To print this page, select "Print" from the File menu of your browser salon.com > People Oct. 4, 1999 URL: http://www.salon.com/people/col/reit/1999/10/04/nopersmon The dung show Psychotic reactions to elephant dung; Jesse Ventura ups the ante; Mormon TV snips the naughty bits. Plus, Susan Lucci gets her gun. - - - - - - - - - - - - By Amy Reiter If an elephant poops in a gallery and nobody there smells it, does it still raise a stink? That was the question at the celebrity-packed preview of the highly controversial "Sensation" show at the Brooklyn Museum of Art Thursday night. "I tried hard to smell Chris Ofili's elephant dung, but I could smell nothing. I was quite disappointed," Hugh Grant told New York party guy Baird Jones. Grant was referring, of course, to the British Turner Prize winner's "Holy Virgin Mary" (dunked in dung), which has so deeply offended Rudy Giuliani. Museum director Arnold Lehman also found the dung itself less than odorific. "But I am not aroma-oriented," he confessed. "I can never smell anything." Concurred artist Mike Starn of the Starn Twins, "There was no smell of any kind." But other keen-nosed celebs dissented. Novelist Tama Janowitz detected a strong "animal smell ... like a ferret I once owned," former Warhol acolyte Jane Holzer deemed it "an unpleasant smell, not my favorite," photographer Rose Hartman called it "slightly acidic" and art dealer Gracie Mansion (yep, that's her name) pronounced it "earthy and quite powerful." But then, she would. Anyway, these things are relative. "When you are surrounded by artists," sniffed writer Anthony Haden-Guest, "all you can really smell is the sweaty artists." Sculptor John Ahearn smelled marijuana, but that was either wafting up from the dance floor downstairs or just wishful thinking. (Cyberdung gapers can, by the way, get a load of the art exhibit on David Bowie's Web site. But, alas, you probably won't be able to smell anything ...) - - - - - - - - - - - - Roseanne gets a whiff "I have a huge germ thing right now. I don't want to have sex with anybody because they have germs and they're stinky." -- Roseanne, explaining why her marriage to Ben Thomas has been nookie-free for the last six months. - - - - - - - - - - - - As outrageous as sucking toes? Pundits aplenty are weighing in on the political shortsightedness of Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura's inane commentary on everything from religion (It's a "sham and crutch for weak-minded people") to fat people (they "can't push away from the table") to reincarnation ("I would like to come back as a 38 double-D bra") in the upcoming issue of Playboy -- but former Clintonista and recovering sex addict Dick Morris, no stranger to scandal himself, sees method in the Body's madness. "It's kind of the price of admission in the Reform Party. Everybody has to have their own outrageous quote," Morris said Thursday on FNC's "The Edge." "Pat Buchanan on the Nazis, God knows Ross Perot has had plenty of them and this is Jesse Ventura's entry ... [He's] anteing up." - - - - - - - - - - - - Maybe they should have gotten Uma ... "I haven't been this nervous since I danced with Tina Turner." -- Oprah Winfrey on her first foray into the classroom to teach a "Dynamics of Leadership" class at Northwestern University's Kellogg Graduate School of Management last week. - - - - - - - - - - - - Juicy bits Two things you can't say on Mormon Church-owned TV: "penis" and "shove it up your ass." Salt Lake City's KSL-TV snipped the words right out of the new NBC drama "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit" last week. But NBC Vice President of Publicity Rebecca Marks says KSL was the only network affiliate to gripe about the show's content. In other words, KSL, NBC thinks you can take your rotten censorship and shove it up your (bleep). Could Susan Lucci's year get any better? First, she finally scores that elusive Emmy, and now she's taking a turn on Broadway in "Annie Get Your Gun" while Bernadette Peters puts her feet up for a while. Now that audiences won't be close enough to see that coloring-way-outside-the-lines thing she does with her lipstick, maybe she'll only have to wait, say, 17 years for her Tony. That's not Shannen Doherty -- that's a man, baby. Actually, no. It's Shannen Doherty dressed like a man. Yep, watchers of "Charmed" on WB have something to look forward to in late October, when the network airs an episode in which Doherty's character morphs into a guy -- goatee and all. "I think I look like a freak," the actress told USA Today last week. "If I saw this man coming toward me, I would run." So would everyone else, but for different reasons. salon.com | Oct. 4, 1999