Minister in a Mouse ClickBy Carl Kozlowski
Last Friday night seemed like the perfect time for my first wedding. The sun was coming down in a beautifully clear sky over the crashing waves of a Malibu coastline, and I looked out past the smiling bride to see the faces of 60 guests waiting eagerly for the vows.
Only this was one of the strangest weddings I'd ever been involved with. For one thing, it wasn't my wedding exactly. Rather, I was the minister in charge, and I was barely even a minister. I had applied online for the legal title from the Universal Life Church only a week before, then placed an ad on the Web site Craigslist offering to "Perform a Wedding - Fast and Free!"
For months, I had been inundated with spam from sites offering to ordain anyone, anytime, for free or dirt-cheap prices. And after hearing that even Courtney Love had been accepted as a ULC minister and had married 27 couples in a Nevada radio-station promotion, I knew I had found the perfect church with which to become a minister in a mouse click.
A guy named Seth had responded to my Craigslist ad, saying his Russian fiancée Oxsana had to get married within a week or else her three-month "fiancée visa" would expire and she would be sent back to her homeland. It sounded a little strange, but I needed to wed someone within a week or I'd miss my deadline too -- so there I was, standing in a ridiculous gold robe in front of 60 strangers who could easily star in a real-life version of The Royal Tenenbaums.
Questions were flying through my mind: Was this really legal? (Yes.) If it was, why? What did real ministers and priests think about the ability of anyone to sign up online and wed people at will? And if an untrained buffoon like me could be in charge, what did this have to say about the state of marriage today?
FOLLOW THE LIGHT
I've had people pressuring me to be a priest all my life. I grew up in a Polish-Catholic household, and from the time I was six I was an altar boy. But I never felt compelled to become a man of the cloth -- at least not as a full-time career.
As I Googled the ULC and read through their Web sites, it seemed like there were no catches to becoming a holy man. I had to put in a few pieces of personal information -- no Social Security number, only name, e-mail address, and home address -- and click an "Ordain Me" icon. Within moments I received a fairly impressive black-and-white copy of my ministerial certificate, calling me "The Reverend Carl Casimir Kozlowski."
Now I was one of the ULC's 20 million worldwide ministers, a total that makes the church the McDonalds of ministry. They've been a source of snickering and intrigue for generations now, as friends dare each other to sign up, or couples that can't afford a fancy wedding or don't want the myriad planning hassles ask friends or family to serve on the happiest day of their lives.
"We've been a church since 1959, but there's really only been widespread Internet signups since late 1995," explains Andre Hensley, a ULC board member whose father was one of the original founders of the Modesto, CA-based church. "At first, word of the ordinations was spread by word of mouth and then by articles and television news reports, but every decade it seems there's been a different movement that's carried the growth along."
According to Hensley, ULC ordinations were a major haven for men seeking draft deferments during Vietnam in the 60s; in the 70s they became a fad as people turned against organized religion during the disillusionment of that decade. During the Me Decade of the 80s, millions signed up in hopes of dodging taxes (a ploy that often didn't work), and in the 90s the frenzy settled into the more romantic mode that holds today: peoples' desire to have friends and family officiate at weddings.
The ULC is founded on just one rule, the Golden Rule: "Do that which is right" (meaning do whatever you want as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else and it's legal). So, the church doesn't care if its services are conducted in the style of Catholic, Buddhist, Baptist or Jewish formats -- everyone can join the party.
Of course, this level of open-mindedness leaves them open to criticism, not to mention pranks. Even one of the three websites listing the ordination guidelines and church rules notes such odd specifics as: "Please only ordain others with their permission. (This includes public figures as well as cartoon and other fictional characters)" and "Ministers can perform any ritual they wish to perform, except circumcision."
"We get people all the time who try to request ordinations for sitting presidents, but that's what happens when you have such an open process," says Hensley. "Then of course there's those who make jokes, like signing up as Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck. That's why we screen all the requests because this is to be taken seriously. I'm not sure about the reasons for discussing circumcision, but [a member named] Brother Daniel stated there was someone who tried to perform a circumcision in Florida and so he decided to forewarn people by putting it out there on the Web."
For a church that wants to be taken seriously, their openness to any allegedly "normal" person being able to sign up also poses a problem.
"If I were to deny Courtney Love, that would be going against the teachings of the church, and that would be going against God's teaching to turn people away," explains Hensley. "We have to take it by faith that she'll do the right thing. What it comes down to is that my father thought it shouldn't be hard for someone who's been in church all their lives to preach by having to go to a seminary for years."
As radical as that idea may sound, it really isn't that far off the mark from the concepts that drove Luther to create the Protestant Reformation, according to Rev. Paul Sawyer of Throop Unitarian Universalist Church.
"Luther believed in the priesthood of all believers, a radical idea generally still practiced by Quakers, who don't believe in professional ministers for the most part and believe that everybody is equal," explains Sawyer. "Even our Unitarian Universalist tradition believed they could choose ministers and make them leaders. and a lot of early leaders in any Protestant church didn't even go to college. Just because you've got a degree or title doesn't make you good."
Not all clergy agree. Father John Collins is an Irish expatriate and associate pastor of St. Phillip's Catholic Church in Pasadena. Collins said he had never heard of online ordination prior to this interview, but thought that the concept was "somewhat silly" and "a huge danger because of the position of power."
"We look at everything that has gone on in the Catholic Church in the past couple years and those are people who have gone through a 7- or 8-year formation program designed to weed them out," says Collins, ".so the idea that anyone can do weddings and funerals and be with people when they're at their most vulnerable and take advantage of that is appalling."
David Manock, of First Hollywood Presbyterian Church, followed the traditional route of studying: 4 years in a seminary for his Masters of Divinity and another 7 years for his PhD, so he felt that online ordination "undermines and demeans the value and meaning of ordination. Ronald Kelly, the director of church relations for the Worldwide Church of God, believes that the potential for financial abuses is vast, as ordained ministers can claim income tax deductions on church donations annually, are allowed a tax-free parsonage allowance, and have part of their salaries rendered tax-free.
"If you have a certificate hanging on your wall or card in your wallet, then someone might think you're a qualified counselor and you're not," says Kelly. "Someone who valued an education by being a graduate of a certified institution wouldn't stoop to this kind of credential."
But for the sake of sheer curiosity, I would.
