When Melissa Etheridge was a girl, she longed to be a boy. But not just any boy.
"I tried very hard to look like Bruce Springsteen," Etheridge recalls in the latest installment of the Women's Entertainment network's "When I Was a Girl," which airs on Monday. "I was the band at my prom."
Oh, there were other boys, too -- even one of the animated variety.
"My favorite cartoon was 'The Archies,' and I was Reggie," she shares. "I didn't want to be freaky Archie and I didn't want to be Betty or Veronica, I wanted to be Reggie. He was cool."
Which is more than can be said of Etheridge's look as a teen, when she made a stab at girliness.
"I had this horrible perm," she says. "I went and saw 'A Star Is Born' with Barbra Streisand ... and I wanted that hair."
Not the nose, though.
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Don't have a mad cow, chap
"We're very excited about the episode, and rest assured every British cliché will be trotted out to get a laugh."
-- Don Payne, executive producer of "The Simpsons," on an upcoming episode of the animated show in which the Simpsons take London by storm and meet up with the likes of Ian McKellen and J.K. Rowling.
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Wham! U can't sing that?
George Michael is down on his knees.
"I'm begging, I'm hoping that there will not be a Band Aid 2," the former Wham! singer told the BBC, addressing rumors that pop stars like Kylie Minogue, Justin Timberlake and Pink may band together to put together an antiwar song and name themselves after the group in which he took part to send aid to Ethiopian famine victims back in 1984.
Why is Michael, who has been outspoken against war with Iraq, so adamant that his musical brethren not sing for peace? Apparently, he feels they don't deserve to.
"The reality is that very, very few people in the industry now, that you're hearing on the radio, make their money from their own hearts and minds," he explains. "They make their money from singing the words of others, and so therefore the weight of something called Band Aid 2 would be incredibly slight."
Slight ... and false, he says, adding, "I really hope the current pop music industry, the current generation, stays away from it because I really don't think it would be a very genuine move."
Big talk from Mister "I Want Your Sex."
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Zell, move away from there!
"What CBS and CEO [Les] Moonves propose to do with this cracker comedy is bigotry, pure and simple. Bigotry for big bucks. They know that the only minority left in this country that you can make fun of and demean and humiliate ... are hillbillies in particular and rural people in general."
-- Democratic Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia, taking to the Senate floor this week to voice his heartfelt objection to CBS's reported plans to launch a new reality-TV version of "The Beverly Hillbillies."
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Drop the drugs and walk on by?
Dionne Warwicke swears that the doobies airport security found in her bag at Miami International airport last year weren't hers, despite the fact that she copped a plea soon thereafter and agreed to attend a drug treatment program.
"Apparently, somebody that didn't want to get caught thought it would be better off in somebody else's bag," Warwicke explained to the Associated Press.
She herself wouldn't be caught dead carrying joints in a lipstick container, let alone smoking them, she insists.
"Drugs of every sort, including aspirin, are not anything I even think about," she said.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
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