A life lived as a blessing

Where to begin. Well, I need to open with a memorial to a great light that is gone from the world this week with the passing of Elizabeth Taylor.

It’s true that she’d become something of a ridiculous figure in the conflation of Hollywood excess and a Hollywood press with zero sense of perspective. To these people, an earthquake in Haiti is less interesting than George Clooney visiting the site of an earthquake in Haiti, and from that coverage you might come away with the impression that he’s solving the earthquake in Haiti.

So through within my lifetime, through the course of the 1970s and beyond she was moving away from an image of Hollywood royalty, transforming into an actress of a certain age (although in her interview with Johnny Carson at the age of 60 she looked amazing). The press was focused on her multiple marriages and her name became equated with AIDS activism, which was significant in that without high-profile support, a disease that was afflicting the dispossessed might have gone unaddressed, but she spent some of her star capital in that effort.

Mostly it haunts me because she has been my wife for many years. That is, she so inhabited the role of Martha in the movie version of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” opposite real-life hubby Richard Burton, and I’ve so associated with that role for so many years that the fact I’m prepping it for stage right now, actually, is a little unreal to me.

I hear echoes of the sharp, towering contempt she brought to her Oscar-winning delivery of Martha’s lines during rehearsal occasionally in the voice of my co-star Ceecy Nucker, and I forget that this was a woman who’d belonged to the world for so much of her life, starring in “National Velvet” as a pre-teen. That so much of her life played out in the public eye it’s hard to be the private person, a person who falls in love, a person who cares and feels things so deeply and reflects so much of that in her various roles. Oh, it was insane to cast her as Kate at her age and Burton as Petruchio at his, but in terms of simple glamor, her role in “Anthony and Cleopatra,” for instance, was among her most astonishing.

So when I see Anne Bancroft, Stockard Channing, Anjelica Huston, Mercedes Ruehl, Liza Minelli, some, Rosie Perez, heck, even Ann Hathaway is showing a bit of this dark, glamorous, maybe somewhat unconventional beauty, it’s an energy that seems to have some antecedent in Miss Liz, a woman whose immense talent and amazing heart helped us to reimagine a better world. Which is why maybe I’m taking it just a little bit harder now, prepping “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” for the community stage, because she’s so inextricably associated with that brash, discontented hausfrau. She set the bar so improbably high with her creation of her and in two weeks I’ll be reaching for it myself. Inspiration may well lead to aspiration, and in dedicated memory, resquiescat in pace, Miss Taylor, requiem aeternam dona eis domine.

From this loss it’s almost unseemly to return focus to television but it’s not like Elizabeth Taylor had no sense of humor. Oh, she had a fine sense of the ridiculous as well I have no doubt, but I think we can bridge this best with her decision to join the cast of “The Simpsons” in 1992 to voice Maggie Simpson’s first word, which was “Daddy.” Aww, how sweet.

“Chuck”

This week – well, Monday night, anyway – turned its attention to muuuuurder mysteries. On “Chuck,” they’re trying to figure out another spy to install the intersect in and Chuck’s first choice is an emotionally stunted geek clone of himself. Who is then killed in a locked room situation, and Chuck actually has to use logic to solve the mystery, which he seems able to do but only, and this is my least favorite means of doing this, by process of elimination.

There’s a detective series from the 1930s that seemed to determine whodunit by who’s still alive at the end of the who thing and no, “Ten Little Indians” is not one of my favorite Agatha Christie novels, although I’ve seen some hilarious spoofs of it. I think I’d like to try one where the remaining guests are increasingly nervous until someone looks and everyone has just gone outside or something.

So I object to this mostly because each new murder provides a whole fresh assortment of clues and indications as to who might have done it. And yes, I’m a bit irritated that most of the time the misdirection has worked and I can almost never figure it out until the big reveal, but at the same time I think that means I tend to enjoy it more so shut up – I may be stupid, but I’m having fun.

“Castle”

I didn’t know whodunit in the “Chuck” episode and I didn’t know it in the “Castle” episode either, which to be fair is usually a whodunit. I just kicked back and enjoyed the ride of a writer murdered on the set of the soap opera she wrote. Favorite exchange was between Castle and Becket. Castle: “Who’d want to kill a writer?” Becket: “Oh, so many reasons.” Very fun.

