The show hasn’t reached my time zone yet, but by all Twitter accounts Betty White is killing it on “Saturday Night Live” tonight. But all this amazement that she can still do the job is a bit misplaced, no? For one thing, she’s only 88-years old. My buddy Antony Holland, whom some of you will know as the farting grandfather in National Lampoon’s Thanksgiving Family Reunion (though he’d probably prefer I mentioned his recent performance as King Lear) just turned 90, and he’s still doing the acting deed. And on stage too, which is a heckuva lot harder.

As for White, she first appeared on TV in 1939, three months after graduating from Beverly Hills High. If that isn’t a formula for killing it on “SNL” 71 years later, I’ll eat my “Golden Girls” Signed Pilot Episode TV Script. She was on “Live with Regis and Kelly” earlier this week claiming to be terrified about the whole thing, but that’s just a very canny performer warming up the house — not so much lowering expectations as raising the “Aww, isn’t she cute?” factor, which will make it all the funnier when she says “shit” and they beep her.

Of course, it was White’s Superbowl ad . . .

 
. . . that gave her cachet with a generation of viewers who didn’t know her from “The Golden Girls,” or “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” before that, or “Password” before that. I expect that’s what she meant when the president of her fan club (as quoted in that CNN article above) told her “When you’re hot you’re hot” and she replied “When you’re old, you’re old.” Not “I don’t know if I can do this” but “Stick around long enough, honey, and they’ll applaud you for getting up in the morning.”

Still, we should be grateful she’s not only still getting up in the morning, but heading down to the TV studio. I also expect the outsized reaction to her appearance on “SNL” has to do with the fact that she brings more skillz to the job than most of the hosts. Seventy-one years on camera will do that for you.

And yet, and yet . . . I found a live feed of the show while I was writing this, and even I find myself thinking: “Cool. She can still read the cue cards.” Call it the “We all love our grannies” syndrome. Good for Betty White for taking advantage of it. Canny. Not cute. Canny.

In the world of unlikely pairings, Cirque du Soleil and Michael Jackson is right up there with peanut butter and neoprene.  Both are great; both have no business calling each other up on a rainy Saturday to hang out.

One of the more appealing aspects of the 40-year-old Cirque is that the more it changes, the more it stays somewhere along the ethereal-yet-wackily-French-Canadian continuum.  No matter which of its many manifestations you plunk your change down to see, there will be contortionists in body paint and clowns on trampolines and someone will dangle from two sashes for longer than is actually worth watching. 

And while I’m all for changing it up, I’m heartily against fixing what ain’t broke, as well as shoe-horning what will not be gracefully shoe-horned.  Cirque has joined up with the omnipresent Michael Jackson Estate to form a new series of shows which, from the looks of the trailer

will be a mash-up of clips from This is It and the Cirque-robats wasting their trapezial talents popping and kicking and crotch-grabbing. 

These aren’t the first famous coat-tails Le Cirque has attempted to ride on, and the bastards they bore with both the Elvis and Beatles franchises are the ones best forgotten.  Jackson’s dance-floor tunes are even less suited to their majesti-comic atmosphere, leading me to the cynical?  Nay, obvious conclusion that this is a money-grab. 

You break my heart, Cirque.  You are supposed to be a thing of purity and preternaturally strong ladies.  Why can’t you just stand on your own bedizened feet?

Dear Kate Gosselin:

What a long, twisty road you have travelled! I first met you when the smiling, laughing faces of your sextuplets caught my eye as I channel-surfed one lazy afternoon. I confess, I fell in love with your children and spent many afternoons looking in on your family.

But I’m glad I stopped when things began to deteriorate. I wanted to see smiling children, not feuding parents and the mess of divorce. It was ugly, Kate, ugly. And all captured on TV and in magazines and tabloids.

Now, as the faces of your children fade from the airwaves and headlines, and they return to what I hope to be a normal, happy childhood, and your ex-husband, John, evaporates from memory, you remain.

You can be seen on solo appearances on talk shows, in interviews, are a steady author of sentimental and autobiographical books, and most recently, a participant on “Dancing with the Stars.” I’ve caught a few episodes of DWTS and your new-found hair-do. I’ve seen you rage, seen you pout, seen you struggle through the dance steps. And I’m hoping that tonight, now that you’ve been voted out, will be the last time I see you cry.

