Relieved 'Brothers & Sisters' Creator Jon Robin Baitz Leaves L.A. Hoping It Burns To The Ground
Playwright and Brothers & Sisters EP Jon Robin Baitz has spilled out his feelings about being "ousted, not fired, an important distinction," from the series he created, though he fails to mention what that distinction is. (We think one ends with the extension of a middle finger and the sound of a door slamming, and the other precedes those with a farewell dinner at Chaya.) Baitz covers a lot of ground in his 5000-word meditation (and that's just part two!) on what it means to leave Hollywood for New York's always-welcoming, rodent-infested embrace, recalling behind-the-scenes power struggles—no McChokeyGates, thank heavens, but Rob Lowe did tend to get pissy if you failed to tell him how nice he looks at the table reads—to his online dating adventures in the "world capital of loneliness." (Baitz obviously a man who never wintered in Bydgoszcz, Poland.) And as for its treatment of the gracefully aging, well—for shame, L.A., for shame:
But perhaps most disheartening to me, a man who adores women, is the daily LA visual horror show of how they are discarded there, no matter how desperately they try to cling to youth.
LA hates and fears aging, and especially despises the revolting notion of women aging. And in LA, more than anywhere I know, women of a certain age, who should know better, are complicit in their own degradation, going to desperate lengths to dodge what should be taken for granted. No actress would dare present herself as proudly and as honestly as Simone Signoret, would they? No. Women should hate LA, and I will never understand why they endure it all. Why? If I were a woman, I would burn LA to the ground, and spread salt on the earth where the men all gathered. (I may do that anyway.)
We too have increasingly felt that ours is a city that caters exclusively to the young and the pulled, the spotting of a natural-looking woman over 60 in the area having become almost as rare as finding a Major League power-hitter with normal-sized testicles and a lack of puncture wounds on his ass. Still, there must be a less extreme and destructive solution than Baitz's suggestion of burning the entire city to the ground and rubbing salt on the charred ruins of the Spearmint Rhino. Perhaps instead Gov. Schwarzenegger might consider offering tax incentives to women who abstain from plastic surgery after the age of 45, throwing in carpool-lane privileges if they put yellow "Access OK: California Untouched Female" stickers on the sides of their unaltered breasts.