I'm Back for More Cash

by Tony Kornheiser

  Sadly, Mr. Bill is feeling the pinch. Last week he set up a legal defense fund for his client, begging the public to kick in. “My poor little girl can’t pay her bills. We have no money,” Ginsburg moaned, noting that Monica’s dad, Dr. Bernard Lewinsky, had already paid “as much as he had.”

  Perhaps it is chintzy of me to point out that a couple of pages away in the same newspaper where Mr. Bill was lamenting that the Lewinskys have run out of money, Mr. Bill himself was pictured getting into a limousine. Take the subway, pal. Or get Tim Russert to drive you.

  And the very next night Mr. Bill and Monica ate dinner at Morton’s, a steak joint where it’s impossible to get out the door for less than one hundred dollars a person.

  So if you’re contributing to the Monica Defense Fund, make sure to include an additional 20 percent for tips. And three dollars for valet parking.

  Another Pizza My Heart

  The Lewinsky Bandwagon, Week 6:

  Rollin’, rollin’, rollin’.

  The response is in, and it’s overwhelming. Everybody loves the Lewinsky Bandwagon.

  For example, reader Cindy Curtis from Reston, who writes: “Tony, Tony, Tony—enough is enough. How much interest can you squeeze out of Lewinsky? I remain your loyal reader. But ugh!”

  So for loyal readers like Ms. Curtis—and my new best friend, Mr. William Ginsburg, Esq.—and perhaps dozens more, the Lewinsky Bandwagon rolls on toward its ultimate destination: the E. Barrett Prettyman Courthouse in Washington, D.C., the site where Monica Lewinsky may someday testify. And perhaps even deliver a pizza, like she did to President Clinton in the Oval Office, according to his own deposition!

  Which brings us to the first question in today’s quiz.

  Who was E. Barrett Prettyman?

  No, everyone knows Mr. Prettyman was the plaintiff in an ill-fated plagiarism suit against Roy Orbison.

  Today’s first question is:

  What toppings were on the pizza Ms. Lewinsky brought to the president?

  a. Sausage and pepperoni.

  b. Capers, olives, and Kenneth Starr’s bloody head.

  c. Monica!

  (Forgive this intrusion, but I wanted to remind all loyal readers that fueling and caring for the Lewinsky Bandwagon costs money. We are looking for corporate sponsors compatible with Ms. Lewinsky’s new lifestyle. Perhaps a personal shopping service. Or a computer so she can continue to blithely e-mail her days away. Or a deluxe hair tamer. A crate of Häagen-Dazs. Thank you.)

  In the same deposition in which President Clinton remembered Monica “Deliver Me” Lewinsky bringing him a slice in the Oval Office, he also recalled having shagged Gennifer Flowers. Once. In 1977. (Once? Oh, please.) It must have been fabulous sex for him to remember it twenty-one years later, considering he can’t even remember meeting Paula Corbin Jones. You’d think he would have remembered his sack time with Ms. Flowers in 1992 when 60 Minutes asked him about it. This falls under the administration policy of “telling the truth slowly.”

  The big fish at the E. Barrett Prettyman Courthouse last week was Clinton’s golfing goombah, Vernon Jordan. In recent weeks much has been said about the nature of their private conversations, which have been characterized as “locker room talk.”

  Locker room talk focuses on:

  a. The pleasing aesthetics of the female physique.

  b. The type of bath towels available in a locker room, their fluffiness, their absorbency, and whether bar soap or liquid soap produces the richer lather.

  c. Are you an idiot? Hooters!

  At the conclusion of his first day of testimony, Jordan pledged his unending loyalty to President Clinton, saying, “Ours is … an enduring friendship based on mutual trust, respect, and admiration. That was true yesterday. That is true today. And it will be true tomorrow.”

  Vernon Jordan is so loyal to Clinton that he:

  a. Assured him Paula Corbin Jones was “bodacious.”

  b. Told the grand jury that he, not Monica Lewinsky, was having sex with Bill Clinton.

  c. Wears a collar that says, IF FOUND, PLEASE RETURN TO 1600 PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE.