Go home, Kate. Stop pleading with viewers, trying to convince them you are a loving, devoted mother, and go home and be that woman. You don’t have to be a celebrity mom to be a good provider for your family. You don’t have to be constantly in the media to provide for your kids. Be a present mom, a constant mom in the lives of your munchkins, and maybe we’ll see you later. Later.

And if you don’t want to disappear from view entirely, let the tabloids capture photos of you, smiling, with your smiling kids, on a fun-filled family outing. You know, maybe with your hair pulled up in a pony-tail, relaxed and blissfully unaware that there are cameras pointed at you because you’re too busy interacting with the “Plus 8″ in your life.

Yours truly,

Jodi

Proposition: Ostensible tweenstress Miley Cyrus is, in fact, an aging dowager.

While her bio and her boobs say she’s still well shy of 20, Miley Cyrus’s actions have all the quiet desperation of a washed-up starlet three times her age.  The navel-exposing Myspaced photos “leaked” in 2008 are the closest to a sex-tape Hannah Montana could get without getting her blond-wigged ass fired.   And while her Disney persona is still too intact for her to have been technically “pole dancing” at the Teen Choice Awards, she was in fact dancing with a pole, giving salacious-headline-writers a way to kill time.  She’ll also be cameoing in the upcoming Sex and the City 2 movie, sure to win the approbation of desperate housewives and edgy gam-gams alike. 

And let us not forget this get-up, from this year’s Oscars:

That is a support under-garment, a very sparkly, very formal Mother of the Groom skirt in Old-Lady-Beige, and Jamie-Lee Curtis’s hair from that scene in True Lies where she tries to be a sexy stripper. In 1994.

La Cyrus is finally taking the last step towards cat-ladydom: getting her own place.  While other 17-year olds are slamming doors, sneaking out of windows and sullenly refusing dinner, Miley will be lounging parentless in her “really Zen” and “so chill” new home, burning incense and trying to convince the kids that she’s still hip.  “My religion is love, so my door is always open,” she says, as the last of her youth goes up in patchouli-smelling smoke.

Books are shit nowadays, and I blame you. 

You may not have made the book deal with “Jersey Shore”’s bronzed illiterates Ronnie and J-Woww (I wish that was a typo), but you will probably read it.  And even if you bypass what is sure to be the most gloriously misspelled Gym-Tan-Laundry manifesto, you watch the show.  And if you don’t watch “Jersey Shore” then you watch “The Hills,” which makes you directly responsible both for Lauren Conrad’s fame and her New York Times bestseller L.A. Candy.  (It also makes you responsible for Speidi, but I think we all have to take the hit on that one.)

And, fine, if both these shows fall out of your sphere of influence, then you at least know who Paris Hilton is, and, since her erstwhile fame rested solely on people knowing who she is, and her 2004 bestseller Confessions of an Heiress relied solely on that fame, you share the blame for that, too.

This is not a new infection, this shilling book deals to anyone with a known face, and it makes fiscal sense.  “Jersey Shore” already has an audience, and even if half of that audience (ostensibly) watches the show ironically, they will probably buy the book ironically too.  But e-books and the internet have already bitten a hunk out of the publishing industry, and it is bleeding out.  Fewer and fewer book contracts are being given out each year, and the more of them that go to People Whose Names Your 11-Year-Old Niece Knows, the fewer there will be for People Who Can Write Worth A Damn.

So I’m throwing down a gauntlet: put away the hard-covered fame-whoring.  I can’t not know who these people are, and I have no problem with watching deliciously trashy TV, but I won’t reward them for scribbling rubbish just because they can.  I don’t want to wake up in a world where Never Fall In Love At the Jersey Shore wins the Booker because there wasn’t enough space for Wolf Hall to exist.

If last year’s film version of the musical Nine is at all true to life (and I hope that it is, as there are gratuitous tambourines) then Daniel Day-Lewis gets all the ladies.  And apparently he is good for what ails you.

Exhibit A:  Nicole Kidman.  The frozen-faced starlet has wandered vaguely about town looking all one color for the past few years, drained of both emotion and of that lovely red hair that made her so stunning in Moulin Rouge.  While proximity to The Lewis failed to resuscitate her auburn locks, it at last gave her a red-gold sheen and about four minutes of actual emoting.

Exhibit B:  Kate Hudson.  Kate Hudson looks like she would cut a bitch.  The girl’s stank-eye switch is stuck in the “on” position, but you toss her next to El Daniel and suddenly she’s all dimples and beaded fringe and kicky dance numbers.