“Justified”

Speaking of whodunits, “Justified” was more of a “howcatchem” this week when through an unbelievably ridiculous set of circumstances, which translates to any time Stephen J. Root joins the cast of nearly anything – it happened in “24,” it happened in “True Blood,” it was a near constant on “NewsRadio” – anyway, through an unbelievably ridiculous set of circumstances, a $100 bill pulled from evidence was yanked in a robbery and traced to a big bag with the rest of the money that Raylan Givens’ ex-wife stole from lock-up and now he’s implicated for trying to help return it.

This is somewhat smaller than the usual problems we’re faced with on this show, but it’s likely to blow up into something huge. Especially in the case of a death at a coal mining operation that seems to have corrupted a judge in a trial going on in the building. I’m interested in seeing where they take things from here, though.

“Grey’s Anatomy”

And speaking of guest stars, I’m sure I’m not the only person who was surprised to see “Star Trek: TNG”s Marina Sirtis out of her interstellar eyeliner in “The Closer” a few years back. Well, the change was even more pronounced in this week’s episode of “Grey’s Anatomy.” She played a woman struggling with Alzheimer’s who’d been in Dr. Sheppard’s study until she learned her son had had to break up with his boyfriend overseas to care for her, and she was more interested in his own happiness than her own.

The episode closed on something of a cliffhanger, with Arizona proposing to Callie on their way to a weekend getaway, and getting hit by a truck. How that is going to translate into the musical episode they have scheduled for this week isn’t clear to me, but certianly emotions were running high, and I’m certainly looking forward to it. That’s some amazing investment in production for a medical rom-dram like that.

“Lights Out”

I was sorry to hear that “Lights Out” isn’t getting picked up for a second season. I think the show has been getting better as it’s developed and while I believe it would’ve been a better show if it had been more about Lights fighting Lights – his own inner demons and fears, rather than the somewhat heavy-handed Lights vs his family, Lights vs. the promotion, the indictment of the process itself – it’s one of those like “Terriers” I’d like to have seen get a better shake.

“Fairly Legal”

“Fairly Legal” on USA closed its first season this week with a pregnancy scare, an international incident, a pair of verkochte altern and a revelation that got Kate fired. Now I need to understand how to care about this. I mean for one thing Lauren is right. Kate is always, always late, she’s completely unreliable and I can only imagine it would be a relief to Leonardo to be fired because whenever she flakes out like a flippin’ Kardashian, it falls to him to smooth the ruffled feathers, indignation and anger she leaves in her wake.

However, Kate is also in possession of a material piece of evidence that her father built his law firm, Reed and Reed, with embezzled funds, which means outside the law firm might be the safest place for her to be anyway – and she could send the dogs at Lauren’s throat and take over the whole thing for a song anyway. She does have martial arts training and that’s an actual move, so it may occur to her.

Add to that this is “Fairly Legal,” which storywise is a lightweight even for USA and I guess I’ll watch it if it returns, and if it doesn’t I’m not out all that much.

Coming up

The main draw for the new week for me, besides the musical episode on “Grey’s,” is Tuesday’s premiere of Dana Delany in “Body of Proof,” airing at 10/9c on ABC, much more on that later. Also premiering next Sunday, AMC presents “The Killing,” about which I’ve heard almost nothing, that’s at 10/9c as well.

“Top Chef” is airing its finale this week. I’m not sure I care anymore but I may tune in, that’s Wednesday at 10/9c on Bravo. Marcel’s also got a new episode in the Quantum Kitchen, that’s at 10/9c Tuesday on Syfy. FOX features flash mobs in “Mobbed,” that’s Thursday at 9/8c, and if you missed it, you can check out an encore of the ultra-meta production of “Supernatural” titled “The French Mistake,” where Sam and Dean are yanked to this universe in which they are actors in a production on the CW, which has to be its own freakish hell dimension.

Apart from that, wonderful weeks everyone and again, for a life lived as a blessing, thank you, Elizabeth Taylor.