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| Lloyd Grove's Lowdown runs Monday through Friday. Before joining The Daily News in Sept. 2003, he wrote "The Reliable Source" column for the Washington Post, where, before that, his specialty had been profiling politicians for the Post's famous Style section. Grove grew up in Los Angeles and Greenwich, Conn., and was an English major at Yale. Aside from newspapers, he also has written extensively for Vanity Fair and Harper's Bazaar magazines, as well as for the late, lamented George and Talk. "Grove," wrote media critic Jon Friedman in a piece about the rising influence of Lowdown, "makes his point with a dry wit." |
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| Now you can visit our complete archive of Lloyd Grove's columns. Click below for the complete lineup and a free sneak preview of each column, plus info on our affordable purchase options! COLUMNIST ARCHIVE |
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From Foley, naked display of weirdness
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| Rep. Mark Foley's campaign against nudist camps for children in 2003 casts a creepy sidelight on accounts of his E-mails with House pages.
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Like many a public figure caught doing bad things (such as E-mailing sexual come-ons to teenage male House pages), ex-Palm Beach, Fla.,
Rep. Mark Foley has copped to alcoholism and entered rehab.
But even in Washington, jaws are dropping at the yawning gap between the six-term Republican's creepy private behavior and his righteous public crusade - as chairman of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children - against sexual predators (like he's accused of being).
Lowdown has unearthed some of Foley's weirder whoppers, from his relentless June 2003 campaign against child-oriented nudist camps in Florida - which reaped a television bonanza:
Foley on CNN, June 20: "You put 11- and 18-year-olds together in a camp where they're nude, I think it is a recipe for disaster. It is like putting a match next to a gasoline can."
On MSNBC, June 23: "I do have to question why people, if this is such a natural endeavor, have to be put in a hot tub with 18 others, if you will, enjoying this kind of activity. ... These kids are young. I think that they should maybe be learning something other than being nude together and being thrown in a hot tub.
On CBS' "The Early Show," June 24: "In fact, in the very camp we're talking about in Florida, there have been people ejected because of their trying to enter the camp because they're peering through sauna windows."
On "Good Morning America," June 24: "In fact, they've coined an expression for people that visit these parts, they call them COGS, Creepy Old Guys. ... It's in [the children's] most formative years. I think they'd be better off at Girl Scout camp, Boy Scout camp or sports camp than a nudist camp."
On "The O'Reilly Factor," June 29: "The parents said, 'Oh, they're supervised, they have camp counselors, they have custodial people there to watch out for them.' Well, again, several cases have come to my attention where the camp managers themselves have been arrested, charged with pornography."
Let's hope Foley is getting the rehab he deserves.
Concert is cig-nature Mellencamp
Rocker John Mellencamp was both on message and off message at this weekend's huge Farm Aid spectacular, held at the Tweeter Center in Camden, N.J., to lend moral and dollar support to organic family farms.
"It's more than just spinach - it's pork, it's meat, it's milk," the proud Hoosier told me Saturday before going onstage with his Farm Aid co-founder
Willie Nelson and Dave Matthews, Neil Young and other headliners. "Our kids don't even eat as well as we did - all these trans fats. When you see what's in it, if you can't read it, you probably shouldn't eat it. If you go to a grocery store and it looks like a toy store, you probably shouldn't be eating it."
But the almost-56-year-old Mellencamp, who's been taking anti-cholesterol drugs since a heart attack in 1994, can't stop propping up America's tobacco farmers.
"I figure my body's so polluted, nothing wants to live in it anyway," he told me. "Everybody has their devil - and you have to fight it. I guess you could say the same about Willie and the things that he does, and the same about you and the things that you do."
How'd he know?
"I'm not here to hang on anybody's cross."
Then Mellencamp left his trailer to smoke a cigarette in the rain.
Double your pleasure, double your fun
Here's a bonus item from the Lowdown spy who watched
Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen - who've been traipsing around Paris and London this week - rack up a $38 bill on tabloids, LifeSavers and beef jerky at a JFK newsstand the other day. After holding up the line to search her purse for money, Mary-Kate fished out a $100 bill. Says the spy: "Ashley thanked her for paying, and Mary-Kate goes, 'Now you totally have to massage me during the flight.' Then they walked out of the Hudson News and up the escalator toward the United lounge. Ashley had both arms wrapped around MK's neck as they walked as one. There would have been less contact if they were running a three-legged race together."
Reverting to form?
You can take the Rev out of the '80s, but you can't take the '80s out of the Rev. Birthday boy
Al Sharpton (52 today) was spotted by Lowdown at the Four Seasons Hotel, wearing one of his trademark zipper tracksuits to an otherwise civilized Sunday brunch with dapper advertising exec
Don Coleman, a board member of Sharpton's National Action Network. Apparently, Sharpton was wearing a Hampton University track suit, having just returned from parents' weekend at the Virginia college where daughter Ashley is a freshman.
Snark Attack!
Father of the Decade? Just three weeks ago, Kevin Federline's wife, Britney Spears, underwent a C-section to deliver their second baby in less than a year, so what better place for K-Fed to spend the weekend than Las Vegas? Brit, presumably still in Malibu recuperating, was nowhere to be seen when
TMZ.com caught the aspiring rapper, bedecked in bling, partying at Tao nightclub. Classy.
With Katherine Thomson
Originally published on October 3, 2006
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