Brandon's Buzz

“Kenny Chesney’s Songs Sound the Same After a While”

— the headline from a Reuters review of Chesney’s recent Nashville gig

”It’s always dangerous in any country when you say, ‘We have this, except for you guys. Not you guys.’ Because you never know when you’re going to be piled into that group that doesn’t have freedom or whatever life affords everybody else. [The True Colors Tour] is an opportunity to step forward. I wanted to do it though the power of music and laughter and have information at people’s fingertips…. I’m not a politician, and I’m not a mathematician, but I do believe in equality. You’re gonna have to vote if you want everything equal because from what I remember from fourth or fifth grade, they always said, ‘Equal means the sum of all the parts.'”

— the terrific Cyndi Lauper (a self-professed “Brooklyn gal from the stoop”), discussing with Entertainment Weekly the monumentally successful annual tour she created in support of gay rights issues

“I love The Sopranos, it’s a fantastic show…. I’m fascinated by the writing. I’m a Jewish guy; if I wrote for The Sopranos, you’d be saying things like, ‘I am so in the Mafia!'”

— comedian Garry Shandling, opening the 2000 Primetime Emmy Awards

“The only talent I have is this: I’ll flap a piece of bologna in front of thousands of women and say, ‘This is a pig’s ass.'”

— Susan Powter, speaking to Elle magazine in 2006

“So now I have a house and I’m married and you know what’s next… I don’t know if it’s gonna happen. I get such family pressure about children! Like, my grandmother keeps asking me, ‘When am I gonna be a great grandmother?’ I keep saying, ‘I don’t know, I guess as soon as you do something extraordinary.'”

— the hilarious Rita Rudner, from her appearance on HBO’s One Night Stand

“Mean ol’ bitch, ain’t I?”

— my crazy aunt Sheila, politely declining a pushy customer’s request for a larger turkey leg. (Editor’s note: she prefaced this statement with the following: “Nobody’s better than anybody else.”)

“In the first 45 seconds of the reading… I [was] sitting there and I thought, ‘Okay, this is too embarrassing. I can’t say to anybody, ‘What is this about?” Because it’s a farce; it’s falling down funny! And they’ll just die laughing at me if I say, ‘Well, we have to figure out what it’s about.’ And I felt like a fool. So we start to read, and right at the beginning, [star] Tim [Curry] says, ‘I’m King Arthur, and these are the Knights of the Riiiind Table.’ And I thought, ‘Well, of course. It’s about class. It’s English. Everything English is about class. It’s their only subject!'”

— legendary director Mike Nichols, explaining to Charlie Rose the process of getting the Broadway musical Spamalot on its feet

“What I tell straight people in my stand-up is, if you watch ‘Will and Grace’ but don’t support gay marriage, then fuck you. Taking the flowers of a culture without easing the burden of minority is like when white people took rock & roll from black people in the ’50s: ‘I love that song, but please don’t use that drinking fountain.'”

— comedienne Margaret Cho, sounding off on same-sex unions

“Oh, look at this, it’s 96% fat free ham. Ham is fat free? Ham is fat free?! Did you know that ham was fat free? Oh, it’s a what? A pig? Isn’t that the universal symbol for fat?”

— the always welcome Susan Powter, with one of a multitude of worthy pullquotes from 1993’s original Stop the Insanity infomercial

“I’m a fan of science. I believe in science. I’m… humility before the facts… I find that a moving and beautiful thing. And belief in the unknown, I find less interesting. I find the known and the knowable interesting enough.”

— House star Hugh Laurie, discussing whether or not he shares his character’s skeptical streak, on Inside the Actors Studio.

While honored and flummoxed to have set off such a brush fire — a compound noun, that — with her grammar woes, Sherry Ann has requested that I kindly clarify some remarks from last night’s post.

Her take on the situation is as follows:

“Please let everyone know I was capable of doing my own homework. I was just unmotivated!”

And, of course, my rebuttal:

“That crazy heifer only wishes she could have survived Calculus and AP Chemistry II without me! Can you say pie in the sky?”

“Sometimes you write about the exact thing you saw, but other times you take something that happened over here and put it with something over there…. It’s a hybrid, but all together, it makes a whole truth.”

— the ever-estimable Joni Mitchell, vehemently disabusing Mojo Magazine of the notion that she is a “confessional” songwriter

(I swear I have other topics beyond my all-time favorite Brit. Nevertheless…)

“I’ve done too many stupid things for there not to be movies made about me when I’m dead. So I might as well write the script.”

— George Michael, speaking to Entertainment Weekly about his forthcoming memoirs