Kathy E-mail Watch: Nothing yet. And time's a-wasting until she performs at the casino up in Niagara Falls. Certain recappers might not have found out about the show until after it sold out and could use the hookup.
This week's stand-up snippet sees Kathy talking about hooking her mother up with the best old-lady gadgets money can buy. God help us all if Maggie Griffin ever gets the use of a Hoveround.
Okay, this I didn't know about The Secret: You're supposed to post the things you're hoping on a bulletin board until they come true? Wow. No wonder that book is such a raging success. You know Oprah's Secret Board has, like, "President Barack Obama," "Tyra Show canceled," and "Lose 50 pounds by the time I take over the world." Anyway, Kathy's had a trip to Bora Bora up on the Secret Board for a while, and that one's actually coming true. Also on Kathy's Secret Board: "Win PGA Award" (uh...sorry), "Trip to Italy," "Trip to Bali," "Pay off credit cards," and a photo of Tiffany with Justin Timberlake. You and me both, lady. The Bora Bora gig is what Kathy calls a "gay on-land cruise," which essentially means you do all the things you'd do on a gay cruise, only at a resort instead of on a boat. Kathy, if you can believe it, is psyched. At this rate, Kathy will have met every homosexual in America by November.
So while Kathy contemplates trying out some new gay material ("gaybies" jokes are the new thing), Team Griffin wonders if this means they'll get a vacation. Kathy says they will, though she'll be busy glad-handling like crazy. She stresses the D-List nature of this gig, as she must, saying that when Chris Rock does a gig, he doesn't have to stick around for three days doing picnics and luaus. Tom starts creepily anticipating "them girls in the bikinis," while Kathy can't wait to see him strut around the gays in his bathing suit. That makes one of us.
Later, Maggie (armed with her glass of wine) helps Kathy pack and agrees to watch the house and the dogs while Kathy's gone. Kathy interviews that lately, Maggie's whole life has revolved around hanging with her gays -- who used to be Kathy's gays. She says when she gets back from Bora Bora, her niece and nephew will be visiting, and hopefully they'll convince Maggie to act her age, and Kathy can have her gays back. She and Maggie chat about island-y things, including the fact that Maggie never learned to swim and Kathy's close resemblance to "tall, tan, dark, and lovely" island women.
Before you know it, we're in Bora Bora. Which, I'm not gonna lie, looks disgustingly beautiful. The resort Kathy's staying at features a bunch of poshly decked-out huts along a boardwalk on top of the water. I am suddenly willing to kill multiple people to stay there. Team Griffin revels in their swank accommodations. Since this is Kathy's one afternoon of relaxation before she has to start performing, Team Griffin takes some time to swim and kayak. Jessica and Tiffany are terrors in their kayak, while Tom ends up drifting all alone in the water for what appears to be several hours. That man is a profile just waiting for a crime.
Kathy shows up for her gig, which is at this semi-outdoor restaurant. The cruise director guy (I guess) tells Kathy the split in the crowd is about 60/40 gay, which of course is far too many straight people for Kathy's taste. There goes all her lube material. Since Kathy's gonna be here all weekend, she's going table-to-table, essentially performing recon for anything scandalous she can use in her act. And much to Kathy's surprise, the majority of the drama lies with the straight people. Threesomes and swinging divorcees and other such deviant behavior that should preclude all straights from ever getting legally married. Kathy makes diligent notes on the Peyton Place-style shenanigans going down.
Another table boasts four straight women courting a rich gay dude (who later ends up drunkenly stalking Kathy), while another table has a straight guy (...or a lesbian, SORRY) asking Kathy how to say "suck it" in Polynesian. Lucky for them Kathy memorized it on the boat.
Kathy's opening act is this tranny singer/stripper who looks like one of the Misfits from Jem and the Holograms. A Kathy voice-over tells us the show, in all its D-List cheapness, couldn't get the rights to the song. I tried to tell what it was by lip-reading, but if it's not "He met Marmalade down in old New Orleans," I can't catch it.
So Kathy gets up to perform and starts well with some banter with the tranny stripper. But it all goes horribly south when she breaks out the "gaybies" material. Turns out homosexual parents are just as uptight and self-righteous about their divine right of child-rearing as heterosexual parents are. So no one's having it, and Kathy breaks out in what she calls the "flop sweat," but I contend that 100 degrees in Tahiti is 100 degrees in Tahiti. But she bombs, is the point, and bombs terribly.
After the show, Kathy sits down and talks with fellow comic Mario Cantone, who I guess was at the show too. Full disclosure: I love Mario Cantone. I know people find him abrasive and whatnot, but I think he's lovely. Anyway, they have a really genuine talk about bombing and the "gaybies" jokes and offending gay audiences and such. It's comic shop-talk, basically, with the added bonus of them both being gay icons talking about gay taboos. This could have been the whole episode. Mario's super-supportive and tells her to get back up there the night and knock 'em dead. "Take the money, go home, and buy your mother a nice encyclopedia set." Love him. Kathy interviews some self-deprecating stuff about Mario being a big Sex & the City star and pitying her, but I don't buy it.