WHAT THE LORD HAS JOINED TOGETHER
Because of that, I rode in my robe on two Metra trains and a Rapid Red bus all the way to Sherman Oaks to meet Seth's sister Vicki on a sweltering Friday afternoon -- and I barely drew a stare from the other freaks on public transit. At her house, I was the center of attention while being a complete stranger: everyone wanted to know what kind of preacher I was, as the groom had apparently forgotten to tell them he found me online for free.
I soon found I fit in, for as odd as I felt, they were odder. There was Seth's octogenarian father, a self-proclaimed "heathen" who had driven from Minnesota with his fourth wife, a Mormon, and their shaggy-haired twin sons who were to play a duet of the wedding march on their violins. The twins were 17, which made them just 4 years younger than their new sister-in-law Oxsana, who was about to marry Seth, 49, but still acting like he was 18.
In other words, they were one big happy American family -- 21st Century style. Elsewhere in the extremely crowded house were Oxsana's utterly bewildered parents, who were in from Russia for the big event, and Seth's mom, who was his dad's wife Number 1. (Numbers 2 and 3 "have scattered to the winds!" Seth's dad exclaimed.)
After an extremely long and winding drive out past Malibu, I met the rest of the friends -- an assortment of people from Seth's current career as a real-estate wizard and his past career as a rock singer on the L.A. club scene. The only people I had yet to meet, oddly enough, were Seth and his bride.
Seth was late to his own wedding. So was his bride. And the band. Oh, and the U-Haul truck that held all the tables and chairs for people to sit in and have a meal. Thank God the booze was there, and everyone seemed to be availing themselves of that -- even me -- until Vicki's husband noticed I was starting to sway and decided it might be best to cut me off unless they wanted to have the wedding challenged over the minister's sobriety.
Finally, the couple arrived. I had envisioned Seth as a look-alike for Larry of the Three Stooges, but he looked like the lead singer of Def Leppard, minus the mullet. Oxsana, meanwhile, was a dead ringer for Valerie Golina in Rainman.
Their arrival set off a whirlwind of preparatory activity -- preparations that should have been done long before. The guests set up their own tables, folded their own place settings, and Seth scrambled to go over which songs he wanted to sing with the band. I remembered that we hadn't even discussed one rather significant detail yet: the vows.
When I asked Seth to take a look at the vow selections, however, he said, "Oh yeah, those things" - and proceeded to dash through the choices picking "Number one, number three, and number seven" from the lists with the same care and enthusiasm he might reserve for ordering off a Chinese takeout menu.
"Just what the hell was going on here?!" I wondered, but before I could really question going through with the ceremony, it was announced that the caterers were ready to dish out the barbecue. Heaven and its attendant moral quandaries could wait. Besides, we were about to be treated to a couple of classic rock covers by Seth and the band.
"Look at Oxsana's father. He does not look amused," said one guest, an elderly Frenchwoman who claimed that she too had been ordained by the ULC. "So how many weddings have you done?" she sweetly asked me.
"This is my first," I replied.
"Fuck!" she exclaimed.
With the sun in danger of slipping away for the night, someone finally convinced Seth to stop singing and get ready. And at last, we were ready to begin, as the band cluelessly played what must have been the only vaguely religious song they knew: Guns n' Roses' take on "Knockin' on Heaven's Door." I heard at least one guest mutter, "Dude, isn't that song about death?!"
Indeed it was, but with America's divorce rate standing at 50 percent, perhaps they were just offering a candid and timely reminder that this was a grave decision the couple were making. Soon enough, the Mormon twins kicked in with their off-key yet heartfelt rendition of "Pachelbel's Canon" and Seth walked up to me in a white tux. I told him he looked good, and he shot me a weird stare like he wondered if I were gay. I decided not to offer any more comments.
Then, as one of Seth's sisters ripped open a plastic bag filled with rose petals and started madly tossing them all over the beach, Oxsana made her entrance in a stunning red wedding dress and white veil. She stood before me with Seth, and the two suddenly looked like any couple should: happy, and thankfully like they actually knew each other. I breathed a sigh of relief that this didn't appear to be a big sham after all and launched into the prayers sans microphone, yelling to be heard above the crashing waves and noticing that Seth's dad was hunched forward and squinting like crazy in an attempt to hear a word I was saying.
It was an odd feeling, taking people through that moment, realizing that this might be the most important moment of their lives while at the same time thinking "nah, something's off here." I was suddenly no better than Courtney Love. (Well, OK, I wasn't committing felonies, but this was certainly in the ballpark of unstable behavior.) Sporting the robe now conferred to me a sense of solemn power.
They put on their rings, Oxsana sort of stammered through her vows after Seth sailed through his, and then they kissed as I pronounced them man and wife. Everyone around them clapped and seemed to be into the moment, and what I felt -- more than any earthly or spiritual power -- was that I just helped make a bunch of people really happy.
And I realized that the ULC's idea of making that ability free was a valuable one, because just like a Mastercard moment, making people this happy was priceless. As the couple made their rounds to friends and family, the rest of the crowd started patting me on the back and saying things like, "That was your first one? Great job!" More than anything, I wanted to just sit down and have a drink under the stars.
Funny how Oxsana read my mind - sort of. I was perfectly willing to sit alone and let her perhaps enjoy introducing herself to the guests as the new Mrs., but instead she came hurtling through the darkness and across the sand directly towards me.
"More tequila!" she exclaimed. I hadn't had any that night, but that didn't stop her from grabbing my hand and offering to get me started.
"More tequila!" she laughed again as we ran across the beach towards the bartenders. I was looking around frantically now, wondering where Seth was, and if he was going to kill me if he saw me holding hands with his wife. But he was back singing with the band, and Oxsana suddenly slowed down.
"I'm married now, Carl," she said, making a face that looked like she had just bit into a grapefruit when she was expecting an orange. "Married!"
My heart sank. Had I just ruined her life in some way?
"Are you happy about it?" I asked.
She shrugged her shoulders as if she'd been asked whether she'd rather buy Nikes or Reeboks. "Sure," she replied, then off we went again to the bartenders, where she supervised the pouring of an extremely large glass and my downing of it in one extremely painful swig. As I gasped for air and sanity, she laughed again and ordered, "More tequila!" The bartender asked "Are you sure?" and this time I waved my hands furiously, "NO!"
Then she leaned over and kissed my forehead.
"You really should get back to Seth, ya know," I said, pointing him out across the crowd as he sang "Mustang Sally" with the band. Oxsana looked over and seemed to get a little serious for a moment before bending over, hiking up a leg of her dress and slipping off her garter.