Exhibit C:  Sophie Loren.  Marginally less weathered.

Exhibit D:  Judi Dench.  No, scrap this one.  Judi Dench is and always will be flawless.

Exhibit E:  Penelope Cruz.  Stunning and intimidatingly perfect in real life; winsome and adorably dumb as D-L’s mistress.

Exhibit F:  F is for Fergie. Her stint as Young Dannyboy’s Favorite Beach-Whore saw her lose the severe SpaceLady make-up, gain about ten pounds, and let her hair down.  Pretty!  Relaxed!  Still slutty (Beach-Whore, after all) but way less pointy!

Exhibit G:  Take one Marion Cotillard, add one Daniel D-L and stir gently.  End product: Audrey Hepburn (with one Day-Lewis, remainder). 

Conclusion:  Someone needs to bottle this man’s essence and sell it.  I mean that in the least-dirty way possible.

The big buzz around the gossip-o-nets lately is that Megan Fox may have used a thumb-double in her terrible Superbowl commercial (*yawn*) and that John Mayer’s johnson is a white supremacist (*gnash*).  This makes it almost heart-stoppingly refreshing to see one of the biz’s young rabble-rousers use her celebrity for good, and not for idiocy.  Especially when it’s someone whose rabble is SO rousey.

Wearer-of-galaxies and eschewer-of-pants Lady Gaga joined iconic nutbar Cyndi Lauper on Good Morning America on Wednesday to promote MAC’s Viva Glam lipstick, the proceeds of which go to fund HIV/AIDS research.  Given that Gaga once gave an interview dressed entirely in Kermit-the-frog puppets (seriously, dozens of them) and writes song lyrics like ‘Ga ga ro-mama,’ I expected from her some sort of Paula-Abdul-esque nonsense about standing in your truth or eating a pizza salad.

Instead, the 23-year-old (‘this kid,’ as Lauper calls her) was articulate, passionate, and HUMBLE!  I know, right!?  Un-ex-pected.  Interviewer George Stephanopolous took a second off of the good-cause chatter to be all, Hey, so here you are in high school *obligatory photo* and five years later you MET THE QUEEN!  Which, the queen! Of England! That is awesome.  But instead of being all, Yes, the queen, my new album, I’m wearing Versace there, Gaga is like, I never knew that I would be allowed to have the responsibility that I have today EMPHASIS SO MUCH MINE!  Because even Spiderman was all, Ugh, responsibility.  But the Lady seems to be embracing it, and rather than hop on a charity bandwagon to enfamous herself, she is USING her FAME to HELP PEOPLE.

Clearly, this is the new wave of shock-rock.  Setting things on fire and eating pigeon-heads has been replaced by selfless campaigning and coherent sentence-making.  Those crazy kids, what will they think of next?

If 2009 was The Year When All Those Famous People Died, 2010 is shaping up to be The Year of Chronic Grave-Robbing (where the “grave” is metaphorical and the “robbing” is more like “exploiting”).

Mind-bogglingly unsubtle fame-whore and living manga doll Tila Tequila (who is famous solely for throwing herself repeatedly and frantically into the public eye) made no secret of her epic grief when her fiancee Casey Johnson passed away in January, which was Actually Really Sad. However,  Tila didn’t allow her overwhelming sorrow to halt her manic twittering, mud-slinging, and spotlight-hogging, and now that the buzz has died down she is poking the hornet’s nest once more by crying “Fetus!”

And I’m no one to throw sunshine at someone else’s grief parade, but now Tequila is all, This baby, that I am totally not lying about brewing currently (even though I have in the past lied about just such a thing, and with far less reason), this baby was supposed to be my baby with Casey, who I know I only knew for like, three weeks, but who I TOTALLY LOVED, and was totally sad about . . . and also still am.  *smiles to camera, slips nip*  Also, I will totally not tell you who the father is, but it is someone “known” and in the “Entertainment Industry” and I will continue to drop hints until your attention wanes, at which point I will probably just tell you.

And while I want to feel for La Tequila and her (probably non-existent) child, when I hear things like this (admittedly paraphrased) monologue, any kernel of sympathy I may have had dries up into . . . something that is drier than a kernel, anyways.  Coal?

