Lunch w/Greg: ABC’s Adam Lambert fallout; Tom Petty’s pain; and “Corduray Skirts Are A Sin”

Hello and happy Tuesday!

Has some errands to run so am a little late off the dime with the morning column so let’s just make it lunch!

Today is World AIDS Day and I will doing a post on that shortly because it’s an excellent time to educate and remind all about this devastating disease for which there are treatments, but still no cure.

But first an Adam Lambert item because, well, it’s just been days since I’ve last written about that little troublemaker! Ha!

Adam, with his racy American Music Awards performance last week has single-handedly led to ABC enact a policy ask artists for assurances that their stage show will resemble their rehearsals and that ABC will seek contractual obligation to make sure artists stick to those plans.

A Reuters story quotes Disney/ ABC Television Group President Anne Sweeney as saying: “We certainly don’t want to suppress artistry at any level, but we also have to be very cognizant of who our audience is.

ABC edited out portions of Lambert’s November 22 AMA performance during the West Coast broadcast of the show and subsequently rescinded an invitation for the singer to appear on Good Morning America last week.

In related Adam news, the singer has also revealed in a radio interview that he suffered from a lack of self-confidence when he was younger and weighed 250 pounds!

This next item makes me so sad: Tom Petty admits in the new issue of Rolling Stone that he was physically and verbally abused by his father when he was a kid because the dad assumed his music-loving son was gay.

“[My father] was scary and violent,” says Petty who still has nightmares about the abuse. “He beat the living hell out of me, and there was constant verbal abuse. … Looking back on it, he probably was disappointed that I was so drawn to the arts. He probably thought I was gay. I wasn’t interested in sports. I didn’t know the names of any baseball players. I liked films and books and records.”

This gives some insight into why so many kids who really are gay run away from home. There are some really sick parents out there.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words and this one certainly is!

I love, love, love it!

According to Towleroad, Syracuse Unoversity drama major Chris Pesto, a junior, decided to make a sign of his own when he saw Open-Air Campaigner evangelist Michelle Deferio standing on campus with her anti-gay sign and wearing a very unfortunate outfit.

Pesto writes of the experience: “This woman was wearing a ankle-length corduroy skirt, which, as we all know, is a fashion nono. So, in order to make her feel uncomfortable, I stood next to her and held a sign that said Corduroy skirts are a sin! I don’t think I have ever drawn so much attention in my life. SO many people asked to take a picture with me, I got laughs, high fives and there were the few that even cursed off the woman standing behind me. As I drew interest to what was going on with myself and the woman with the hateful sign, I started to draw a crowd that stood with me in support. Before I knew it I had 100+ people holding signs for gay rights asking people to honk their horns to support. I was interviewed by a news station, and more than 5 student organization papers, and the Post Standard of Syracuse.”