Then she looked at me again.
"Are you married, Reverend?"
"No," I gulped.
"I don't believe you," she replied.
I flashed her my hands -- devoid of rings, marriage or otherwise. Then she handed me her garter.
"You're a good man, Carl. I hope you find a good woman. That's what this is for." She leaned in towards me again, and. gave me a hug. I never thought I'd say I'd rather not have a hug from an exotic foreign beauty, but this moment was one of them.
She then let me go, turned, and faded into the darkness across the beach. I looked up at the skies and saw the stars brighter than they'd seemed in ages, and I made a wish that she was right.
Currently listening : Greatest Hits By Red Hot Chili Peppers Release date: 18 November, 2003
Friday, September 7, 2007
MY NIGHT ON SKID ROW WITH MICHAEL MOORE
Sick of the system
Michael Moore takes aim at America's deadly health care industry
By Carl Kozlowski
the doctors are in: Michael Moore and LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa offer their prescription for a healthier city
Think of Hollywood movie premieres and images of red carpets, glamorous celebrities and paparazzi will likely come to mind. Michael Moore had an entirely different idea in mind for the Hollywood debut of his new film "SiCKO."
The rabble-rousing populist documentarian, who previously took on automaker General Motors over massive corporate layoffs in "Roger and Me," confronted America's gun and media culture in the Oscar-winning "Bowling for Columbine" and exposed the horrific handling of the War on Terror by the Bush administration in the 2004 smash hit "Fahrenheit 9/11," actually did have a fancy premiere in Hollywood Tuesday night.
But on Monday he took his movie to the streets of downtown LA — literally.
In one of the more surreal movie events ever to hit Los Angeles, Moore arranged for a full-sized movie screen
to be set up on a Skid Row street in back of the Union Rescue Mission and unspooled the film before a raucously appreciative audience of hundreds of homeless people, complete with popcorn and Pepsis.
With LAPD officers posted near the screen, the roar of police helicopters occasionally scanning from the skies and the sound of sirens passing rapidly in the night, it was an occasion vastly different from the staid critics' screening held the previous Thursday at The Grove's movie theater on the West Side.
But make no mistake, the chance to sit among the poorest of the poor as they watched a famous man actually show up and advocate for their needs was a powerful experience.
As Moore strode from behind the screen toward the crowd in his trademark baseball cap and sneakers, dozens of people in the audience leapt to their feet spontaneously, pumping their fists in the air and screaming his name while others ran toward him to shake his hand or attempt to hug him.
It was clear that this was no mere publicity stunt. The only press around was a cable movie channel and a crew from Noticias television, leaving the Pasadena Weekly with a citywide exclusive interview with Moore, thanks largely to the fact that that same night Moore abruptly called off the next day's scheduled press events in Beverly Hills in favor of participating in a health care reform rally at Los Angeles City Hall.
"I said to Michael I want people who are in the street and in the movie to see the movie, and asked if he could do a premiere on the streets of Skid Row. He loved the idea and made it all happen," said Andy Bales, CEO of the Union Rescue Mission. "I've seen the film four times at other cities' events and I think it will get people talking — and hopefully it's his goal too to move us from me-centered to we-centered society and make sure everyone has health care."
Children of God Indeed, "SiCKO" is a film that speaks squarely to the concerns of the poorest members of society, as when Moore tells the story of a 63-year-old homeless and disoriented woman named Carol Reyes, who was dumped off by a taxicab in front of Union Rescue Mission in March 2006 after officials at Kaiser Permanente's Bellflower hospital decided that caring for her had become too costly.
Moore shows the incredibly sad footage, taken by the Mission's security cameras, of Reyes pacing lost and alone and wearing only a thin hospital gown on the street. She had long lived in a public park in far-away Gardena and had no idea she would be dumped in downtown's Skid Row, leaving her in danger until Mission staff went out to see what was wrong.
Initially, it was impossible to determine which hospital she had come from because the names of two different hospitals had been rubbed out from her patient wristbands. But eventually the Bellflower hospital was pegged as the culprit, and public outrage forced officials to do their jobs.
Criminal charges were filed against the hospital's officials and Kaiser was forced to pay a large class-action lawsuit settlement designed to stop the practice of patient dumping from occurring again.
"These corporate hospitals like Kaiser take patients who can't afford to pay their own hospital bill in cabs and dump them like they're garbage in front of these buildings, when they're human beings created by God," says Moore, speaking from behind the giant movie screen on San Julian Street as "SiCKO" was shown.
"It's a travesty, and I'm so grateful to the people here at the Rescue Mission and Andy Bales because day after day, week after week, they saw sick people dumped here and one day they said 'enough is enough' and they called the police on the hospital, and the police and city attorney filed criminal charges. It was a rare moment when the rich faced arrest for their treatment of the poor.
"When somebody is left to die in an ER or on the streets of LA, you should call 911 and report an attempted murder: murder by the hospital, murder by the health insurance company, murder by the pharmaceutical company, because that's exactly what they're doing."
Reaching out It may sound like Moore is merely unleashing his usual righteous indignation, but the surprising thing about "SiCKO" is the fact that he lays out his arguments in a relatively subdued fashion. This isn't the Bush-bashing spectacular of "Fahrenheit," and he's not pulling a string of pranks to get his point across like he did on his two Emmy-winning 1990s TV series, "TV Nation" and "The Awful Truth." He doesn't crash the offices of any health care company to subject CEOs and their public relations shills to hilarious humiliation.
Instead, Moore realized that even as "Fahrenheit" exploded to set the all-time gross record for documentaries with its $120 million take, he had become such a polarizing figure that he risked having half of America tune him out completely on the subject. So he decided that — just as the best legislative progress comes from bipartisan cooperation — he too had to reach across the ideological divide and point out that the American health care debacle is no single party's fault.
He even takes his biggest slap at Hillary Clinton, pointing out that she sold out over the years between her 1994 efforts to create universal health care as first lady and her current status as Congress's second-largest recipient of health care lobbyist donations.
Moore's new approach is a decided attempt to have the issues take center stage, rather than his own controversial image, which was burned into the American psyche at the 2003 Oscars ceremony when he went on live worldwide television to warn that the rationale for the then-impending war in Iraq was built on lies rather than any genuine threat to our national safety.