The day, Kathy and Team Griffin head off to another island, where Kathy once again plays Happy Fun Gal to the vacationers. India, the tranny stripper who I guess I have to start calling by name, welcomes them to "Fantasy Island," and there's some fun time watching silly Americans try to hack into a coconut. This is a lunch-type outing, so Kathy goes from table to table just talking with the people. There's a lesbian who works for the company that makes Life Alert, and she offers to be Kathy's hookup so she can buy her mom one. At another table, they're all gossiping about Todd, the rich gay stalker from the night before, who apparently had been acting up all over the island. He's apparently some kind of pan-sexual pharmacology experiment gone wrong. Kathy's loving this part. She interviews that if she could just spend the whole time gossiping with the vacationers, she'd be all kinds of set.
Kathy finds this gigantically tall guy wearing a Lakers shirt and, divining that he's straight, recruits him to be Tom's sought-after straight friend.
up is an interview with a travel magazine guy, who asks Kathy some fairly pedestrian questions, though when he gets to the subject of Botox, Kathy takes the opportunity to clear the air. She says she hasn't had any plastic surgery in five years, so despite her long-standing reputation as a trailblazer for the nip and tuck, she's now one of the few people in Hollywood who can make expressions with their face. She also says the one person she'd like to be on the island with is her mom. Kathy then interviews, yet again, that she needs to find her mom some friends her own age. I get that this is probably going to come up by episode's end, but it's eight kinds of awkward shoving the build-up into these scenes all willy-nilly.
Continuing the summer camp theme of the weekend, it's time for Truth or Dare, hosted by India. India's like a master of disguise (go figure) because now she looks like Heidi Klum. Not the drag version of Heidi Klum, either. Go India. Kathy dares one guy to tickle the balls of one of the cameramen, which ends up with the tickler chasing the cameraman halfway across the beach. "Scared he might like it," is Kathy's verdict. Mmm-hmm. Kathy dares India to kiss her open-mouthed, with tongue. India is freaked out by this. Kathy promises only three seconds, but Tiffany helpfully points out that's barely enough time to stick your tongue in someone else's mouth to begin with. Cogent point, Tiffany. Aren't you supposed to be on vacation? Quit working! All in all, the day's events totally win Kathy back into the collective gay bosom.
For the last night in Bora Bora, there's some traditional Polynesian dancing, followed by what Kathy hopes will be her "white Jennifer Hudson" performance where she will refuse to let the audience not love her. All jokes aside, she's crazy nervous. Team Griffin gets called out to dance with the professionals, and all of a sudden there's rich, stalker Todd -- who is now being referred to as "The Todd," in clear violation of Scrubs' firsties -- is all up in her business again. Kathy interviews that Todd's throwing her off her game even worse now.
The stand-up gets off to a rollicking start -- Kathy even gets a good laugh out of Tom retrieving a bottle of water for half-naked India, who Kathy surmises may "have a secret" for Tom -- but it goes to a whole 'nother level once she starts on the material about The Todd. She recounts all the hot gossip about Todd, and while the audience the other night was none too thrilled with her talking about their own dirty laundry, everybody's happy to hear about Todd's mysteries and scandals. It's a perfect microcosm: Kathy Griffin goes to a tropical island, finds the one celebrity among the group, and gets big laughs by talking about him. So Kathy kills; her winning-back of the gays is complete.
Back in L.A., Kathy's niece and nephew, J.P. and Claire hit the town (looking surly as you please for two kids spending the week in Kathy's sweet pad), ostensibly to convince Maggie to act her age and relinquish Kathy's gays. J.P. couldn't be less interested (and he should also SIT UP STRAIGHT, but I'm not his mother), but Claire actually engages Kathy in her idiot plan to take Maggie to visit a Seniors Retirement Village (or "Doggie Day Care," as Kathy calls it). The four of them head off to the Retirement Castle, where Kathy tries to dazzle Maggie with wine and snacks. Maggie seems to be enjoying things okay, despite the hard sell from Kathy and Claire. Maggie starts sizing up the dessert plates to see if they could fit in her purse (that's my girl!), which is probably what's bugging Kathy when she bitches that Maggie's always acting like Kathy's an embarrassment to the family. "Like we're the fucking Rockefellers." Maggie says it's a place she could see herself visiting, from time to time. Though, honestly, for 87, she seemed the most vibrant, youthful one out of all of them. Including J.P.
After the break, Kathy has some deception planned for her mom. She gets Patrick -- Maggie's new gay, remember -- to take part in a ruse where he pretends he sold Kathy's dad's old scooter on eBay. (In reality, Kathy gave it away to charity.) Meanwhile, Kathy and the kids present Maggie with a variety of old-people toys, like ambient noise machines and those mechanical arm-gripper things that I so totally wished I had the day I had to remove a dead mouse from my apartment.
Then, one final surprise for her Maggie: a Hoveround! Oh shit. She's resistant at first, but in the end, no one can resist the urge to motor around one's own condo in their very own scooter. Maggie ends up leading a modestly-paced parade around the condo, looking like she's taking to the Hoveround just fine. Hide your dessert plates.
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Joe R thinks Maggie Griffin deserved an Emmy nomination of her own. He can be reached for comment via e-mail.