Late last week, a beleaguered Arnold Schwarzenegger picked up the telephone and dialed his BFF to ask for some advice. And who better to help Mr. Schwarzenegger cope with the embarrassment of scandal than our own Willie Brown, who says the former governor "called Thursday night, as he often does just to talk." We'd like to think Willie takes calls like these in the lobby of the St. Regis, after a butler carries out a hamburger phone on a silver platter - but we digress! Willie is actually trying to defend his pal Arnold's behavior. After all, Arnold's only human.
The problem with that argument (besides the obvious fact that Arnold is actually a man-machine hybrid) is that part of being human in the year 2011 means you agreed to live in a particular society and live by it's generally accepted set of social norms. Things like not cheating on your wife and not knocking up your housekeeper (who is not your wife) are the kinds of things we, as a society, have decided are important guidelines to follow. Not following those guidelines doesn't mean one is immediately ostracized (we're beyond the scarlet A's at this point), but it does mean we get to make fun of that person in the tabloids while we feign outrage. So don't bother defending Arnold Schwarzenegger. We all knew the guy was a sleazebag, we're just happy we have the headlines to back up our suspicions.
One thing Willie is not defending is the food around Union Square. In his Wednesday Inside Scoop column, Willie says that when you're downtown there's really nowhere good to eat aside from Farallon or Bourbon Steak. That's funny, because he seemed pretty jazzed about Subway the other day, and there are three franchise locations within 4 blocks of Union Square. Anyhow, Willie ended up taking in a "casual bistro experience" at Scala's on Sutter and Powell (two blocks from a Subway), where a nice woman offered him her barstool - not out of respect for a former mayor as he assumed, but because she was trying to help out an elderly gentleman. Because he hates vegetables, Willie ate the Kobe steak with pommes frites.
Speaking of elderly gentlemen and meat, Willie ran in to noted pornographer and North Beach strip club owner Larry Flynt at the Four Seasons Hotel. Flynt, in a gold wheelchair, tugged on Willie's coat to talk to the former mayor about his new book, a work dedicated to outing "philandering politicians who present themselves as pillars of fidelity." Even though he just spent half his column talking about Arnold's extramarital romances, Willie calmly tells Mr. Flynt he won't find too many of those types of folks in California.
Still talking about sex, Willie describes this week's movie pick Bridesmaids as, "an X-rated, 'Sex and the City,'" because it opens with a sex scene that includes "instruction on the 10 positions of lovemaking." Willie might want to go back and ask his friend Larry Flynt about what constitutes an X-rated movie, because we don't recall seing so much as a stray nipple cross the screen in Bridesmaids, but Sex and the City left us traumatized after that Samantha Jones pube-dye incident.
Finally, a tender moment as Willie gave a convocation speech last week. A convocation speech for the GED graduation at San Francisco's Juvenile hall, that is. It wasn't nearly as glamorous as say, Michelle Obama speaking to the graduating class at Spelman College, but Da Mayor seems to have gotten more out of it than the kids themselves. As he made his way out of the building, Willie pondered his impact on those kids getting an education behind bars. If he convinced just one of them to make it on the outside, "it would be worth more than the whole stack of honorary degrees" people have given him over the years, including his honorary M.F.A. in the sandwich arts.
