By emily

Grade: C?

I didn’t actually watch this, so if you’re looking for a biting, incisive play-by-play, you will have to look elsewhere. For all I know, the finale consisted of the Friends finally figuring out how to kill the voodoo priestess who cast the spell that makes the male Friends gain all the weight that the female Friends lose. However, I did catch the ongoing Friends postmortem this morning on the Today show, which now consists exclusively of ‘experts’ being asked questions about topics they are obviously WAY too biased to have valid opinions on (examples: former generals on the war in Iraq, US Weekly ed Janice Min on Jennifer Aniston’s career trajectory). Anyway, I learned from Matt and Katie that Ross and Rachel shocked the panties off America by ending up together. If only M and K would do the same. Sigh. As real as it may seem, it was only in my dream.

Now that we all have that song stuck in our head, I’ll get to the real meat (okay, more like Steakums) of the review. While Matt, Katie et al were watching Friends, I was watching famous actor/auteur/artiste Edgar Oliver scandalize the Astor Place Barnes and Noble by reading from his new book, THE MAN WHO LOVED PLANTS. Edgar is very hard to describe. I hope no one will be offended when I say that his accent is a mix of gay, Dracula, and Southern Belle. Edgar himself doesn’t worry about offending anybody, as evinced by his introduction: “I realized, when deciding which chapter to read, that this one reveals my desire to have a black mammy.” It was one of those moments where everyone looks around to see whether other people are going to laugh, then goes for it. The book itself is also impossible to describe, but it’s definitely not about a too-tightknit group of pals who live in improbably huge apartments. However, it will be there for you when the rain starts to fall.