Word: biz
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...teen- idol spin on a black urban beat. Eight years and 60 million albums, singles and videotapes later, the group -- Donnie Wahlberg, Jordan Knight, Jonathan Knight, Danny Wood and Joe McIntyre -- are no longer new and no longer kids. Now in their mid-20s, they have, in show-biz terms at least, reached that other awkward age, groping for a way to reach an adult audience without alienating the screaming teenyboppers who made them rich and famous. So what's an old New Kid to do? Change the band's name, for one thing, to NKOTB (not, obviously, a radical...
...other celebrities to promote their wares: Dolly Parton appeared as one of Rivers' first guests to shill her own line of "goof-proof" Revlon cosmetics, for which the singer has also completed an upcoming infomercial. Rivers sees herself as the pioneer of a new genre combining selling with show biz. "This is entertainment in big letters," she says. "You're not getting close-ups of snake chains; in a few years there are going to be 35 shows in this format...
...with these money trees to be shaken, why are major professionals like Boitano (gold medalist in 1984) and Britain's Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean (also 1984 winners, in dance) returning to the upcoming Olympics? After all, their show-biz routines are smooth and easy, very scant on triple jumps. Possibly it all goes back to those patches; the new rules have reopened the doors to onetime champions who let their mastery of school figures lapse long ago. But they may feel nostalgia for the old discipline, for the satisfaction of finding, in devotion and repetition, the perfect triple jump...
Penn and Teller are ultra-show-biz-savvy New York intellectuals whose act is an ironic deconstruction of magic shows in addition to being a very impressive magic show (see box). They first played Vegas a year ago. Penn Jillette's fondness for Vegas, like every hip baby boomer's, is sweet-and-sour, simultaneously bemused and fond. Of a traditional Vegas variety show at Bally's called Jubilee, he rants, "In the first five minutes they destroy temples and sink a giant model of the Titanic -- there are 80 topless dancing women while the Titanic sinks, blast furnaces spewing...
Frank Zappa surely would have appreciated -- indeed, relished -- the irony ! that his death last week was, as the old show-biz line has it, a shrewd career move. The musical iconoclast, best known for his work with the seminal 1960s rock band the Mothers of Invention, was in many ways the prisoner of his own raffish image: hirsute hippie freak; countercultural sire of prototypical Valley Girl Moon Unit Zappa and her siblings Dweezil, Ahmet and Diva; opinionated crank ("AIDS is a CIA plot"); and First Amendment scourge of Tipper Gore. With his death from prostate cancer, a few days short...