Fugger: Rihanna

One of my favorite things this week — in an OPRAH’S FAVORITE THINGS!!! sense, even — has been reading Julieanne Smolinski’s dispatches from the Rihanna 777 debacle. I don’t know if you’ve been keeping up with this, but it seems like (at best) not a great idea to really irritate the journalists you’ve invited on a press tour with you. It also, however, sounds like one of those debacles that makes said journalists really irritable but also a little bit gleeful about how snarky they’re going to get to be when they finally get to file. See: every Heatherette show Heather and I ever attended, and the Richie Rich show two years ago where we almost died but then lived to sit through seven hours of naked interpretative dance (that piece begins, “The experience of attending Richie Rich’s epic clusterfuck of a show on Thursday night may have destroyed us. Arrival to departure, it was a three-hour odyssey — an epic poem full of rage, drag queens, nudity, figure skaters, and, inexplicably, the attendance of a 4-year old child,” and it may be one of my favorite things we have ever written). So now every time I look at Rihanna, I think about how several of my comrades will never be able to hear her name without shuddering:

Which actually, at this point, seems like a fair reaction regardless. I mean, this is kind of horrible and droopy and she looks like someone from the cast of Newsies as costumed by Hefty, but the truth of that matter is that: I am really, really over her.