Blonde on Blonde: Herpes, Name Changes, and Ambition

Moments before Deirdre Imus and Lis Wiehl took the stage for this week’s edition of Blonde on Blonde, Imus told Connell he thinks Lis is “a politically correct pansy.” Bernard jumped in to defend Lis’s so-called “phony” behavior, saying, “We call it civility.”
 
Imus maintained that Lis is “transparent,” unlike the British man who neglected to tell sexual partners that he had Herpes. He has since been sentenced to 14 months in prison for a crime Deirdre and Lis agreed is worthy of punishment.
 
“People have done that with AIDS and HIV also,” Deirdre said. Reports have indicated the man knew he had the disease, raising an entirely separate issue than if he was accidentally spreading Herpes.
 
“There’s negligence there,” said Lis, an attorney, whose hair looked remarkably good this morning. Though she did not defend the Herpes-ridden Brit, Lis sort of understood why he didn’t disclose his condition prior to gettin’ busy. “If you tell somebody you’ve got AIDS or you’ve got Herpes before you have sex with them, that’s not the best turn on. I don’t think Viagra can overcome everything.”
 
But before sex comes marriage, right? To that end, Imus noted that Kim Kardashian will shed her famous moniker after this weekend, having decided to take the last name of her future husband, basketball player Kris Humphries. Deirdre proudly adopted the surname Imus when she married you-know-who, but admitted today, “If I married someone with a name like Weiner, I don’t think I would take their name.”
 
Lis, on the other hand, did not change her name after getting married for reasons she said were mostly professional. “I had been a law school graduate at that point, I had started my career, and to try to change it midstream just didn’t make any sense for me,” she said.
 
Accused by Deirdre of caring more about convenience than anything else, Lis replied, “Women have a tougher time anyway in society, holding down good jobs and having a career if they have children, as we know. Why not take one thing out of it?”
 
Sensing an opening, Imus remarked that, name change or not, “it doesn’t mean either one of you still shouldn’t be subservient to your man.”
 
Some women stick by their men regardless of how embarrassing or shameful their public deed, a la Bill Clinton, Eliot Spitzer, and Bernard Madoff, whose wife Ruth reportedly left her jailbird husband earlier this week.
 
“I don’t understand Eliot Spitzer and his wife,” Deirdre said. “Hillary and Bill I kind of do, because she’s so ambitious, and she stuck with him thinking she was going to be president. That is a business-political relationship.”
 
Annoyed, Lis shot back, “By pointing out that Hillary is ambitious and not pointing out that Bill is also ambitious, and he was a part of this deal or arrangement—aren’t you being sexist by saying that?”
 
This interchange went on for a while longer, until Imus could take it no more, declaring, “Neither one of you makes any sense at all.”
 
-Julie Kanfer