"But people should ask why I'm controversial. I told the American people from the stage of the Oscars that we were being lied to about weapons of mass destruction and I got booed," he recalls. "These days, I get a lot of Republicans stopping me on the street and apologizing to me. They now see I was trying to warn them the Emperor has no clothes, and I'm now in the middle of mainstream America."
It's middle class, mainstream America that Moore really focuses on in "SiCKO." He realized that the media had long informed Americans of the fact that more than 50 million people lacked health coverage in the US, so he decided to turn his attention to those who are ostensibly covered and still get screwed through payment denials, refusals of life-saving procedures and insanely high premiums.
One particularly sad segment of the film spotlights the tragedy of Dawnelle Keys, a Los Angeles woman whose
18-month-old daughter Mychelle contracted a 104-degree fever, vomiting and diarrhea on May 6, 1993. Keys tried to take her toddler to the emergency room at King/Drew Medical Center and found a doctor who said Mychelle had a bacterial infection that needed immediate treatment with antibiotics.
Yet because King/Drew was considered an unaffiliated hospital under Keys' Kaiser Permanente health care plan, the insurance giant refused to approve the medication and attendant blood culture, forcing Keys to spend hours begging for an ambulance to take her daughter to a Kaiser-approved hospital.
By the time Mychelle was finally taken to the approved hospital, she was in need of resuscitation. Within 30 minutes of arrival at the "correct" facility, the child was dead.
"She would have been 15 and a half years old now," said Keys at a health care-reform rally Moore attended at Los Angeles City Hall on Tuesday morning.
Horror stories Other victims depicted in the movie include a retired couple who were forced to move into a relative's storage room when health care costs forced them to sell their house, and a woman whose husband died on her birthday because the health insurance company she worked for refused to approve a bone marrow transplant from his own brother.
Moore collected the tragic tales after putting out an open call through his Web site, www.michaelmoore.com, for people to submit their health care travails. Within a week, he had received more than 25,000 emails on the subject and that total continued to grow exponentially.
"Over the past few decades, the pharmaceutical companies have done an excellent organizing job for us. They have so abused the people of this country, even those who have health insurance, and the people who think they're covered find that the whole point of the companies is to see how little of the bill they have to pay," Moore said from the podium at the same rally.
"Health insurance in this country is a racket; it's Vegas, and the house always has to win. It's a system based on figuring out what the odds are and that's why they don't wanna insure people who might get sick. They send out investigative teams to find out if you had pre-existing conditions so they can get their money back."
"SiCKO" offers damning testimony from former insurance corporation employees who blow the whistle on the corner-cutting prevalent in the industry, with one woman showing that her former employer would refuse anyone who had any pre-existing condition found in a 37-page list. But the climax — and the film's sole problem-solving prank — centers upon the plight of volunteer 9/11 rescue workers who now suffer from life-threatening illnesses that the government won't cover because they weren't on the public payroll.
In a brilliant move, Moore rents three boats and fills them with the sick volunteers before making a hilarious trip to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. The reason for the excursion is that the US-run base houses accused terrorists, who, officials at the prison facility have openly bragged, receive the finest medical care possible.
Moore decides to take the rescue workers there in hopes of enabling them to receive the same quality care as our alleged national enemies. Instead, they wind up receiving the care they need and huge supplies of medicine from a Havana hospital, but the trip has nonetheless resulted in the US Commerce Department investigating whether Moore broke laws in defying the government's embargo against the communist nation.
"Sixty-two percent of the American public now is opposed to the embargo against Cuba. The American people have had it, and are tired of being told who the enemy is. The American people fell for that when we were told Saddam was going to attack us," Moore says at the Skid Row screening. "We don't wanna listen to anyone else in the government telling us who our enemy is, whether it's Saddam or Castro or whatever. We as human beings wanna live in this world with other human beings, and the people in Cuba are human beings and we want them to share with us and we will share with them."
Furthermore, Moore believes that government outrage over his trip is yet another sign of the Bush administration's efforts to quash dissent in the post-9/11 world.
"The Bush administration is coming after me because this film is an embarrassment to them. I pointed out how the detainees we have at Guantanamo Bay are getting better health care than the 9/11 rescue workers who ran down to Ground Zero to save peoples lives," says Moore. "That is so wrong on so many levels, so they're going after me because I point out the truth to people. What kind of free country is this anyways, where you make a documentary and you've got the government investigating you? What kind of free country is it where you can't travel where you want to travel? I'm just grateful the Bush administration is showing the American people exactly how free we are."
But what of those critics who point out that Cuba's health care system is ranked 39th in the world by the World Health Organization, two places behind America's supposedly hopeless system? The movie shows the list, but Moore himself doesn't discuss that salient point in the film. He had no problem laughing off the critique in his Skid Row interview, however.
"We're paying 60 times as much as the Cubans are," he says, shaking with laughter. "And we're only two steps ahead of them. I think it's pretty funny."
'A Christian thing to do' While the American way of life deteriorates at home, Moore shows that the quality of life in some other nations is vastly better. He takes the audience on a European vacation to England and France, revealing societies that are stable democracies with full speech and press freedoms and well-off families. In Paris, he joins a dinner of American expatriates who speak with awe at the services that French society provides, extending far beyond free health care to include 24-hour house calls from doctors, free college education and even free laundry service.
Yet the Americans stress that the tax rates in their adopted society don't cramp their dreams, pointing out that they have good homes and cars to go along with their lack of worry over basic survival.
And in England, he spotlights a doctor who still manages to own a new Audi and a million-dollar home on his government salary. Moore sums up the travelogue by questioning whether we're taught contempt for the French simply because the government doesn't want us to be jealous and start getting any ideas about free quality care for ourselves.
"These are countries that say we're all in the same boat and we sink or swim together. Countries that live with the concept of 'we' and not 'me.' It's not 'me me me' in these other countries, it's 'we,'" says Moore. "And if we allow too many people to slip between the cracks of society, we all suffer. Not just those who slip between the cracks, but all of society is ruined. All the rest of the world's 25 leading industrial nations provide health care as a basic human right. Could it be that maybe they're right and we're wrong?"
Despite all the sadness spotlighted in the film, Moore finds hope in the fact that the majority of Americans are finally getting fed up. While he argues that most Americans are brainwashed by newscasts often funded by pharmaceutical commercials, he also feels the true need for a better way is starting to break through the ad clutter.
