Words Fail Us, Redux

In case you didn't know, this is a photo of D-List Party Babe Tara Reid with Extra! correspondent Jerry Penacoli. A few things surprise us about this photograph.


1) Tara is not in a bikini which reveals her plastic-surgery-gone-horribly-wrong.


2) Tara is not falling down drunk.


3) Jerry Penacoli has not lived up to our adolescent fantasies.


Let us explain that last one.


Picture it: Connecticut, 1987-1990. A mother and son bond over a burgeoning fad called cable television. In particular, a Lifetime talk show which appeals mainly to suburban mothers and their gayling sons, called Attitudes. It stars the formidable Linda Dano, a daytime diva who combines Lucille Ball timing with Joan Crawford fierceness. Her co-hosts are of the vapid, giggly blond variety--first the reserved Nancy Glass, then the proto-Kelly Ripa Dee Kelly. (Who we always sort of liked, when we didn't want to slap her.)


And then came Jerry.


If we didn't realize we were gay beforehand, we knew it when we saw Jerry. Charming, handsome, muscular, tanned, hairy Jerry.


He was the first (and last) male co-host of Attitudes. As much as we hate to admit it, perky Dee was probably the best foil for Linda Dano's intense charisma, and the show pretty much went downhil after her tearful farewell appearance (mom and I cried, too, as I recall). With Jerry onboard, we got a nice glimpse of some cheesecake on the comeback trail, a la Vanessa Williams -- in Jerry's case, a promising career on local Philadelphia news came to a screeching halt in 1985 when a (fictional) rumor involving him, a gerbil, his rectum, and the emergency room spread faster than the same damn rumor about Richard Gere.


To Jerry's credit, he lived down that indignity to host a national talk show, and then, eventually, become a long-term member of the Extra! staff, for which we applaud him. And he's still attractive, in that odd "I wouldn't turn down David Copperfield or Simon Cowell if I were really drunk" kind of way.


If you watch Extra! (and you know you do!), that's how you know Jerry -- as a deteriorating pretty boy with tortured hair -- but, oh, if you could only have seen him on Attitudes in 1990. You would swoon, my dears, simply swoon. Here he is, looking fab (if slightly-big-haired..a harbinger of things to come):