Family feuds–and not so nude dudes

THE BARRETTOS. Long-festering, internecine conflicts.

The Barretto family is at it again, with its beautiful members engaged in the latest not-so-lovely round of slings, arrows and brickbats hurled at one another by different cliques within the egregiously contentious clan.

Ordinary mortals gawking at the family once more in full “frothing and feuding” mode may think, “Goodness, if we looked as good as those people, we would be so grateful and happy with our lives!”

But then, we aren’t surnamed Barretto, so what do we know about the long-festering, internecine conflicts that run so deep that they cry out for pained expression—and explosion—every five years or so? All we can do is wish them well in the long run, even as they hurl the wet and wild family laundry at one another in the short—!

The latest family fissure appears to be between Gretchen and Marjorie vs. Claudine, with mom Inday vigorously siding with the latter. What’s the bone of contention this time? Marjorie’s upwardly ascendant starlet-daughter, Julia, has been bashed by faceless critics whom some people link to an “envious” relative, hence triggering Gretchen’s own salvos against her youngest sister.

In turn, in defending her bunso, mom Inday hit back at Gretchen in a painfully personal way. “Collateral damage” has included Claudine’s husband, Raymart—not a pretty kettle of fish all around.

The wonder, of course, is why all this has been made excruciatingly public. Other families may have even worse problems to deal with, but they keep them to themselves! Well, the Barrettos are stars, so the line separating their private and public personas has become “mute and mediagenic.”

But, we join the growing ranks of people who believe that it shouldn’t be so, that stars’ personal issues shouldn’t be foisted on us because—well, frankly, we have better things to do.

Further complicating the situation is some cynics’ suspicion that the whole fuss and bother may be orchestrated to boost fledgling and/or flagging careers.

But, that’s too conspiratorial and mass-manipulative a hidden agenda for us to be able to wrap our feeble and simplistic minds around. So, excuse us out.

Winking variation

At the other end of today’s piece, the “not so nude dudes” part, we have it from an audience member that the macho leads of the “Full Monty” musical decided not to flash their crown jewels, at least in the performance he watched, but settled instead for a winking variation and approximation thereon (except during one performance when the lights reportedly came up a split-second too early). The eyewitness was not so much disappointed as he was ticked off by the self-serving nature of it all.

As for “The Graduate” and its own “daring and baring” bed scene, another eyewitness recalls seeing somebody’s pink bottom revealed, but that’s it. —A far cry from the full-frontal depiction of the key scene by Kathleen Turner in the US production of the show. —So much for the strip and tease.