Moore also said he was encouraged by California having two competing health care reform proposals working their way through the halls of government in Sacramento. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is touting a plan that mandates that all Californians purchase health insurance from a private carrier, but places few controls on the price and quality of the coverage. Businesses would be forced to spend 4 percent of their payroll costs on providing insurance to employees or paying into a state fund for uninsured workers.
Meanwhile, two competing Democratic bills offer their own distinct visions. Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez has a bill that would cover all children, but would not cover single, childless and unemployed adults and would exempt the self-employed and businesses with payrolls less than $100,000 per year.
Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata would also exempt the self-employed, but according to a report by the Los Angeles Times, would mandate health insurance for individuals making at least $40,840 per year and families of four with earnings at or more than $82,600.
But Moore believes that it's the federal government that needs to come up with one overarching piece of legislation in order to prevent a morass of 50 competing state-level bills, and he heartily endorses HR 676, a comprehensive health care bill co-sponsored by US Congressman and presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich and his fellow Democrat John Conyers.
Moore firmly believes that true and lasting reform is coming to America as soon as the current White House resident is shown the door at the end of 2008. But until then, he has three last things for all of us — especially the enemies who like to toss epithets such as "communist" at him — to consider.
"Go for a half-hour walk each day and eat some fruits and vegetables. Take care of yourself, and that's what I need to do," says Moore, who has lost 25 pounds and counting on a diet and exercise program. "Second, demand that the candidates running for president next year make a pledge to support universal health care for all, and it's not enough to say they want it — they need specifics in the plan.
"But behind it all, we need to realize that if we say we're a Christian nation, providing health care for every American is the Christian thing to do," concludes Moore, a Catholic who embarked on his quest for social justice after opting not to become a priest.
"I don't know why we call a Christian act socialism. I think Jesus would want for every one of us to take care of human beings and guarantee it for everyone."
06-28-07
Currently listening : Rent (2005 Movie Soundtrack) By Jonathan Larson Release date: 27 September, 2005
Michael Moore takes aim at America's deadly health care industry
By Carl Kozlowski
the doctors are in: Michael Moore and LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa offer their prescription for a healthier city
Think of Hollywood movie premieres and images of red carpets, glamorous celebrities and paparazzi will likely come to mind. Michael Moore had an entirely different idea in mind for the Hollywood debut of his new film "SiCKO."
The rabble-rousing populist documentarian, who previously took on automaker General Motors over massive corporate layoffs in "Roger and Me," confronted America's gun and media culture in the Oscar-winning "Bowling for Columbine" and exposed the horrific handling of the War on Terror by the Bush administration in the 2004 smash hit "Fahrenheit 9/11," actually did have a fancy premiere in Hollywood Tuesday night.
But on Monday he took his movie to the streets of downtown LA — literally.
In one of the more surreal movie events ever to hit Los Angeles, Moore arranged for a full-sized movie screen
to be set up on a Skid Row street in back of the Union Rescue Mission and unspooled the film before a raucously appreciative audience of hundreds of homeless people, complete with popcorn and Pepsis.
With LAPD officers posted near the screen, the roar of police helicopters occasionally scanning from the skies and the sound of sirens passing rapidly in the night, it was an occasion vastly different from the staid critics' screening held the previous Thursday at The Grove's movie theater on the West Side.
But make no mistake, the chance to sit among the poorest of the poor as they watched a famous man actually show up and advocate for their needs was a powerful experience.
As Moore strode from behind the screen toward the crowd in his trademark baseball cap and sneakers, dozens of people in the audience leapt to their feet spontaneously, pumping their fists in the air and screaming his name while others ran toward him to shake his hand or attempt to hug him.
It was clear that this was no mere publicity stunt. The only press around was a cable movie channel and a crew from Noticias television, leaving the Pasadena Weekly with a citywide exclusive interview with Moore, thanks largely to the fact that that same night Moore abruptly called off the next day's scheduled press events in Beverly Hills in favor of participating in a health care reform rally at Los Angeles City Hall.
"I said to Michael I want people who are in the street and in the movie to see the movie, and asked if he could do a premiere on the streets of Skid Row. He loved the idea and made it all happen," said Andy Bales, CEO of the Union Rescue Mission. "I've seen the film four times at other cities' events and I think it will get people talking — and hopefully it's his goal too to move us from me-centered to we-centered society and make sure everyone has health care."
Children of God Indeed, "SiCKO" is a film that speaks squarely to the concerns of the poorest members of society, as when Moore tells the story of a 63-year-old homeless and disoriented woman named Carol Reyes, who was dumped off by a taxicab in front of Union Rescue Mission in March 2006 after officials at Kaiser Permanente's Bellflower hospital decided that caring for her had become too costly.
Moore shows the incredibly sad footage, taken by the Mission's security cameras, of Reyes pacing lost and alone and wearing only a thin hospital gown on the street. She had long lived in a public park in far-away Gardena and had no idea she would be dumped in downtown's Skid Row, leaving her in danger until Mission staff went out to see what was wrong.
Initially, it was impossible to determine which hospital she had come from because the names of two different hospitals had been rubbed out from her patient wristbands. But eventually the Bellflower hospital was pegged as the culprit, and public outrage forced officials to do their jobs.
Criminal charges were filed against the hospital's officials and Kaiser was forced to pay a large class-action lawsuit settlement designed to stop the practice of patient dumping from occurring again.
"These corporate hospitals like Kaiser take patients who can't afford to pay their own hospital bill in cabs and dump them like they're garbage in front of these buildings, when they're human beings created by God," says Moore, speaking from behind the giant movie screen on San Julian Street as "SiCKO" was shown.
"It's a travesty, and I'm so grateful to the people here at the Rescue Mission and Andy Bales because day after day, week after week, they saw sick people dumped here and one day they said 'enough is enough' and they called the police on the hospital, and the police and city attorney filed criminal charges. It was a rare moment when the rich faced arrest for their treatment of the poor.
"When somebody is left to die in an ER or on the streets of LA, you should call 911 and report an attempted murder: murder by the hospital, murder by the health insurance company, murder by the pharmaceutical company, because that's exactly what they're doing."
Reaching out It may sound like Moore is merely unleashing his usual righteous indignation, but the surprising thing about "SiCKO" is the fact that he lays out his arguments in a relatively subdued fashion. This isn't the Bush-bashing spectacular of "Fahrenheit," and he's not pulling a string of pranks to get his point across like he did on his two Emmy-winning 1990s TV series, "TV Nation" and "The Awful Truth." He doesn't crash the offices of any health care company to subject CEOs and their public relations shills to hilarious humiliation.