  Except for one fancy dinner out, we didn’t see much of Monica last week. But her lawyer, “Bill” Ginsburg, was busy. He had a dustup with Ken “I Am the All-Powerful Oz” Starr. He swatted at a TV camera at Dulles on his way to California. And he made news with a bizarre revelation to Time magazine that he had “kissed that little girl’s inner thighs when she was six days old—I said, ‘Look at those little pulkies.’ ”

  “Pulkies” is an affectionate Yiddish term for drumsticks. One can only imagine the baffled look on the interviewer’s face as Ginsburg scrambled to explain the avuncular innocence of that kiss. Time reported the word as “polkas,” as if the Schmenge Brothers were in the room, and Ginsburg told me with a chuckle: “Never let a Time guy translate.”

  Yes, Ginsburg told me!

  He’d returned my call and said about last week’s column, “There’s no truth to the rumor that Wolf Blitzer and I are doing La Cage aux Folles in summer stock. But he’s leaving Lynn, and I am leaving Laura—and we’re moving in together.”

  Ginsburg also said, “You’re making a mistake picking on me. I’m a nice guy.”

  Which explains why there’s a shotgun seat for him here on the Lewinsky Bandwagon. Just don’t hit me, Bill.

  My other new best friend, literary agent Lucianne Goldberg—who started the Lewinsky Bandwagon rolling by suggesting to Linda Tripp that she use a tape recorder instead of hot curlers—also reported in to say that she enjoyed being called a shark in last week’s column. She faxed me this statement: “When you don’t get the royalties you are owed, and the publisher holds all your money as a reserve against returns—who you gonna call? Someone with beautiful manners, or someone with teeth?”

  Incidentally, to clarify terms in Clinton’s deposition, sexual relations were defined as “any contact with someone’s groin, buttocks, breast, or inner thigh if intended to stimulate sexual arousal.” That lets Ginsburg off the hook for the pulkies deal, and it takes Spin the Bottle out of play. But I’m not sure about those other pizza party games, including Hide the Pepperoni.

  Excerpted from the forthcoming best-seller Fun Facts About Bill and Lucianne. All rights reserved by Tony Kornheiser, Lucianne Goldberg, and William Ginsburg.

  Waiting for a Snowstorm and a Thirty-eight-inch Waist

  The Ice Age

  After living here for twenty years, I’ve learned that three things define Washington, D.C.

  1. Political scandal.

  2. Bad hair. (Not just mine, but get a load of Liddy Dole. Her hair is piled up so high she needs baling wire. Where does she get her hair done, the Cone Zone?)

  3. Weather-related panic shopping and hysterical school closings.

  That wimpy snow flurry Friday was nothing compared with the previous weekend, when we were hit by the biggest chunk of ice since Boris Yeltsin found out how to make a frozen Stoli margarita.

  Excuse me, Tony, but there was no ice storm that weekend.

  Oh.

  Hmmm. What do I do with all this canned fruit?

  You remember that storm, don’t you? You remember the panic as weathermen assured us a “significant accumulation of ice” was on its way?

  One-half inch of ice, they said, would snap trees in half. An inch would cause your roof to buckle. Two inches and your mail would have to be delivered by the Toronto Maple Leafs.

  You know the technical term for three inches of ice?

  The South Pole.

  We were getting four inches.

  You couldn’t escape the glum predictions. They were on every TV channel. You’d be watching a football game, and you’d see these words crawling across the screen: “From the Eyewitness News Storm Desk: We’re gonna get it. We’re not kidding. We are licensed meteorologists, dammit, and we’ve got Doppler! Snow is streaming in from the Midwest. Flakes as big as dogs. They’ve got hundred-car pileups in Ohio. AIIIEEEE!!!”

&nbs
p; The storm’s ETA was 4 P.M. Saturday. It would start as snow, change over to freezing rain and ice. And by Sunday morning we would all be dead.

  That Friday night I did what any father would do: I brought my children together and told them the ice would bring down power lines all around town, leaving us without heat and electricity, that our neighbors’ trees would come crashing down into our house. I told the kids to gather wood to burn in the fireplace to keep us warm until the Royal Canadian Mounties arrived in May.

  Early Saturday morning I went to the supermarket to load up on provisions. Me and everyone else in the metropolitan area. The supermarket lot was filled. Streets around the supermarket were filled. I ended up parking so far away that my car was in a town that wouldn’t even get snow!

