I thought everybody knew this, but Dick Van Dyke’s new book includes candid revelations about his alcoholism.
Isn’t is freaky to think that one of the most beloved married couples in TV history were, in real life, a couple of raging drunks?
Now if someone could put together a mashup of The Dick Van Dyke Show and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf, that would be great.
Thanks.
UPDATE: turns out, kids these days don’t even take drugs right…
For fellow Celebrity Rehab watchers who’ve asked themselves, “Who the f*** is Bob Forrest?” — turns out he fronted a California punk band even I’d never heard of. Ooops.
The other day Arnie wondered who was slated to appear on the next Celebrity Rehab, and — thanks, Google — holy crap: Amy Fisher!
It would be amazing if they could get Joey Buttafuco in there at the same time.
Don’t laugh: Dr. Drew put the Hollywood Madam and her ex-thingie Tom Sizemore in together last season.
He also had one 80s sitcom star and his soon to be ex-wife in a kind of adjoining set up; in one episode she — I’m not joking — was whispering to the guy through the thick, flowering trellis that separated the wards, and rustled the leaves to get his attention. It was like a lost Sid and Marty Croft pilot.
Dr. Drew’s reliance of co-ed rehab goes against everything I ever heard; people are always trying to have sex in rehab, and pick each other up at meetings (“13 Stepping”):
Whether or not you succumb is often a roll of the dice based on who you end up with in the sober cesspool. Meaning: lust has a way of lying dormant if all you have to choose from is a group of old dudes missing half their teeth. But if you get a halfway decent-looking bad boy or the kind of girl momma warned you about, game on, bitches. They may be puking up bile and half dead when they first drag themselves through the doors, but in a week or two? Addicts have an amazing ability to see the potential in other human beings. (…)
And it’s always the people you never want to picture having sex that get caught in these situations, isn’t it? Why, you ask yourself, did it have to be the scary dreadlocked man who smelled like hobo taint who was busted getting a blowjob from the bat-shit crazy chick with an affinity for mid-heel naturalizers and bulimia? (…)
Another loophole in the no opposite-sex talking stricture was that at least a quarter of the population was gay, so the boys could chatty-chat-chat with each other to their heart’s content. One night my roommate and I were treated to a particularly impressive, uh, “bull session” through the ceiling. The next morning we discovered that the room belonged to two supposedly straight guys who you wouldn’t want to picture eating a sandwich, let alone each other.
***
The women on Celebrity Rehab preen to a neurotic degree, and Drew has mentioned their habit of wearing a good hour’s worth of makeup. But he seems to think it’s “part of the process for women in recovery,” not something that wouldn’t exist to that extent without guys around. (As you can see, I went to an all girls Catholic school…)
Anyway, I don’t know anyone who stayed sober after coed rehab. And Dr. Drew’s success rate is quickly approaching Mengele velocity…
I got a kick out of this part of the Celebrity Rehab 5 show description:
[White House party crasher] Michaele Salahi was later removed from the show because, according to TMZ sources, she harbored “no addiction,” and thus had “no reason to be there.”
Next it’ll be Daddy Balloon Boy, and those two fat twins who own a restaurant.
Other patients announced for Celebrity Rehab 5 are Steven Adler (again?), Dwight Gooden, Jeremy Jackson (he was on Baywatch apparently), Lindsay Lohan’s dad, Sean Young (uh oh) and Chinese actress Bai Ling (“Subsequently, Bai spent some time in a mental hospital. Though she insisted then and now, ‘I’m not crazy,’ she maintains to this day that she is from the moon;” in my day, the really big “origin story” delusion in AA were people who thought they were the children of aliens and/or had been raised in Satanic ritual cults. Hey, it was the 90s. Who knows what the hell it is now. And in fact it has always been extremely common for even “less-crazy” alcoholics to cling to the belief/hope that they are “really” adopted, and especially that they are the secret children of millionaires or movie stars.)
Anyway, I look forward to tuning in again this season to judge everybody else’s “program”, and do the typical alcoholic thing: look down my nose at the junkies. (“Ew, needles! Lowlifes!!” Never mind that I used to go to the beer store in my pajamas…)
UPDATE: whoa, how did I miss this?
Alleged Drunk Driver Slams Into L.A. Sober House