Instead, Moore realized that even as "Fahrenheit" exploded to set the all-time gross record for documentaries with its $120 million take, he had become such a polarizing figure that he risked having half of America tune him out completely on the subject. So he decided that — just as the best legislative progress comes from bipartisan cooperation — he too had to reach across the ideological divide and point out that the American health care debacle is no single party's fault.
He even takes his biggest slap at Hillary Clinton, pointing out that she sold out over the years between her 1994 efforts to create universal health care as first lady and her current status as Congress's second-largest recipient of health care lobbyist donations.
Moore's new approach is a decided attempt to have the issues take center stage, rather than his own controversial image, which was burned into the American psyche at the 2003 Oscars ceremony when he went on live worldwide television to warn that the rationale for the then-impending war in Iraq was built on lies rather than any genuine threat to our national safety.
"But people should ask why I'm controversial. I told the American people from the stage of the Oscars that we were being lied to about weapons of mass destruction and I got booed," he recalls. "These days, I get a lot of Republicans stopping me on the street and apologizing to me. They now see I was trying to warn them the Emperor has no clothes, and I'm now in the middle of mainstream America."
It's middle class, mainstream America that Moore really focuses on in "SiCKO." He realized that the media had long informed Americans of the fact that more than 50 million people lacked health coverage in the US, so he decided to turn his attention to those who are ostensibly covered and still get screwed through payment denials, refusals of life-saving procedures and insanely high premiums.
One particularly sad segment of the film spotlights the tragedy of Dawnelle Keys, a Los Angeles woman whose
18-month-old daughter Mychelle contracted a 104-degree fever, vomiting and diarrhea on May 6, 1993. Keys tried to take her toddler to the emergency room at King/Drew Medical Center and found a doctor who said Mychelle had a bacterial infection that needed immediate treatment with antibiotics.
Yet because King/Drew was considered an unaffiliated hospital under Keys' Kaiser Permanente health care plan, the insurance giant refused to approve the medication and attendant blood culture, forcing Keys to spend hours begging for an ambulance to take her daughter to a Kaiser-approved hospital.
By the time Mychelle was finally taken to the approved hospital, she was in need of resuscitation. Within 30 minutes of arrival at the "correct" facility, the child was dead.
"She would have been 15 and a half years old now," said Keys at a health care-reform rally Moore attended at Los Angeles City Hall on Tuesday morning.
Horror stories Other victims depicted in the movie include a retired couple who were forced to move into a relative's storage room when health care costs forced them to sell their house, and a woman whose husband died on her birthday because the health insurance company she worked for refused to approve a bone marrow transplant from his own brother.
Moore collected the tragic tales after putting out an open call through his Web site, www.michaelmoore.com, for people to submit their health care travails. Within a week, he had received more than 25,000 emails on the subject and that total continued to grow exponentially.
"Over the past few decades, the pharmaceutical companies have done an excellent organizing job for us. They have so abused the people of this country, even those who have health insurance, and the people who think they're covered find that the whole point of the companies is to see how little of the bill they have to pay," Moore said from the podium at the same rally.
"Health insurance in this country is a racket; it's Vegas, and the house always has to win. It's a system based on figuring out what the odds are and that's why they don't wanna insure people who might get sick. They send out investigative teams to find out if you had pre-existing conditions so they can get their money back."
"SiCKO" offers damning testimony from former insurance corporation employees who blow the whistle on the corner-cutting prevalent in the industry, with one woman showing that her former employer would refuse anyone who had any pre-existing condition found in a 37-page list. But the climax — and the film's sole problem-solving prank — centers upon the plight of volunteer 9/11 rescue workers who now suffer from life-threatening illnesses that the government won't cover because they weren't on the public payroll.
In a brilliant move, Moore rents three boats and fills them with the sick volunteers before making a hilarious trip to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. The reason for the excursion is that the US-run base houses accused terrorists, who, officials at the prison facility have openly bragged, receive the finest medical care possible.
Moore decides to take the rescue workers there in hopes of enabling them to receive the same quality care as our alleged national enemies. Instead, they wind up receiving the care they need and huge supplies of medicine from a Havana hospital, but the trip has nonetheless resulted in the US Commerce Department investigating whether Moore broke laws in defying the government's embargo against the communist nation.
"Sixty-two percent of the American public now is opposed to the embargo against Cuba. The American people have had it, and are tired of being told who the enemy is. The American people fell for that when we were told Saddam was going to attack us," Moore says at the Skid Row screening. "We don't wanna listen to anyone else in the government telling us who our enemy is, whether it's Saddam or Castro or whatever. We as human beings wanna live in this world with other human beings, and the people in Cuba are human beings and we want them to share with us and we will share with them."
Furthermore, Moore believes that government outrage over his trip is yet another sign of the Bush administration's efforts to quash dissent in the post-9/11 world.
"The Bush administration is coming after me because this film is an embarrassment to them. I pointed out how the detainees we have at Guantanamo Bay are getting better health care than the 9/11 rescue workers who ran down to Ground Zero to save peoples lives," says Moore. "That is so wrong on so many levels, so they're going after me because I point out the truth to people. What kind of free country is this anyways, where you make a documentary and you've got the government investigating you? What kind of free country is it where you can't travel where you want to travel? I'm just grateful the Bush administration is showing the American people exactly how free we are."
But what of those critics who point out that Cuba's health care system is ranked 39th in the world by the World Health Organization, two places behind America's supposedly hopeless system? The movie shows the list, but Moore himself doesn't discuss that salient point in the film. He had no problem laughing off the critique in his Skid Row interview, however.
"We're paying 60 times as much as the Cubans are," he says, shaking with laughter. "And we're only two steps ahead of them. I think it's pretty funny."
'A Christian thing to do' While the American way of life deteriorates at home, Moore shows that the quality of life in some other nations is vastly better. He takes the audience on a European vacation to England and France, revealing societies that are stable democracies with full speech and press freedoms and well-off families. In Paris, he joins a dinner of American expatriates who speak with awe at the services that French society provides, extending far beyond free health care to include 24-hour house calls from doctors, free college education and even free laundry service.
Yet the Americans stress that the tax rates in their adopted society don't cramp their dreams, pointing out that they have good homes and cars to go along with their lack of worry over basic survival.
