So I happened to stumble across this Touched by An Angel official website when doing one of my routine compulsive searches for Del Shores, successful cheeseball gay playwright. 20 minutes later I realized I needed to get back to work. The guest stars on that show are worth the time spent on it alone. Carol Burnett, Ann-Margret, Randy Travis, the mom from Mr. Belvedere, Kirsten Dunst, Jack Black, John Amos and Florida from Good Times, Debbie Allen, Margot Kidder… you name a star and they probably appeared on this show. Touched is one my favorite guilty pleasures. The predictable storylines ending with the Angels revealing their identities to the celebrity of the week. And they fucking GLOWED as they did it! I love the way Roma Downey said, with that accent and tears glistening in her eyes. ‘God loves you’. This show always got me teary eyed myself. Real life- no tears, but artificial situations, hell yeah. This got me to thinking about other secret guilty pleasures. Now I don’t mean trendy ironic emo guilty pleasures like Starksy and Hutch or the Backstreet Boys, or any t-shirt you can buy at Urban Outfitters- I mean things that you probably wouldn’t want to publicly declare, like loving Touched by an Angel or Webster.

Mine include:

Bananarama- They sing just above a whisper and I suspect without a producers touch they would sound like the kids from Zoom but I just like the idea of 3 (there are 2 only left now) beautiful ‘alternative’ (at the time) London hipsters shamelessly singing overproduced pop songs. I like their version of Help better then the Beatles. Click here to watch my favorite Banarama video, Rough Justice. Watch them as they sing about poverty whilst applying cosmetics. Brilliant!

Reba- I never even watched this until Lifetime started showing it and now you can’t turn on the television without seeing an episode of Reba, the survivor. Reba is the Mama’s Family for the new millennium with her hunky son in law Van filling Bubba’s tight jeans. Reba has about 3 expressions and is so stilted that you swear you can strings dangling from her but I love watching the ’so bad, they’re good’ cast and Miss Reba. The hot, dumb daughter, the snarky, ‘gonna be ugly really soon’ middle girl that they will desperately try to beautify when she gets older like that daughter in Desperate Housewives, and of course, the retarded youngest child. Barbara Jean, played by Melissa Peterman is fabulous, but seeing which 3 expressions Reba chooses to use in any given scene gives me great pleasure as well. Reba gives hack actors like me hope.

CAN TV- I love watching public access television shows and my favorite ones are the truly sincere citizens that try to cover what are truly important issues like AIDS in the African American community or transgender rights. There are also the fashion shows with truly hideous diluted hags that strut down the runway in their best Milwaukee Avenue fashions, and you know they only get to do do this after they pay an ‘entrance fee’ which makes it all the more pathetically horrifying!

Myspace profiles- I love to surf Myspace for some of the more interesting profiles. I don’t mean the hot guys without a shirt that probably aren’t real people or the endless overweight blondes with photo collages of them and their best overweight girlfriends (there’s usually one hot one) holding drinks in a bar with the caption-’I'm really drunk’. I mean the sad profiles of the too old or just doesn’t;t fit the caste they;re trying to be a part of, or… the person that posts horribly inappropriate photos of himself or uses Myspace to send out embarrassing quizzes or with a couple of desperate ‘Do you find me attractive’ questions buried in body of the test. There are also the rants of imagined victimization trying to lure a response of ‘I think you’re swell’ to said poster.

What are some of your DARK GUILTY PLEASURES? Please, no Abba or ‘eating frosting out of the can’ responses. I want the dirt.

Filed under: My Way Of Life