Monday, January 03, 2011

My Twitter 'War' With Sandra Bernhard

DISCLAIMER: The only way this situation could be more preposterous would be if Chelsea Handler got offended by me for being "vaguely racist."

If you are with me on Facebook or Twitter, then you may have already read that Sandra Bernhard -- who completely won me over as Masha in "The King of Comedy" and later in her one-woman show "Without You I'm Nothing" -- inexplicably cock blocked me from following her on Twitter recently. While I wrote online that I was especially perplexed because Sandra "wasn't following me" -- meaning she wasn't seeing any of the delightful things I've tweeted -- and that "I have never written to or about" her on Twitter, my pal Matt corrected me when he reminded me that I had forwarded a tweet he'd written about her to her once. From there, I did a little more digging around and discovered I had actually mentioned her a few other times -- they were so inconsequential to me that I had completely forgotten about them, but apparently she hasn't. Based on the time line of events, I have a pretty good idea which tweet soured the woman Laurie Stone of the Village Voice once described as "petty and bilious" on me. (The one other possibility is that she was offended by a drag-queen crack about the Williams sisters, whom she adores, I made on my blog.) I'd almost feel bad about blogging about this (passive-aggressive) Twitter war (that nobody cares about) if not for the fact that Sandra herself hilariously worked the Laurie Stone incident into her aforementioned "Without You I'm Nothing" show back in the day, going so far as to playing Stone's backtracking voicemail message onstage (and on Letterman!) until Stone called in a lawyer. With that in mind, I've posted the four tweets in question below, and I'm asking for you to vote for the one you think could have been so "offensive" as to turn Sandra Bernhard -- the woman who "joked" that Sarah Palin would be "gang-raped by my big black brothers" if she entered Manhattan -- against me.

I sent Sandra a note the other day to let her know that I was curious about her decision, and wanted to know if I had offended her in some way. (Mind you, blocking really does nothing. You can still view someone's feed and still reference them in messages, so the whole thing is pretty pointless and, um, petty.) In my message, I also reminded her that my principal memory of having any contact with her was when she referred a designer friend of hers to me to help promote his swimwear line. (I hadn't a clue as to how she even knew about my blog, but was tickled nonetheless.) She hasn't responded, but perhaps I'll get the chance to discuss it with her face to face. I realized the Twitter "blockage" when I was tweeting about having just bought tickets to see Rosanne Cash at the Rubin Museum later this month -- with special guest Sandra Bernhard!

Which was a response to this tweet from her: "today i will see my dentist he will look at my teeth and tell how beautiful he could make them look if i only let him."

Which was a response to this tweet from her: "kim clijsters is a great tennis champion why must the media insist on constantly reminding us she is a mother. no she is a tennis player."


Vote now. I'll let you know the results -- and my educated guess -- in a few days. I haven't been this flattered since Gawker banned me from commenting for being "too mean"(!).

Which Was the Toxic Tweet?
Dental FU Hall of Fame
Margaret Cho
Keep Kim's kid off the court
The Snatch Batch
Venus and Serena crack on blog
pollcode.com free polls




2 comments:

techdeco monk said...

I'm not sure what this post is about.

Warwick said...

TechDick: Perhaps a remedial reading comprehension class would be helpful.