil rates (conspiracy theorists of the world unite)…

Spears signs on the dotted line regarding a post-preggers Vegas spectacle (Just wait for the inevitable Celine/Brittany deathmatch)…

The shit is hitting the fan for EJ, who’s husband just got wind that a ‘massage’ means quite a bit more in Sin City (I’m guessing this wasn’t a rubdown at Canyon Ranch).

Stop the world! I want to get off. It’s been an insane week of sound bites, so sit back and enjoy this latest edition of 15 Minutes. So much time and so little to tell… Er. Strike that, reverse it. Much better.

I’m typing this from IAH, otherwise known as Houston Intercontinental Airport. Thanks to the city and many taxpayers, it’s one of the most comfortable airports in the US and pretty darned easy to navigate. Admittedly, the runway must have ties with Oz, because whenever a singular drop of rain hits the tarmac, air traffic control loses bowel control and the meltdown begins. A small rainshower can sometimes lead to a line on the runway 20-long. Thankfully, it’s a beautiful day here in Texas and a weather delay is slim-to-none.

It takes a bubble machine and a hoopskirt to make this shit look good…

A big yello to new readers from the Out in America network of websites. This Friday was my intro to their lineup of content and I’m simply happy to be reaching a new group of eyes. 15 Minutes has a bit of format on a weekly basis, but is also very freeform in how it’s written. If you happen to like any certain ‘bit’ that’s featured here, feel free to email and let me know you want more of it. I’m trying to create a standard format before I debut v.2 of 15 Minutes later this summer. Things will always be subject to change, but I’d like to know what works and what doesn’t.

Hi, i’m Vanessa

I enjoy being blind-folded

This past weekend was spent back in my old stomping ground of Las Vegas, where I had a chance to spend some time at Cirque Du Soleil’s Zumanity cast party, as they just revamped the show. The new edition is different, if not my favorite incarnation of the show. If you’re seeing the show in the near future, look for my gal-pal Vanessa in the wildly lit ‘window’ of the lobby, doling out naughty sex advice to those brave enough to stop and talk. Congrats go out to her as well for being featured in this month’s issue of Playboy. While her real hair color remains top-secret, she makes quite the straight man’s fantasy as a busty, bubbly blonde in the show.

Zumanity cast: The most beautiful bodies on the strip

Also had a chance to catch up with old friend Bobby Lane (a former escort who’s currently working for the movers & shakers of Vegas’s entertainment scene) while I was in town. He’s looking as cute as ever and we ended up joining Frank Marino (of La Cage fame) and his BF for some interesting conversation at a local hotspot. Frank, just back from a month traveling throughout Europe, introduced me to his new beau (a real hottie himself who’s managing the male strip-revue at the Riviera, recently featured on VH1’s reality spectacle Strip Search) and we spent the night basically just shooting the shit. It was relaxing and fun.

Chippendales, eat yer heart out…

On the plane ride over to Vegas, I had the pleasure of sitting next to Victoria Gotti, the daughter of imprisoned John Gotti, crime boss extraordinare. She’s currently working on the next season of her hit reality series ‘Growing Up Gotti’ for A&E; and was on her way to LV to get a scoop for her weekly column she writes for Star Magazine. Interesting lady indeed. I wasn’t ballsy enough to ask her if she used Restylane in her lips or if she went with implants, but I did spend an inordinate amount of time trying NOT to stare at her massive soup-coolers. Gotti did give me one small scoop that I found shocking, involving a very well-known tennis pro and his tendencies towards men. When I pressed a bit more, she let on that he has a ‘shaving fetish’ and that he regularly hires guys to come to his hotel rooms and ‘shave him down.’

Dammit. Why can’t I get that job? That actually sounds pretty hot…

I shacked up at Wynn this weekend, but decided that a rental car would the best bet for getting around the city this time. Most everyone was sold out of cars by the time I got into the city, with Avis finally giving me a nice deal on a new silver convertible Thunderbird. I’d never been in the new T-Bird before. It was pretty sweet: two-seater, V8 engine and actually sorta roomy. Getting luggage into it was pretty amusing, as the end result of stuffing bags into the trunk (which only fit one small roll-on) and onto my passenger’s lap was more akin to a clown car than anything.

