Weekend Small Talk: Saturday White Live
Saturday Night Live recently added two more female cast members but they are STILL going to have to rely on guest stars to play Michelle Obama. While the lack of minorities on the NBC late night show is nothing new, it's really starting to look worse and worse now that we have an African-American president and nary an African-American who can play him on the NBC staple.
But as I said, this is hardly a new predicament. SNL has rarely had standout minority talent. Have they had a breakout non-white star since Eddie Murphy? You can't really count Damon Wayans since he was only a featured performer and was fired. All of those years on SNL and Tim Meadows can't even get his own throwaway Happy Madison feature. But you can't really blame the actors asa cast members from the early days have commented that a lot of Garrett Morris' material didn't make it because it didn't fit..
It's hard to figure out why this is happening and why it hasn't changed. Part of me thinking that the key issue is where SNL looks for talent. I went through the Groundlings' alumni photos and a quick glance found two African-Americans in some 34 pages of pictures. I've been to Upright Citizens Brigade in LA and I can't recall seeing a single minority performer (and there aren't many in the audience either). So is Improv a white person's game? Does the need for some shared experiences to make the ability to improv with one another draw a diving line between races or economic backgrounds? Or is there something with the way that these troupes are set up that they don't reach many minorities?
I don't know what the answer is but you'd think that, in this day and age, someone would have told Lorne Michaels that he might want to switch up his approach. It's not like the series is hitting home runs. There are still some great sketches but the show seems incapable of churning out two good shows in a row and Kristen Wiig can only appear in so many sketches.
I'm an unrepentant soda monster. I don't care how knows it. I've recently fallen into a terrible habit of kicking off my day with a glorious, ice cold Mountain Dew. The Dew has to be some sort of drug. I often go in and out of phases with drinks; in college I was addicted to Dr. Pepper which I began to affectionately call The Pepper M.D. Now and then a root beer phase will come in and some times, I just want Gatorade.
It's been a fairly unproductive week and I don't really have anything for the Weekend Small Talk so I thought I'd post up a Can Danny? post here. It's the 2007 Redux. If the draft was done again, would Greg Oden still be the #1 pick? Would he even be #2?
Critics throw around the one hit wonder label pretty loosely of late and have been dismissing a lot of good bands as if they were on the level of Gerardo or Right Said Fred. While I understand that the techinical definition has to do with charting on the top 40, let's be real: most bands aren't going to make it to the pop charts and dismissing a rap or rock group for not crossing over enough seems like a weak reason for labeling them a "One Hit Wonder". 
I also have to recognize the girl I couldn't believe I remembered, Laura Ramsey. Now Ms. Ramsey probably isn't on many "That Guy" lists but she's always had a place in my heart because a) she's super-cute and b) she was in "The Real Cancun", a reality film that I worked on and that nobody else saw. I pretty much forgot about her until she popped up for a second in "The Lords of Dogtown". I couldn't figure out who she was and finally figured it out with the help of IMDB. Since then she's popped up in a few other movies and is starting to get bigger roles in, well, films with bigger marketing campaigns. She was in "The Covenant" as well as "The Ruins". Hopefully she'll keep getting roles and grow as an actress. What can I say, I'm kind of crushing on her. 
So while you are on your Valentine's Date and conversation has come to a stand still, why not ask her about her favorite breakfast cereal. Not only will it give you a good look into her soul but you'll also be able to gauge how much she might be interested in having breakfast with you the next day... if you know what I mean. If you don't know what I mean, I mean that maybe you can tell if she'll have sex with you if she plays along with the breakfast chat. Or maybe not. What do I know?