And in England, he spotlights a doctor who still manages to own a new Audi and a million-dollar home on his government salary. Moore sums up the travelogue by questioning whether we're taught contempt for the French simply because the government doesn't want us to be jealous and start getting any ideas about free quality care for ourselves.
"These are countries that say we're all in the same boat and we sink or swim together. Countries that live with the concept of 'we' and not 'me.' It's not 'me me me' in these other countries, it's 'we,'" says Moore. "And if we allow too many people to slip between the cracks of society, we all suffer. Not just those who slip between the cracks, but all of society is ruined. All the rest of the world's 25 leading industrial nations provide health care as a basic human right. Could it be that maybe they're right and we're wrong?"
Despite all the sadness spotlighted in the film, Moore finds hope in the fact that the majority of Americans are finally getting fed up. While he argues that most Americans are brainwashed by newscasts often funded by pharmaceutical commercials, he also feels the true need for a better way is starting to break through the ad clutter.
Moore also said he was encouraged by California having two competing health care reform proposals working their way through the halls of government in Sacramento. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is touting a plan that mandates that all Californians purchase health insurance from a private carrier, but places few controls on the price and quality of the coverage. Businesses would be forced to spend 4 percent of their payroll costs on providing insurance to employees or paying into a state fund for uninsured workers.
Meanwhile, two competing Democratic bills offer their own distinct visions. Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez has a bill that would cover all children, but would not cover single, childless and unemployed adults and would exempt the self-employed and businesses with payrolls less than $100,000 per year.
Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata would also exempt the self-employed, but according to a report by the Los Angeles Times, would mandate health insurance for individuals making at least $40,840 per year and families of four with earnings at or more than $82,600.
But Moore believes that it's the federal government that needs to come up with one overarching piece of legislation in order to prevent a morass of 50 competing state-level bills, and he heartily endorses HR 676, a comprehensive health care bill co-sponsored by US Congressman and presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich and his fellow Democrat John Conyers.
Moore firmly believes that true and lasting reform is coming to America as soon as the current White House resident is shown the door at the end of 2008. But until then, he has three last things for all of us — especially the enemies who like to toss epithets such as "communist" at him — to consider.
"Go for a half-hour walk each day and eat some fruits and vegetables. Take care of yourself, and that's what I need to do," says Moore, who has lost 25 pounds and counting on a diet and exercise program. "Second, demand that the candidates running for president next year make a pledge to support universal health care for all, and it's not enough to say they want it — they need specifics in the plan.
"But behind it all, we need to realize that if we say we're a Christian nation, providing health care for every American is the Christian thing to do," concludes Moore, a Catholic who embarked on his quest for social justice after opting not to become a priest.
"I don't know why we call a Christian act socialism. I think Jesus would want for every one of us to take care of human beings and guarantee it for everyone."
06-28-07
Currently listening : Rent (2005 Movie Soundtrack) By Jonathan Larson Release date: 27 September, 2005
HANGING WITH DANE COOK AT DENNY'S
Nice and Twisted
Comedian Dane Cook has learned the secret to getting away with anything~
By CARL KOZLOWSKI for LA Citybeat~
Hanging out with comedian Dane Cook can be a dangerous proposition. By his own account, he estimates, "At least 15 of my favorite restaurants have closed after I started going there."
The closings weren't by order of the Health Department. Rather, they're just another part of the bizarre, unexplained events that seem to follow Cook everywhere he goes – whether his life is being threatened by a fellow customer for cutting in line at Rite Aid, or he's getting caught in the middle of a gang fight at the Sunset Strip's dearly departed "Rock 'n' Roll Denny's."
"I was sitting there with four of my buddies from Boston," says Cook over a long lunch at a different Denny's. "I had just said, 'I haven't had such a good time in a long time,' when suddenly 12 guys pull up in Escalades, come in, and immediately start throwing ketchup bottles at this group of guys who look pretty shady themselves. Every patron immediately went for the kitchen, because they were blocking the [exit] doors and whipping ketchup bottles, and at that moment I knew what the passengers of the Titanic felt like.
"But after it was over, I felt like, 'What a rush!'" He laughs, swigging a Coke. "But we should be scoping out places to hide right now. It's part of living in L.A., dude."
Cook's mix of comedic storytelling, manic energy, and self-deprecation has earned him a rabid following in both his native Boston – hometown of Jay Leno, Denis Leary, and Steven Wright, among many others – and his adopted hometown of Los Angeles. When his name is announced during his regular weekend gigs at the Laugh Factory, the crowd erupts in the kind of cheers normally lavished on rock stars – replete with squeals from female fans pleased to find in Cook a comic who resembles Ben Affleck more than Jon Lovitz.
Cook's career got another boost on Tuesday, when Comedy Central Records issued his new CD, Harmful If Swallowed, the inaugural release from the cable network's new label. It comes with a DVD compilation of his Comedy Central appearances, including the uncensored hour-long version of his 22-minute televised special. This fall, he'll appear in both the Farrelly Brothers' Siamese-twin comedy Stuck on You and the Ice Cube action flick Torque – and he's developing series ideas with UPN.
The release of Harmful also represents a vindication of Cook's lifelong comedic dreams. He grew up listening to Bill Cosby and Richard Pryor, and wishing he could duplicate their magic, but he might never have made it onto any stage, thanks to a crippling series of childhood panic attacks.
Cook literally had to pretend he didn't exist in order to survive his first performance. While trying to work up the courage to do his own material, he'd watch other Boston comics at an open mike hosted by a pre-fame, pre-Mr. Show David Cross.
"He kept asking for 'Ernest Glenn,' so my hand shot up on his fifth try of the name," Cook recalls. "I went onstage as Ernest Glenn and scored a laugh with my first joke. It was about a tabloid headline that read 'I Was Raped by a Snowman.' That's not part of my repertoire now."
What is part of his repertoire now is a freewheeling style that can have Cook humping a sidestage mirror or cracking jokes while performing handstands by the end of a set. He veers wildly between innocuously goofy ideas, such as wondering what it would be like to have a pet ram, and comically graphic tales of sexual embarrassments. Sit too close, and you might find him singling you out as someone who's just as twisted as he is.
"My being aggressive onstage now is all a put-on, because I used to be the most introverted guy in school," Cook says. "I would get sick if I had to talk in front of the class. Then I'd go home and tell my dad I wanted to be a standup, and he'd say, 'Whoa, then you've really got to find your voice, to talk to people.' Once I figured this out, standup saved my life and gave me a life. I'll always support it and do it, no matter where my career takes me."
