karl rove and sarah jessica parker: what you don't know

Surely you have been following the Karl Rove leak scandal with a combination of disgust, dread, cynicism, fear and utter unsurprise that "the architect" of Bush's 2004 "re-election" and the Iraq War may or may not have leaked the name of a CIA Agent in order to discredit her ambassador husband, who says he has evidence that the African nation Rove was blaming for selling uranium to Iraq (leading to their never-existed WMDs, the WMDs that Rove used to justify the whole Iraq War in the first place) could not, in fact, have done anything of the sort. Surely.

The news coverage in The Voice is particularly excellent this week. Read the whole section.

And now, without diminishing the gravity of the situation, I shall elaborate upon my sensational header.

In James Ridgeway's piece Grime Pays: a Karl Rove Chronological Tour, Making All the Stops, he describes one of Rove's early, dirty-campaign tricksicles, a privileged-man's frathouse stunt to end all frathouse stunts:

FALL 1970: Rove pays visit to Chicago campaign headquarters of Alan Dixon, a Democrat running for state treasurer. Disguised as a volunteer, Rove steals official campaign letterhead and sends out 1,000 invitations to people in the city's red-light district and soup kitchens, offering "free beer, free food, girls, and a good time for nothing" at Dixon headquarters. When hundreds of homeless and alcoholic Chicagoans show up at a fancy Dixon reception, Rove succeeds in embarrassing the candidate. Dixon still wins the election.

Now. To those of you who have seen 1985 dance movie Girls Just Wanna Have Fun--the film that, along with Flashdance, set down the boy-meets-girl class-struggle template for many dance movies to follow, including Dirty Dancing--the above paragraph will sound incredibly familiar. Not only is Girls set in Chicago, but you may recall the scene in which Sarah Jessica Parker, Helen Hunt and wee Shannen Doherty discover that bitchy, wealthy socialite rival Natalie is having an exclusive debutante ball. The three spunky chicas, all wearing acid-wash jean-skirts, furtively "borrow" an invite from a neutral party, race down to the local photocopy shop where they order "50--no, a HUNDRED and fifty" copies, then hit the mall, passing invites to punks, drug addicts, new wavers, lesbian bodybuilders, and other malcontents and social misfits--all to the tune of Cyndi Lauper's classic "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun," sung by someone who is painfully not Cyndi Lauper.

When the punks literally crash the party [read: the Clinton years] by jumping through a WINDOW at the country club (despite the fact that they all have invites), it's not just time for choreographed dance numbers... it's time to destroy the food spread. A guy with a liberty hawk puts his Converse inside a turkey, and Jonathan Silverman's character drops a blueberry pie in Natalie's important dad's toupee, "RUINING his beautiful SILVER HAIR" (all to the tune of Holland's "Wake Up the Neighborhood"). Natalie, the pride and the fury, is totally humiliated--no, perturbed: "THIS. MEANS. WAR." [Rove again!] In retaliation, she coaxes her dad [Rove] into using his political/corporate leverage to make sure she [Bush] and her 7-foot-tall beefcake professional dance partner [Cheney] win the DTV dance contest against Sarah Jessica Parker [Kerry] and her SUPER hottie partner [Edwards]. (The super hottie partner being basketball fan/dancer/rebel-with-a-heart/prototype of my perfect boyfriend Jeff Malene, played by Lee Montgomery.)

Paying off the judges... would Karl Rove do that? Hmmm. Was Girls Just Wanna Have Fun writer Amy Spies--who later wrote on the Doherty's much-loved series Beverly Hills 90210--referencing Chicago political history, but flipping the script to fit with her class sympathies? Was she visually redeeming Alan Dixon through a film for teens about a television dance contest, and perhaps making further commentary on the dearth of women and/or the lack of representation and voice teen girls have in politics? Did she, by setting her story in Chicago and perhaps referencing Rove's political behavior there, foretell the Bush administration's demise?

I don't immediately know, because there is no good bio information on Amy Spies on the interweb, and whether she is either political OR a medium. But when in doubt, call the Screen Actors' Guild "Actors to Find" 800 number. Feel free to bet on whether I will actually do this.