Luckily, I could put the top up for the drive to the Wynn so people on the strip wouldn’t point and laugh. We, admittedly, looked incredibly awkward. It was like the Incredible Chinese Acrobats on Xanax.

This car was only designed to hold Tommy Lee’s schlong… and that’s it

The next morning I headed down to the Wynn’s gym (which is small and overpriced) to keep on schedule with a chest/back day and midway through the workout, I thought I noticed a familiar face headed into the spa. I finished up my workout and went into the locker rooms for a quick shower, again seeing this familiar face lathering up his face in the mirror and preparing for a morning shave. No one else around me recognized him. I guess it’s not that surprising they didn’t.

It was Stephen Sondheim… And he was shaving against the grain. Oh, the horrors!

I didn’t have the chutzpah to say hello. You snooze, you loose, right? He finished up and headed further into the depths of the spa, leaving me standing there still wanting to know some juicy dirt on Elaine Stritch and her days as the booziest broad on Broadway.

A bitter ex-Golden Girl or Elaine Stritch? You decide
m>

Changing gears: For the past couple of months, I’ve been in this small back-and-forth with my local Time Warner Cable about the new gay cable channel Logo. I emailed their programming director to ask if they’d be carrying the channel anytime in the near future on digital cable and they replied with a resounding no. They said it didn’t fit into the ‘cultural demographic’ of the San Antonio area.

Cultural demographic? You’ve got to be shitting me. SA’s practically a screaming queen just waiting for Halloween to put on a dress, heels and lip-synch to a Cher song. If this town got anymore gay, the RiverWalk would be immediately drained and permanently refilled with Wet Platinum. Imagine the possibilities.

Now, as for San Antonio being gay-friendly: No, not really.

I fired back a letter to Time Warner, letting them know that the thousands of their gay (and gay-friendly) paying subscribers might also like a chance to enjoy this more personalized ‘lifestyle’ network. I’ve yet to hear back from them and don’t really expect a reply. Is TWC saying that they don’t really want to recognize their gay customers? Are they being pressured by the moral majority to keep Logo out, while letting such culturally enlightening programming such as The Real World have free reign? I really don’t know and can’t assume, as I don’t know how much it would cost (in terms of time and money) TWC to add Logo to their lineup. If anyone out there with a better understanding of how this kind of thing works, enlighten me with an email and let me know.

Bellagio finally changed their art exhibit and they’re now featuring a decent impressionism retrospective. Even with Steve Wynn’s impressive collection, once housed at the old Desert Inn, Las Vegas has never (and probably will never) be much more than a speck of dirt against real ‘art’ cities like Chicago, New York and London. However, it is nice to see institutions like the Guggenheim and Smithsonian looking to diversify the cultural offerings out there. Strangely enough, one of my all-time favorite art exhibits was not too long ago at Bellagio when they had the full collection of Warhol’s celebrity silkscreens. It was a really well-done (and well-lit) piece.

So, I’m reading through this month’s issue of Radar Magazine (which btw is one of the most interesting new mags to hit the stands in quite awhile) and they’re talking about the new rage overseas of ‘designer toilet paper.’

I can’t believe I typed that without laughing.

Yup, expect to see Louis Vuitton TP in the near future kids. It’s tailor-made for the total yuppification of America, while still appealing to the throw-away society side in all of us. China has already adopted the coveted ‘triple-ply’ tissue (it’s selling like hotcakes) and they even goes as far as to incorporate pineapple enzymes in the tp to keep the user so fresh and so clean all day long. Even packaging has changed from the standard see-through plastic schpiel to a more designer-friendly grey, translucent covering. All this and more for nearly quadruple the cost of your normal 4-pack of Charmin.

I honestly think this is the seventh sign of the Apocalypse. Lions have now officially begun eating Christians, so repent and save yourselves while you still can.

My other magazine fetish includes the airplane ritual of devouring every last word in the latest issue of Vanity Fair. Forget cover girl Jennifer Aniston and her perilous Pitt problems and just flip back to the scathing article regarding stereotypical porn star autobiographies. Porn goddess (and filthy rich to boot) Jenna Jameson teamed up with Judith Regan to produce a NYTimes bestseller about her life before and during her rise to the top of the adult world. The article is particularly amusing when she talks about the psychosis of long-schlonged Peter North:

“Can I just tell you one thing Jenna,” he says with deep concern set in his big brown eyes. “It’s the only thing you have to know about me in a sex scene”

“Of course you can tell me.” Maybe he was going to tell me that he easily formed a crush on girls that look like me.

