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Recently in Salon People

Nothing Personal
Courtney Love: Baby talk
Tells mag she likes "porno 44DD" girls, "and they have to be really aggressive."
By Amy Reiter
[07/14/99]

Nothing Personal
Did Little John make Robin Hood's quiver shiver?
Professor says "merrie men" were making merry, but not making Maid Marian.
By Amy Reiter
[07/13/99]

People Feature
Inside baseball
Willie Mays talks about stickball in Harlem, today's best players and his ban from the game.
By Joan Walsh
[07/13/99]

Brilliant Careers
Willie Mays
In the mid-'60s, whites weren't ready for the best baseball player to be black, and blacks weren't ready for him to be black like Mays.
By Joan Walsh
[07/13/99]

Nothing Personal
Tori: "Get ready, 'cause here I come!"
Spelling says next lover better prepare for a passionate workout; Elsie the Cow: those lips, those eyes; Murdoch barred from his own office; woman battles sexism by donning pork chops. Plus: Check it out, Janet Reno mistaken for grocery clerk!
By Amy Reiter
[07/12/99]

Complete archives for People

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It was yet another hilarious example of the universal fact that anything you utterly, outspokenly reject: lovers, jobs -- Christ! even the fucking movie industry! -- will hunt you down like a dread wolverine, love-famished for you in equal degrees to the amount it ignored you when you were actually interested.

I handed the book package to the FedEx guy at the same moment I got in the car service sedan to go to the film set, feeling like I was pissing all over my own manifesto and finding that fact somehow karmically ticklish; a good and just revenge on myself.

Cintra Wilson Cintra Wilson's column appears every other Wednesday in People + Archives

So, I spent the rest of the day and night playing a recovering alcoholic on Sixth Avenue in front of the Limelight club, which from the outside looks like a church, which is in fact what it used to be, nothing being sacred anymore. On that July evening it was summer, fall and winter in front of the old church on Sixth, replete with stacks of real snow melting under the big lights and a bunch of us standing around in furry hats and mittens while sweaty paparazzi in tank tops jeered at us and tried to catch shots of Sandy B. with her mouth open.

Believe it or not, Sandra Bullock is actually pretty cool. I never thought I'd be one to think such a thing, Sandra Bullock being one of the highest ranking poster girls for everything I consider to be the hacking, shameful death of culture, but there you go.

You take one look at Sandra Bullock in person and you figure it out: She fits perfectly into movie stardom with the smooth machinery click of a math equation. She's so superlatively normal, she's like normalcy squared. Normalcy cubed. Super-attractive normal girl-next-door-at-the-office-in-the-cafe. Her features, taken individually, are kind of weird, but on her head they look really gorgeous, and given her trained eyes-wide-open, long-necked kind of behavioral carriage, she's really ravishing, in a totally normal way. She's a mouthy smarty-pants, she runs around the set giving everyone sass, glowing from all the slavering attention like a non-ornate street lamp; a functional kind of luminosity that does its job, and does it just fine. Still, you can work with her all day and hug her and admire her superhuman qualities all you like, then go home and forget all about her. She doesn't hang melancholy love hooks in your heart; you don't feel all wrecked that she's not your best friend, there's no addictive, heightened deity-aura to old Sandy. She's the kind of gal you'd feel OK about having help push your car if your alternator cacked out. She's folks.

I was sharing my trailer with a soap opera star; an attractive older lady, positively floral with Southern belle benevolence and saintly grace. I didn't recognize her because I don't have a TV, but as we were walking together every black person we passed on the street gave her beautiful, open-hearted compliments and greetings, which she returned with the gushing warmth of a favorite aunt. From the majestic way she treated her fans, I decided she was a good and selfless queen. Then we got on camera together, and I realized the woman was professionally hellbent on usurping the maximum amount of acceptable camera attention she could skillfully wring out of the situation, with a life-or-death seriousness that made my liver curl with fear. She stomped on my lines like they were on fire, and I got out of her way; I could see she was a goddess whose aging vanity would stop short of nothing. Thin as she was, I knew she would easily crush and hide my limp body under the nearest production truck if my elimination meant she could stand closer to Sandra B. in the shots. I slunk back to my trailer to read while she voraciously networked in between scenes. I was easily vibed away.

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