The initial title of Tuesday’s Lindsay Lohan post was “Throw The Key Away.” I wrote this on my iPhone early Tuesday evening while waited for a screening of Kisses to begin at the Tribeca Grand. The thought was “this woman has shown herself to be all but hopeless and needs to be slapped awake or she’ll be dead in ten or fifteen years, so don’t slap her on the wrist — hit her hard and pretend to throw away the key. Maybe that’ll get through.”
So the headline didn’t quite say it. But it was close, and sometimes you just need to go with what seems right before the screening begins.
After thinking things through the next morning I decided that I had to plop in a new title. Lilo needs to live and breathe and create and have a future. The point of pretending to throw away the key was to wake her up to the point that she might start to consider that she’s Errol Flynn-ing and Tallulah Bankead-ing and needs to turn it around. So I went with “The Crowd Roars” — generic but workable.
In response to which a couple of HE readers complained, saying that I lacked the stones to stick to the original headline. I responded as follows:
“I can and will change anything I want, whenever I want, if and when the mood changes or suits or whatever. I am the Lizard King. I can do pretty much anything. And it’s all about keeping things in flux, being adaptable, being open to whatever tremors or instincts or subliminal urges occur. I’m not the managing editor of the Kansas City Star in 1957 with a deadline approaching and final edits being applied downstairs before the presses roll. This is a fluid and sometimes cantankerous Thelonious Monky jazz column. I always reserve the right to tweak, modify, edit, change, add and, yes, sometimes, if the urge is strong or persistent enough, wimp out.
“Wimping out is part of human nature from time to time, so the freedom to wimp out is one of the tunes I might play — and so is the freedom to decide later on that I shouldn’t have wimped and thereafter a decision to restore whatever it is or was that I may have wimped out on in the first place.
“That said I stick to 97% of the stuff I put down initially. Make that 98%. Oh, and if I decide to edit this very post I’m writing right now then I will do that. Live with it or leave or whatever.”