One place his career has taken him is to the hallowed stages of the late-night talk shows. He was thrilled to land a spot on the Late Show with David Letterman, but that evening he got an even greater surprise upon learning in his dressing room that Letterman was sick, and the backup host would be none other than Cook's childhood hero, Bill Cosby.
"I couldn't believe how nice he was," Cook says. "He came into my room, where I was sitting alone waiting for my family, and talked to me for a half-hour about comedy, and made me feel like I was special, just saying my name over and over, like 'Dane Cook! Dane Cook is in the house!'" He slides into a pitch-perfect rendition of the comedy legend. "Then, as I was about to start my routine on the air, he came up and hugged me and whispered, 'Massachusetts, baby! Go get 'em!' and I had the best set of my life. Because what could go wrong after that?"
Indeed, not much has gone wrong, and these days each show Cook does seems like smooth sailing. The key to his success, he explains, lies in an old Redd Foxx quote.
"Years ago, Redd said one of my all-time favorite comments in comedy: 'If you're likable, you can get away with saying anything,'" he says. "I realized I was likable, and I decided to see how far I could push people, and how much I could get away with. I love dark and Evil Dead ideas, and those go through my brain, so I feel I can go from friendly, warm, and relatable to bizarre and twisted, and people will go along for the ride. Thankfully, they have." .. Added 09/24/06 MJL -->
07-24-03
Currently listening : Retaliation By Dane Cook Release date: 26 July, 2005
Comedian Dane Cook has learned the secret to getting away with anything~
By CARL KOZLOWSKI for LA Citybeat~
Hanging out with comedian Dane Cook can be a dangerous proposition. By his own account, he estimates, "At least 15 of my favorite restaurants have closed after I started going there."
The closings weren't by order of the Health Department. Rather, they're just another part of the bizarre, unexplained events that seem to follow Cook everywhere he goes – whether his life is being threatened by a fellow customer for cutting in line at Rite Aid, or he's getting caught in the middle of a gang fight at the Sunset Strip's dearly departed "Rock 'n' Roll Denny's."
"I was sitting there with four of my buddies from Boston," says Cook over a long lunch at a different Denny's. "I had just said, 'I haven't had such a good time in a long time,' when suddenly 12 guys pull up in Escalades, come in, and immediately start throwing ketchup bottles at this group of guys who look pretty shady themselves. Every patron immediately went for the kitchen, because they were blocking the [exit] doors and whipping ketchup bottles, and at that moment I knew what the passengers of the Titanic felt like.
"But after it was over, I felt like, 'What a rush!'" He laughs, swigging a Coke. "But we should be scoping out places to hide right now. It's part of living in L.A., dude."
Cook's mix of comedic storytelling, manic energy, and self-deprecation has earned him a rabid following in both his native Boston – hometown of Jay Leno, Denis Leary, and Steven Wright, among many others – and his adopted hometown of Los Angeles. When his name is announced during his regular weekend gigs at the Laugh Factory, the crowd erupts in the kind of cheers normally lavished on rock stars – replete with squeals from female fans pleased to find in Cook a comic who resembles Ben Affleck more than Jon Lovitz.
Cook's career got another boost on Tuesday, when Comedy Central Records issued his new CD, Harmful If Swallowed, the inaugural release from the cable network's new label. It comes with a DVD compilation of his Comedy Central appearances, including the uncensored hour-long version of his 22-minute televised special. This fall, he'll appear in both the Farrelly Brothers' Siamese-twin comedy Stuck on You and the Ice Cube action flick Torque – and he's developing series ideas with UPN.
The release of Harmful also represents a vindication of Cook's lifelong comedic dreams. He grew up listening to Bill Cosby and Richard Pryor, and wishing he could duplicate their magic, but he might never have made it onto any stage, thanks to a crippling series of childhood panic attacks.
Cook literally had to pretend he didn't exist in order to survive his first performance. While trying to work up the courage to do his own material, he'd watch other Boston comics at an open mike hosted by a pre-fame, pre-Mr. Show David Cross.
"He kept asking for 'Ernest Glenn,' so my hand shot up on his fifth try of the name," Cook recalls. "I went onstage as Ernest Glenn and scored a laugh with my first joke. It was about a tabloid headline that read 'I Was Raped by a Snowman.' That's not part of my repertoire now."
What is part of his repertoire now is a freewheeling style that can have Cook humping a sidestage mirror or cracking jokes while performing handstands by the end of a set. He veers wildly between innocuously goofy ideas, such as wondering what it would be like to have a pet ram, and comically graphic tales of sexual embarrassments. Sit too close, and you might find him singling you out as someone who's just as twisted as he is.
"My being aggressive onstage now is all a put-on, because I used to be the most introverted guy in school," Cook says. "I would get sick if I had to talk in front of the class. Then I'd go home and tell my dad I wanted to be a standup, and he'd say, 'Whoa, then you've really got to find your voice, to talk to people.' Once I figured this out, standup saved my life and gave me a life. I'll always support it and do it, no matter where my career takes me."
One place his career has taken him is to the hallowed stages of the late-night talk shows. He was thrilled to land a spot on the Late Show with David Letterman, but that evening he got an even greater surprise upon learning in his dressing room that Letterman was sick, and the backup host would be none other than Cook's childhood hero, Bill Cosby.
"I couldn't believe how nice he was," Cook says. "He came into my room, where I was sitting alone waiting for my family, and talked to me for a half-hour about comedy, and made me feel like I was special, just saying my name over and over, like 'Dane Cook! Dane Cook is in the house!'" He slides into a pitch-perfect rendition of the comedy legend. "Then, as I was about to start my routine on the air, he came up and hugged me and whispered, 'Massachusetts, baby! Go get 'em!' and I had the best set of my life. Because what could go wrong after that?"
Indeed, not much has gone wrong, and these days each show Cook does seems like smooth sailing. The key to his success, he explains, lies in an old Redd Foxx quote.
"Years ago, Redd said one of my all-time favorite comments in comedy: 'If you're likable, you can get away with saying anything,'" he says. "I realized I was likable, and I decided to see how far I could push people, and how much I could get away with. I love dark and Evil Dead ideas, and those go through my brain, so I feel I can go from friendly, warm, and relatable to bizarre and twisted, and people will go along for the ride. Thankfully, they have." .. Added 09/24/06 MJL -->
07-24-03
Currently listening : Retaliation By Dane Cook Release date: 26 July, 2005
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