Mary J. Fug

Generally, I don't really like Mary J. Blige. I guess her story is good, with the beating drugs and the finding love and all that, but I'm a little sick of her trumpeting it nonstop for the past several years any time she wins an award, because we get it. We've heard it. A hundred times. That "Be Without You" song she won for this year makes me want to rip off my ears and feed them to Brandon Davis. Plus, she was terrible in The Ghost Whisperer when she had to play a cheerleading coach whose girls kept getting in accidents caused by a cranky spirit (spoiler: it worked out fine in the end). And to stand out as terrible in the day-player cast of that show, and in particular that episode, well, she MUST have been bad.

Nevertheless, she usually pulls herself together very well for public events. So it was a surprise to me to see her out on the town in a wig that I can only presume was once on Joyce DeWitt's head during a failed experiment with going blonde.

There's just something about its '70s aura, combined with her stiff facial expression, that suggests perhaps she lost a bet with somebody over the Grammys and is wearing this under duress. Perhaps that person was Suzanne Somers, and perhaps she's held on to DeWitt's old wardrobe rejects in the hope of deploying them selectively in order to subtly humiliate her old rival in painful ways only Joyce would understand.

To be fair to the wig, though, the entire ensemble is retro in a moldy way.

Those shoes give me hives. The entire effect is that she's a Pan-Am stewardess from 1970-something and is on a quick conjugal sojourn between international flights.

Normally, this is where I would hope that Mary J.'s whole aesthetic here is just a ploy to land a role in, say, a revival of the divine Airplane! franchise. But those movies -- yes, even the second one; it's Shatneriffic! -- are too sacred to me, and after watching Jennifer Love Hewitt try desperately to bring up the quality of their scenes together and fail helplessly, I can't get behind Mary J. desecrating the fine Airplane! legacy. For real. Sure, maybe that sounds crazy, but what can I say? Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue, and Mary J. picked the wrong week to start sniffing wig tape.