A Balloon In Cactus
Mexican Eye For the Gringo Guy
By Marge Van Ostrand

     According to the show business trade paper, The Hollywood Reporter, “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” the megahit TV show whose stars are known as The Fab Five, will soon have some light-hearted competition from Comedy Central’s “Straight Plan For The Gay Man,” whose stars have already been dubbed The Flab Four. Three hour-long episodes of the new satire, are scheduled to air February 17, 2004, and will star Curtis Gwynne, Billy Merritt, Kyle Grooms and Rob Riggle.
     Queer Eye’s premise of homosexual men advising heterosexual men how to dress, decorate, and behave in a civilized manner, will be flipped upside down for this new show, produced by Borderline Productions.
     Straight comedians will attempt to teach a succession of gay men how to pass as heterosexuals, including “lessons in Spartan home decorating, oafish manners, less-than-fashionable wardrobes, and overdeveloped ego to mask all personal failings,” production executive Lou Wallach told Reuters News Service.
     Residents of Mexico who have satellite TV or Direct TV probably know that the Comedy Central cable channel is best known for “South Park,” “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” and reruns of “Saturday Night Live.”
     This show biz news report gave me an idea — why not tape a show right here in Guadalajara called “Mexican Eye for the Gringo Guy?” Jalisco is already famous for its Mariachi, why not for its men?
     Five Mexican men, whose talent has as yet been undiscovered, would be interviewed by a Casting Committee comprised of Judy Eager, Sherry Sourelis, Tee Falcon, Aurora Michel, April Watts and Mary Alice Sargent, final cast approval to be given by director Alejandro Grattan.
     The final selection of men, who will be referred to neither as The Fab Five nor the Flab Four, will be dubbed Los Tipos Sabios. Each weeknight and twice on Sundays they will choose a Gringo expatriate and teach him such things as how to serenade a woman using only a tuba, the advantages of having backyard bantams, the art of lounge lizardry, how to strut while seated, and how to avoid your wife’s restaurant when dining out with your mistress.
     Sponsors of this proposed television show will bring muchos pesos to the Lakeside area and in fact bring an economic boom to all of Mexico.
     After the guaranteed success of such a show, all the ex-pats living in Mexico could pose nude for a calendar. People have done stranger things to raise money for charity. Why not show a little skin? And, since the older we get, the more skin there is, I figure this will only increase the contributions.
     The nude calendar idea worked for the fishermen of Cape Cod, for elderly school mistresses in Wales, and for Russian women amputees who advertised their calendar on one of those porn channels. (Someone told me about it. I certainly never watched it myself.)
     So there you have my Big Idea For The New Year, and it ranks right up there with the guy who kept trying to help hemorrhoid sufferers and finally gave up when he failed yet again with his Preparation G.
If he only tried one more time...