  Everybody had the same thing in their shopping carts: bottled water and toilet paper.

  One woman had a cart filled with twelve jugs of water and eight six-packs of toilet paper. And I thought: Just how long does she expect to be snowed in? I mean, we’re not in Finland. It’ll be 45 degrees in two days.

  Still, I shuffled dutifully around the aisles, trying to figure out what to buy. But by this time the shelves were mostly picked clean. I thought I’d wandered into the Stalingrad Safeway. In produce they were down to a few scrawny heads of lettuce, nine Brussels sprouts, a bruised plum left over from the last millennium. As I pondered whether to buy it, three people reached for it like it was the Hope Diamond.

  Alas, there was no toilet paper left.

  So I bought loose-leaf paper.

  I saw people with cans of soup they’d have to eat cold when the power failed. Cold corn chowder. What could possibly be worse than that—maybe hot corn chowder?

  My friend Nancy says that in this circumstance the only things to buy are “comfort foods,” foods she describes as “we’re locked in this house for four days with the kids food.”

  You mean like sweet, oven-baked cinnamon rolls with gooey white frosting? I asked.

  “I mean like vodka,” she said.

  For some inexplicable reason I had a craving for Cream of Wheat, an item so unpopular that even in the face of imminent nuclear war it would still be on the shelves. So I picked up a box and went to see how long the checkout lines were. They were, uh, long. I would have needed a pitching wedge to get to the cashier.

  Luckily, I ran into a woman I knew, who graciously offered to buy the Cream of Wheat for me and drop it off at my house when she was done shopping. It was then 10:15 A.M., and she was about to get on a checkout line.

  “Um, you’re not thinking about having it for breakfast today, are you?” she asked.

  With my shopping out of the way and the storm of the century still a couple of hours away (This just in from the News 4 Ice Desk: “Oh, it’s coming, baby!”), I went to the 1:30 showing of the movie Shakespeare in Love. When I came out I hooted at the morons waiting in line for the 4:30 showing. They’d be iced in! They’d have to live off the Jujyfruits stuck beneath their seats. Hahaha.

  As I got in my car my heart swelled with joy as the first drops of freezing rain fell on my windshield. I went home to sit in my cold, dark, powerless home, like Ted Kaczynski.

  Well, the afternoon passed, then the evening. I saw a few flurries of snow, but nothing as terrifying as, say, Carol Channing in bright light. There was some freezing rain that laid a thin coating on the sidewalks. The TV weather poodles kept insisting the apocalypse was at hand. Eventually, I went to sleep, assuming I’d wake up in a world of darkness, fear, and death. Sort of like Pat Buchanan’s living room, only chillier.

  Rapping on my window woke me at 5 A.M. I bolted out of bed thinking it was a flock of arctic scavenger birds pecking on the glass, coming to feed on my frozen flesh.

  I walked to the window. Rain was washing down the street like a river. Water. No ice. But it was still dark, so I figured the streets were coated with black ice, which would surely kill us all within minutes.

  I went downstairs and opened the front door. I gasped. The temperature was in the high forties. It felt like spring.

  Good thing I loaded up on Cream of Wheat.

  Eat My Dusting

  Oh, sure, it’s easy to be a weatherman now, when temperatures are mild and daffodils are blooming. No need to hide under the bed anymore like a scared Chihuahua. They’re back on the set taking bows. A few sunny 65-degree days in March will do that.

  But let’s go back a few days—when THEY RUINED OUR LIVES!

  A “dusting”?

  That’s what I heard from my smiling weatherman at 6 A.M., as he put the kibosh on concerns that a big snow was headed for us. “A dusting to an inch,” he said dismissively, like maybe he’d call for a tee time.

  A few hours later more than a million commuters had that word—dusting—boring a hole in their craniums as they ground up a hill in first gear, fishtailing in snow up to their grillwork.

  Dust this, pal, is what they were thinking.

  We don’t ask much from the weatherman. There are maybe three days a year when we’re truly in need of an accurate forecast. Will it snow? How deep? Tell us that and we’ll even forgive that numskull chitchat with the anchor poodle about what the humidity does to your hair.

  A dusting is what, one quarter-inch max? I got ten inches.

  I got Norway in my backyard.

