Double Feature

After a whirlwind week with my friend Nina from Chicago, last night we decided to stay in after dinner and watch a movie. Nina had been dying for me to see the infamous 1970s documentary "Grey Gardens," which chronicles the lives of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis' aunt and cousin -- Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter, Edie -- who gained notoriety when the National Enquirer and the Suffolk County Health Department revealed that the two onetime debutantes lived in squalor and almost total isolation for more than 20 years in the mother's decrepit East Hampton mansion, Grey Gardens. If you haven't seen this, you must! It is everything reality television aspires to be and then some. The two women are delightfully out of touch with reality -- 79-year-old Mom still thinks she's an aspiring singer and 58-year-old daughter a flirtatious ingenue dancer. The things they say to each other make Judi Dench's character in "Notes On a Scandal" seem like Doris Day -- and their bizarre day-to-day routines -- like cooking corn on the cob in bed and feeding Wonder Bread to the raccoons who live in the attic -- have to be seen to be truly believed. While it may sound highly exploitational, the two Edies seem to relish their time in front of the camera and a chance to tell their side of the story, and at the end of the DVD the directors included the audio of a phone call between Little Edie and Albert Maysles (one of the film's producers and cinematographers) and the love and affection between them remained strong into the new millennium (Little Edie died in 2002).

Apparently a two-disc DVD was released last year that includes a whole separate film -- "The Beales of Grey Gardens" -- using the unused footage. I'm eager to see more ... I'm still completely in awe.

When we went to rent "Grey Gardens" we found out it was two-for-one night at my video store, so I reluctantly turned around to see if there was anything else near the checkout line that might be worth grabbing for "free." Out jumped "Jesus Camp," and we actually got around to watching that one, too. I mistakenly thought it was about a camp to turn gay kids straight, but it's actually almost scarier than even that. It chronicles this awkward, closeted lesbian with bad highlights, Becky Fisher, as she trains young soldiers in "God's Army" at a cult summer camp for evangelical Christian children in North Dakota. What happens next is beyond belief -- but let it suffice to say that Ted Haggard was involved and that Nina and I sat there in shock for 90 minutes. I'm petrified to go to sleep tonight because nightmares are assured. If this is what the future of America looks like, God help us all.