We'll Always Have Paris (I'm Afraid)

By which, emphatically, I don't mean a certain French city. But one of my friends at Old-Time Radio Talk & Trade just had to open a discussion thread pondering what Paris Hilton might be listening to if she chanced to be listening to classic radio.

Now, Paris Hilton isn't exactly one of my abiding life's concerns. My day isn't exactly incomplete for missing any news about the young lady. To the best of my knowledge, the only time I've ever read anything to do with her voluntarily was when I bought my copy of Mr. Bernard Goldberg's 100 110 People Who Are Screwing Up America (and Al Franken is #37) (New York: Harper, 2006), and Ms. Hilton's parents turned up as Number 100 on the list:

Okay, Paris Hilton has an excuse. She's a moron. But her parents can't be let off so easily.

If they gave Nobel Prizes for the mom and dad who raised the most vapid, empty-headed, inane, hollow, vain, tasteless, self-centered, useless twerp in the entire country---maybe in the entire world---Rick and Kathy Hilton would be on their way to Stockholm to pick up the medal.

Paris wears designer T-shirts with slogans like "Got Blow?" and has said, "Wal-Mart? What's that? Do they, like, make walls there?" She's made headlines for shoving her way to the head of a washroom line, and when upbraided for her rudeness, said she just wanted to look at herself in the mirror. And, as everyone knows, she's a big movie star---if you count having sex in a home video that has made its way around the world on the Internet as being a movie star.

But Rick and Kathy's little celebutante insists she's misunderstood. The bad press "sucks," she pouts, and she thinks that "people are mean."

Congratulations, Rick and Kathy. You did a fine job. People are mean---especially to heir-heads like your daughter.

Still, I was caught with my pants down----no, better amend that. I was caught unawares when my OTR-TNT friend launched the aforesaid thread innocuously enough, with the unsuggestive title, "So, Here's a Question." So, there was a question, all right: "So what OTR shows do we think Paris Hilton would listen to anyway?"

Just my luck. No one had troubled to answer it yet when I sauntered in for my morning rounds, and I wasn't exactly in shape to ask what on earth possessed him to think about asking what OTR shows did anyone think Paris Hilton would listen to anyway. Except for suspecting she wouldn't have been caught dead listening to Louella Parsons (mainly because, in that time and place, her antics would have gotten her caught dead by Louella Parsons, with maybe Walter Winchell hammering the last nails into her coffin before it was maybe run out of town on every rail that didn't stop at Anaheim, Azusa, or Cu-ka-mon-ga), pondering Paris's vintage listening was probably the last thing crawling into what passes for my brains early in the morning.

Unfortunately, his proposition was simply too tempting to leave be. So I couldn't . . . and didn't. Your mileage may vary, but here's what I think the heirhead would have been listening to back in the day. Unlike in the original response, I decided to list them alphabetically here:

Break the Banker
Diddler McGee & Molly
Dimension XXX
The Great Gildersleaze
The Inner Skankdom Mysteries
Lust Radio Theater
Muffy's Tavern
My Favourite Husbands
Rate Your Mates
Sleazy Aces
Vic & Sadomasochist
We'll Always Have Paris
XXX Plus One

At which point I figured I'd better quit while I was ahead. To be honest, I was tempted to throw in Arthur Godfrey Time, but I thought that might be going too far. Make that farther than too far, which I'd probably gone already.

Take the question seriously, really, and you may think as I, that Paris Hilton back in the day might (maybe) be caught listening to My Friend Irma. If only because of the empathy factor. At least, until Paris was driven to change the channel by the shock of recognition. The recognition that she probably makes Irma resemble an astrophysicist between the ears.