  Do you have any sense of how much you missed by? It’s like getting on a plane for New York and ending up in Kuala Lumpur. You expect a Knicks game at the Garden, and you get a rickshaw race in a dung heap. You couldn’t have missed by any more if you forecast “a plague of toads dropping from the sky.” If Mike Mussina were this far off with his pitches, he’d hit the third-base umpire.

  My favorite moment was watching the city’s most celebrated weathercast in midmorning—home of the Thomas Edison of Washington Weather, the man who invented “humiture,” a humidity and temperature index that he explains is “how it feels outside”; he particularly likes to talk about humiture in July, when we already know what it feels like outside. It feels like dying and decomposing. Anyway, this station’s weatherman was preening in front of his Digital Doppler as he confidently predicted, “The snow is expected to start around noon.”

  At that moment flakes the size of human skulls were streaming down, and my car already looked like the mutant Sta-Puft Marshmallow Man in Ghostbusters. I started screaming at the TV set: “LOOK OUT THE WINDOW, YOU MORON!”

  (I remember this moment very well, because I’d just read something in the paper that I’d found very funny. It was an article on Al Gore’s presidential chances. Gore, who as you know invented the Internet, the automobile, movable type, and oak trees, was said to be in trouble with many voters who felt he “lacked charisma.” Voters want charisma? My feeling is, Bill Clinton had so much “charisma” he needed to be blasted with a firehose.)

  Let’s be honest here: A baboon in a leisure suit could do as good a job with the weather as these guys. It’s not like they’ve been spending hours reading instruments and laboring over charts. That’s what the National Weather Service is for: Some guy in some office cubicle is most likely doing all the heavy lifting. These pretty boys are reading the weather, not predicting it. Being a TV weatherman takes one skill—pointing. You think you need Yale for that?

  By the way, the next day, did any of them go on the set—that is, if they could get to work through the snow—and say they were sorry?

  Nope.

  Not one of them had the decency to say: “I am lower than pond scum. I am so loathsome, I make my own mother gag. Please let me make it up to you. Allow me to shovel your walk and sculpt the slushy leftovers into your likeness with my bare hands.”

  Instead they grinned and said, “Well, we got a bit more snow than we figured on.” And they explained it with low-pressure ridges and jet streams and those little squiggly things on the map.

  I don’t care why it happened, isobar boy.

  I care that it doesn’t happen again.

  A couple of
days after the big snow I went to New York to watch the Lennox Lewis–Evander Holyfield fight. While I was there I turned on the Weather Channel and saw that another big snow was headed toward Washington. I was anxious to find out what the weathermen were saying, so I could alter my travel plans if necessary. I kept calling every twenty minutes to see if the snow would make me change my schedule.

  This time the weathermen had dropped the grandstanding in front of the Digital Doppler. Twelve inches in Fairfax had crimped their style. They gave the forecast like deer at an NRA convention.

  “We could get some accumulation,” they said, “or no accumulation—or who knows?—maybe another Ice Age. It could start as snow or rain or sleet, and change to sleet or snow or rain. It could start tonight, or tomorrow, or next Lent. You should bring an umbrella—or maybe a bathing suit if global warming kicks in early. We’d like to be more definitive, but it’s the weather, you know. It’s sort of unpredictable.”

  Spare us your sackcloth and ashes. How much snow?

  “Somewhere between a dusting and the Winter Olympics.”

  I Know Which Way the Wind Blows

  In my next life I want to come back as a weatherman.

  That way I can be dead wrong 80 percent of the time and not get fired.

  Excuse me, what happened to the snow?

  The storm was supposed to get here last Sunday, and snow through Monday and Tuesday. Washington was going to be so white it would look like an Osmond family reunion.

  Except by midday Monday the sun was out, the sky was blue, and whatever snow had fallen was gone. Tuesday I believe I wore shorts.

  Not that I’m bitter. But I do have a question: Which local TV weather team is gonna reimburse me for the “Convenient 28-Pack” of toilet paper I bought?

  This is the second time this winter our expert weathermen have predicted an apocalyptic amount of snow. They brayed it could be “the worst snowstorm in fifty years”—and we didn’t get jack. You may remember a few years ago when “a dusting” was infamously predicted at dawn. By 9 A.M. we were on our way to eleven inches! It was like waking up inside an Eskimo Pie!