Bite Me, Tony

  Sirens Billed as a satire, the new Netflix series, Sirens , sends up the ultra-rich in this tale of two sisters, Devon and Simone. Simone, having left her hardscrabble life behind, has scored a coveted gig working as personal assistant to socialite Michaela ("call me Kiki") Kell. Kiki and her billionaire husband, Peter, live in a sprawling mansion on an island off the New England coast. Pampered and kowtowed to by a coterie of servants, Kiki smiles and purrs to all and sundry, while Simone barks Kiki's orders to the hired help via a megaphone. Despite her high-profile status as a hostess and fundraiser (for predatory rescue birds), Kiki has a few quirks. Primarily, Kiki has cultivated a devoted cultlike following of Stepford Wives who hang on Kiki's every word and whim. They smile incessantly, maintain an illusion of warmth, and don't seem to have any life outside Kiki's orbit. Under Kiki's mentorship, Simone has drunk the Kool-Aid and become a brittle ...

Cult Movies #5 In 1967, when director Franco Zeffirelli, was busy filming Romeo and Juliet in Italy, he spent his down time trying to seduce the young actor cast as Benvolio who, in turn, was having none of it. At least that's according to the actor who played Benvolio. A couple decades later, in 1987, that actor--Bruce Robinson--exacted his revenge by writing and directing the hilariously melancholy  Withnail and I , part of which satirizes a gentleman of a certain age  as he pursues a reluctant young straight man. Withnail and I is not an easy movie for some viewers to embrace; perhaps it's too squalid, what with all the drunkenness, profanity and drug use. Also, the lead characters are consistently awful and hardly endearing. That's part of what makes the film so funny: these two young actors, penniless, unemployed and living in a filthy flat, are continuously overwrought, acting out their frustrations offstage instead of on. I think it's a masterpiece but since th...

The five-season globetrotting of that rascally seductive serial killer, Joe Goldberg, has finally come to an end. Circling around to where the series began, You finds Joe back in the Big Apple, living in the limelight as he and billionaire wife, Kate, make the rounds of high-end restaurants, soirees, fundraisers and fashion shows. They're the IT couple of the moment and, with the sudden flush of celebrity, Joe has become a high-profile heartthrob for millions of New Yorkers. His past activities  apparently laid to rest (ahem), Joe lives a charmed life with Kate--now occupied with running her late father's business empire--and his young son, Henry (who you may, or may not, remember was born in season 3 during Joe's sojourn in California with the late Love Quinn). Joe would seem to be home free but, unfortunately, this is the winter of his discontent.  Kate needs help dealing with the swarm of hateful relatives/business associates circling around her, but she insists on ha...

Every bookstore worth its salt has a cat. The bookstore cat, aloof and superior, holds court from atop a favored cushion located somewhere within the shop. The cushion (or throne, as is more likely the case) generally adorns a once-comfy-but-never-fashionable 20th century chair or sofa punctuated by claw marks on both arms. In a pinch, a hard, wooden stool will do. Throughout the day, customers come and go, paying homage to the indifferent feline's magnificence as they browse from room to room. Be forewarned: bookstore cats can be capricious when showered with overt affection. Too much  rubbing will almost certainly result in a peremptory hiss or perhaps even a quick nip from sharp, tiny teeth. The bookstore cat is  royalty  and demands to be treated as such: it has never missed a meal during any of its nine lives but cleverly conceals its generous bulk beneath a lush fur coat that continually scatters behind this majestic creature as it slinks from one place of repo...

The Betrayal of Thomas True Molly houses are not establishments regularly covered in History 101, or even in Lucy Worsley's highly regarded documentary programs on PBS. In fact, unless you're a gay British scholar you are unlikely to have come across the term "molly house". And yet, in London during the 18th and early 19th centuries, molly houses were infamous. Under cover of darkness, sodomites (or "mollies", hence the term molly house) gathered in secret meeting places to socialize with other like-minded men. 200+ years ago, "gay" was not a term used to describe this much vilified group of degenerates . Our modern equivalent of a molly house would be a combination gay bar, drag venue, sex club, and relatively safe haven for outcasts to form chosen families when they were cast out by their own. Not unlike more recent times, there were frequent raids on molly houses, depending on the whims of a constabulary willing to overlook these illegal es...