I don't know much about acting. I know what I like, and what I don't, but I haven't done any theater or acting work since I was a teenager. I decided to focus on music pretty early on and can talk volumes about that. But not today. Today I talk about an actress - Elizabeth Taylor.
In her prime she was freaking amazing. She knew her craft, understood nuance, could perform in roles that were nothing like her real life (and a couple that actually were) and despite the outlandish life she lead deserved the accolades she received. But more than anything, she's responsible for helping to put a human face on AIDS.
For musicians, it's the death of Freddie Mercury that brought AIDS home for all of us. For actors, it's Rock Hudson - but it wouldn't have been without Elizabeth Taylor. Hudson died back when we still didn't understand much about the disease - even those of us who had already lost count of the friends we had lost didn't fully grasp it. It was still "Gay Cancer" back in those days. Joan Collins, who had worked with and shared a screen kiss with Hudson less than a year before he died, had herself tested - because of that screen kiss. Television preachers were calling for the rounding up of all gays into concentration camps. Yes it sounds moronic now but that's how people saw the disease back then.
It took Elizabeth Taylor's reaction to her friend Rock Hudson's death to change everything. And it needed a Elizabeth Taylor. Someone respected who had lived in public for so long and under so many different circumstances that she didn't give a damn what anyone thought of her. Remember when Elton John and everyone else wrote "That's What Friends are For"? The song for a young boy dying of AIDS? Well, it was Elizabeth Taylor who introduced the boy to her musician friends during one of her many excursions to hospitals and hospices - raising tons of cash and awareness towards the disease.
I've lost friends to AIDS. I stopped counting the number of them when they reached double digits back in the 1980s. One was a close enough friend that I named my son after him. I'm quite familiar with how it changes a life - even the life of a person who never had it. Although the disease has become a part of people lives now, Elizabeth Taylor was one of the first people in the public eye to embrace the people as people and not as sinners or a byproduct of a lifestyle that they didn't understand. To Elizabeth it wasn't "Gay Cancer" but a disease that could hurt anyone, and that we weren't doing enough to figure it out. She was right, and she raised millions of dollars for the fight.
Even after her acting career waned, she raised money for AIDS charities. She was a wealthy woman but would lend her name and her fame to many causes that would raise awareness and money for AIDS research and its victims, even when she was in poor health herself. She refused to be sidelined - and in fact outlived the man who wrote her obituary by six years. She joined facebook and twitter and used them as well.
As I said, I don't know much about acting but I know what I like. I like Elizabeth Taylor.
Cheap Shots:
Keith Olbermann might not be on TV right now, but he still can do a Special Commentary.
So what will this thing look like? I picture a statue of a bunch of men reaching into a woman's vagina and attempting to pull. Eww.
Sadness. I have been to a few of these places - as a kid - and I remember them being vital.
And because I love you, something new from The Cars
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