Why does your page look like this?

 

Email this story
Print this story
Write the editor

 

 

In This Issue

---

Public Art

This Is Not a Memoir Her irresistible novels may read like autobiography, but Sarahbeth Purcell insists she’s just making stuff up

The Spin

Love-Hate Mail

Inquiring Minds Hamell on Trial’s latest release is provocative, scathing and colorful

He’s Only the Piano Player Ben Folds wants you to floss

Money for Nothing Is a year of college worth the price of a Lexus?

 

.

A few weeks ago, Sen. Bill Frist’s office sent out an invitation to an exclusive weekend fundraiser called VOLPAC ’06 Weekend, to be held in Nashville April 21-23. But the invite is getting interest far beyond the deep-pocketed GOP faithful.

Upon pulling the invitation out of the envelope, the lucky invitee is confronted with a cowboy’s crotch. On the back, the seat of the cowboy’s jeans sports a red bandanna in the left pocket—a code indicating the desire for a particular gay sex act.

Naturally, Brokeback Mountain jokes followed, and some Frist supporters were appalled by the invitation.

“It may have been that it was bent in the mail, but the one I got seemed to have a definite bulge to it,” says one GOP committeewoman. “I just couldn’t leave it out on the kitchen counter for the kids to see, so I put it in a dresser drawer in the bedroom.”

Others, though, liked Frist’s cowboy crotch invite.

“You open it by undoing the belt buckle and then you reach in here to whip out the information about Sen. Frist’s party,” explains one clearly enchanted Republican who had received the invitation at the stylish Lockeland Springs home he shares with his partner. “I’ll be there,” he adds.

Now, adding to the controversy, The Rolling Stones have sued Frist, contending that the crotch invitation is a theft of the cover of the band’s 1971 album Sticky Fingers.

That album, which contained popular Stones fare such as “Brown Sugar” and “Bitch,” also shows a bulging crotch on the front and the seat of the jeans on the rear, just like Frist’s invitation. The Andy Warhol-designed cover even originally featured a working zipper.

“It’s just too close,” says a Stones spokeswoman. “There are lots of provocative male sexual images out there without Sen. Frist needing to rip off The Rolling Stones.”

“This suit is completely without merit,” a spokesman in Frist’s Washington office counters. “People are just reading too much into the fact that you have to unbuckle the cowboy’s pants to get the invitation information. That and the gay sex code bandanna on the rear—all that is just coincidence, and it has nothing to do with The Rolling Stones.”

(The Fabricator is satire. Don’t believe everything you read.)