“Don’t touch my hair…” He glanced in the mirror. “It takes me a long time to get my hair like this and if anybody touches it in a sex scene, I lose all of my concentration.”

What hair?

Only in porno kids. Only in porno. LOL.

I also learned recently that due to a little-known loophole in Bushies ‘No Child Left Behind’ bill, military recruiters can legally get student information lists of juniors and seniors in high school for recruitment purposes. This ultimately leads to high-pressure recruiters calling your home, sending mail and coming to their schools. If high schools try to deny the lists to local recruiters, they can have their government funding yanked. The only real way to keep your kid from being harassed is to write directly to their high school and opt-out on paper. How incredibly sad that not only is Big Brother watching, but that they’re also wanting to send your child to Iraq so they can meet their monthly quotas.

Here’s the hot scoop this week from the scorching strip of Las Vegas. The dish is being served, so pull up a chair and dig in:

She’s toxic and headed for The Aladdin… Seems the princess of pop Britney Spears has secretly signed a deal with the new resort to headline at least a year of shows after she’s done with the bun in her oven. Sources say the deal was signed just last week and that Spears’s contract has a specific ‘singing live only’ clause, as her last tour was plagued with crap reviews due to her lip-synching most of the show.

Marilyn Dearest? Audio tapes released earlier this week reveal that Marilyn Monroe had a same-sex affair with fellow actress Joan Crawford. Forget the hell that little schmucky Christina Crawford went through… Let’s get Faye Dunaway back into those shoulder pads and add some steamier scenes into Mommy Dearest pronto! I bet that Monroe would definitely give some of those AVN starlets a run for their money come awards season. I would also put money on the fact that Crawford was always the ‘top’ in that relationship.

Cher at The Wynn. Need we say more? She’s going to beat the French out of Celine Dion and the white trash out of Britney Spears. I can’t wait.

For fans of the ever-loved personal ad: EJ iso J/O when gigging at the CP under the guise of M4M massage. His partner IRL may be a forgiving soul, but he’s unwilling to furnish EJ with the benefit of the doubt any longer. Stay tuned for more on this Colosseum-sized problem.

On the way home from Vegas I had the extreme pleasure of sitting next to a couple who appeared to be a living, breathing J. Crew catalog come to life. I assumed I was safe. They looked like people who had just attended a horse show: A stately couple in their late sixties, he in a cashmere sweater and she in a tweed jacket, a gem-encrusted shamrock glittering against the rich felt of her lapel.

The couple took their seats, and just as I settled in beside them, the man turned to the woman, saying “I don’t want to hear this shit.”

I assumed he was continuing an earlier argument, but it turned out he was referring to the Etta James number the airline was playing during the boarding process. “I can’t believe the fuc
king crap they make you listen to on planes nowadays.” The woman patted her silver hair and agreed, saying that whoever had programmed the music was an asshole.

“A cocksucker,” the man corrected her. “A goddamned cocksucking asshole.” They weren’t loud people and didn’t even sound all that angry. This was just the way they spoke, the verbal equivalent of their everyday china. Among company, the wife might remark that she felt a slight chill, but here that translated to “I’m fucking freezing. How about you?”

“Yeah,” her husband said. “It’s cold as shit in here.” See, shit is the tofu of cursing and can be molded to whichever conditions the speaker desires. Hot as shit. Windy as shit. I myself was confounded as shit, for how had I so misjudged these people? Why, after all this time do I still believe that expensive clothing signifies anything more than a disposable income, that tweed and cashmere actually equal refinement?

It’s as if someone had kidnaped the grandparents from a Ralph Lauren ad and forced them into a David Mamet play- and that, in part, is why the couple so appealed to me: There was something ridiculous and unexpected about them. They made a good team and I wished that I could spend a week or two invisibly following behind them and seeing the world through their eyes.

Interesting indeed. It may be a small world, but it’s an even weirder one at that.

Saving the icing for the end, here’s this week’s edition of EYE CANDY. I didn’t get as many submissions as I usually do, but I still think it’s an impressive collection of hotties. Enjoy and if you’re sitting on some hot pics, why not send them over and get your ‘good deed for the month’ over and done with.

~BN
‘Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.’ — Oscar Wilde