Tila can perhaps be forgiven, since she is only being exactly what the industry has rewarded her for being.  Closer on the spectrum to Actual Doucheyness is Brittany Murphy’s husband, Simon Monjack.  Monjack is suing Warner Brothers for dropping his wife from the film Happy Feet, claiming that losing the gig is what caused Murphy’s heart attack in December (not, you know, drugs, or being really really skinny) and suing WB for wrongful death.  Because they should have known this would do her in?  Because they are responsible for her health and well-being?

Leaving aside the fact that Murphy’s death (like Johnson’s) was Actually Really Sad, as well as the fact that Murphy had not yet signed a contract for the cartoon and could therefore not technically be fired, this is pure crazy talk.  Hollywood can no more be responsible for the fate of the stars it chooses not to employ than I can be for the fate of all the cheeseburgers I choose not to eat.  This completely non-sense-making law suit is either a grief-crazed man lashing out, or a thinly-disguised money grab.

Either way, it has to stop.  It is one (admittedly despicable) thing for ambulance chasers and paparazzi to use public tragedy for their own ends.  They, at least, are up front about their motivation.  It is another thing entirely for loved ones of the Famous Dead to cash in on their affection.  Their grief is understandable; their shameless self-serving is reprehensible.

Alright, to save time we’re going to go ahead and take a head-count. If you have slept with Tiger Woods, I’m going to need you to go ahead and raise your hand. Yes, the young lady in the pink, I see that hand. Yes, ma’am, you and your daughter, check. Yes, in the back there . . . Nana, is that you?

By now the number of women not claiming to have shared a bed with the golf mogul is foundering under the weight of those who have. At the time of writing, 11 women have claimed that dubious prize and another handful are likely to report in by the end of the week. It has gotten to the point where news sources have to tack stories about Woods’ mother-in-law’s recent collapse onto the end of yet another story about yet another lady-pal because they can’t spare the (metaphorical) ink. I mean, the woman may be gravely ill, but TIGER HAS BEEN FORNICATING!!! AGAIN AND STILL!!!

But where are they all coming from? Rachel Uchitel was the first Tigress to be unearthed, but she was dragged from anonymity and through the mud by the National Enquirer. To date she is still all, Naw dude, those panties ain’t mine. This seems to have opened the floodgates, however, for every opportunistic young cocktail waitress or swimsuit model (or former Trashy Girls Lingerie employee or porn star [former or otherwise]) to claw their way into the spotlight. It’s like a 15-minute free-for-all.

Because Tiger doesn’t seem to be denying any of them. He was pretty well damned after the first few, and sorting through which ones he has and hasn’t actually slept with is only going to lend an air of lurid accounting to what is already a feeding frenzy. The sheer number of women scuttling out of the woodwork makes me doubt them, unless Tiger has wicked organizational skills — few of the women seem to have been aware of the others, and all of them seem oddly pissed. The did-she-or-didn’t-she is sort of moot, though. Even if the final tally ends up being scaled back to one or two, it’s unlikely that Tiger’s fans (and sponsors) will forgive him for having looked so damned good on paper, and for not actually being that shining beacon of hope.

So if you’re in the need for some quick celebrity, you can go ahead and chalk your name to the list. Or you can join the rest of the Oh-Noes-Brigade and ponder the likelihood of your own marriage surviving if this handsome young all-American and his hot wife can’t make it. Or you can refuse to believe any of it, or you can swallow all of it, or you can help Tiger escape his angry wife by guiding his Escalade through obstacles. I won’t lie, I’m hella good at that last one.

Oprah Winfrey has announced that she is quitting while she’s ahead, and putting her immensely popular talk show to rest. For real this time. Not like in 1997, when she said she was done, but was just psyching us out. Or like in 2004, when she did it again. This time she’s finished for realz. Probably.

And even those who don’t spend their afternoons spellbound by the Queen of the Couch can’t deny the lady her influence. Oprah has been a staple of afternoon television for 25 years, preceding Dr. Phil by a long shot and outlasting Ricky Lake by miles. Her plush sofas have been soaked in more heartfelt tears than Jessica Simpson’s pillow.

So what do we do now? Who will tell us what to read? And how to decorate for fall? And how to be our healthiest us, while her own weight boomerangs? (Whazzat? Kirstie Alley is still around?)

Fear not, world. The Hand of Oprah will still guide us through her magazine, her website, her radio channel, and her television network, OWN. There is little chance of us being left alone. Ever.