Goin' down with Hurricane Rita

I’m extremely annoyed that Rita turned out to be only a Category 3 hurricane and not the Category 5 monster that the media hysterics were predicting. I was all revved up for a repeat of Katrina in this summer/fall’s hurricane reality show.

The only thing more disappointing than Rita’s anti-climatic landfall is that I still have yet to witness flying debris smack a media personality in the head. Instead, I have to settle for sand whipping into Anderson Cooper’s face.

When I was in fourth grade I wrote a letter to the National Hurricane Center with a list of suggested names for hurricanes that included my own and several of my friends. I’m glad that these many decades later the NHC took up one of my suggestions by naming the most recent storm after my mother, Rita.

It's sad that the only Rita-caused deaths occurred before the storm actually made landfall, when 24 elderly people burned to death after the bus evacuating them out of harm's way caught fire in traffic gridlock. Yellow school buses, oxygen bottles, bedridden old people - nice going, Texas!

My biggest worry was when Rita took a sudden turn away from Galveston and headed toward Port Arthur, Tx., the hometown of Janis Joplin. Pearl once remarked during an interview on "The Dick Cavett Show" that Port Arthur residents’ favorite hobby was “burning crosses on the lawns of Negroes.”

More Janis fun-facts:

- A local developer bought her childhood home on Proctor Street in Port Arthur for his daughter, a Janis fan, to save it from demolition. When his efforts to turn the home into a museum failed, the Port Arthur Housing Department tore it down in 1980. In 1995, bricks from Janis's childhood home went on sale for $40 a pop.

- Janis was voted “Ugliest Man on Campus” while attending the University of Texas in the early ‘60s.

- The original, graffiti-scarred tables from Barney's Beanery, the bar where Janis drank her last screwdriver the evening of Oct. 3, 1970, hang from the ceiling above the present tables in a weird sort of parallel universe.

- Janis left $1,200 in her estate for a post-mortem party. Two hundred guests received invitations to a memorial at Barney's that read "the drinks are on Pearl." The Grateful Dead also performed.

- Janis died in Hollywood at the Landmark Hotel at 7047 Franklin Street in room 105. When she did not show up at the recording studio to finish taping tracks for "Me & Bobby McGee" the next morning, members of her band broke into her hotel room and found her wegded between the bed and nightstand, "bottoms up."

- "Me & Bobby McGee" was Janis' first song to hit No. 1. Unfortunately, it climbed the charts posthumously.

- Strange paranormal activity is said to occur at the Landmark (now Highland Gardens) but only when Janis' name is mentioned: phone lines start ringing simultaneously, lights flicker and celebrity 8X10 glossies fly off the walls. It's the ultimate cosmic giggle.

Seems like everywhere you turn these days some organization is raising money for Hurricane Katrina relief. There are yogathons, danceathons, drinkathons, marathons, moveithons -- how much more can I give?

I'm ashamed to say to that I have yet to donate money to any of these relief efforts, except for several pairs of plus-size Capris pants that I gave to a young neighbor of mine who was collecting items for Chicago Bull Chris Duhon's Standing Tall Foundation to be shipped to Katrina evacuees in the south.

Frankly, I could use a fundraiser for myself. I think the Red Cross has enough money and it still hasn't distributed the funds it collected to families of 9/11 victims. One of the best stories I've heard lately are Katrina victims who are spending their Red Cross vouchers on $800 Louis Vuitton handbags. If you're going to start over again, you might as well get yourself a nice purse.

Barry Cowsill is still MIA. His fans have posted his name on every Katrina missing list on the Internet. With so many of these stress-eating, pudgy broads leaving their own email addresses and phone numbers for him to contact them, the poor bastard is going to get confused. No wonder he's in hiding!

I posted a message as "Flower Girl" on "Cowsill Chatter" suggesting that maybe he was medivacked to a rehab clinic for heroin and cocaine withdrawal, and received a very terse reply from his brother Bob stating that Barry's substance abuse problems were booze - not smack or snow. HEY, GODDAMIT, I WAS ONLY TRYING TO HELP!

It's sad because the Cowsills can't even get arrested, let alone muster any media interest in their missing brother. "Entertainment Tonight" ran a segment (see the link below) last Thursday about Barry that was pretty heartbreaking. Still, if or when the Cowsills find him, I think it's going to be fabulous for their careers.

http://www.stellarshowcase.durham.on.ca/ET.html