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Pamela Anderson appeared on the cover of Playboy magazine 14 times. That’s more than anyone else, including Drew Barrymore. The actress and delightful talk show host was on the cover only once, in January 1995; the issue also featured the “untold story” of sex and Prozac and an interview with Jean-Claude Van Damme. What a time to be alive!

On Friday’s episode of The Drew Barrymore Show, Barrymore and Anderson — who is promoting a Netflix documentary and memoir — reminisced about their Playboy days. “When I was doing Playboy and loving it and having so much fun and don’t regret a thing and love it, I didn’t know I’d have kids later,” Barrymore said.

Anderson recalled bringing her “kids to the Playboy Mansion every Easter and I was getting in the car and [her son] Brandon came out [and said], ‘Mom, do you know what [Playboy founder Hugh Hefner] does for a living? He takes pictures of naked girls!’ I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, get in the car. Let’s get out of here!’” The Baywatch star also shared what she learned from her time spent at the mansion.

“I learned that there are such things as philanthropists and art and gentlemen and chivalry,” she said. “And as crazy as people really want me to always say something bad about it, I didn’t have a bad experience. That was so much better than where I had come from.”

You can watch Anderson’s interview above.

(Via Decider)

It should go without saying that having your private business shared with people you didn’t consent to hearing about it can be upsetting. But imagine having it shared publicly, with the entire town after you took on a prominent role. It would be devastating. Except what happened to Dawn Clements, interim superintendent of Ben Hill County Georgia, was even more upsetting. Someone publicly outed her as gay.

Coming out as part of the LGBTQ+ community is something that someone does on their own time in the way they feel most comfortable. It can take years for someone to build up the courage to do it, and some people never feel comfortable enough to share that part of themselves with the world. But no matter when or if someone comes out, their existence within and outside of the queer community is still valid.

And while many people respect that the decision to come out is deeply personal, not everyone does and Clements was on the receiving end of hateful behavior. According to LGBTQ Nation, Danny Pate wrote the letter outing Clements as gay and sent it to local pastors before the letter began circulating the community. This led to Clements handing in her resignation.

Being a member of the LGBTQ+ community doesn’t make you any less capable of doing your job, so it’s strange that someone would go out of their way to push a competent person out. Clements has worn many hats in the school district, from teacher to principal, according to LGBTQ Nation. She’s more than qualified to hold the position of interim superintendent and her feeling pushed into resigning is heart wrenching.

But the school board wasn’t having any part of her resignation. In fact, when Ben Hill County school board met, they outright rejected the resignation.

“Cheers erupted among hundreds of students and other community members and colleagues who gathered in support,” LGBTQ Nation wrote.

Turns out she had a whole community behind her ready to fight against hatred. Beth McIntyre, an area blueberry farmer told Georgia Public Broadcasting, “When something that hateful and mean-spirited is written about our people, we don’t like it.” With McIntyre knowing Clements since she was a child, it’s not surprising that she’s likely feeling protective.

Clements has been with the school district for 22 years and when the school board met, hundreds of people crowded in to show her support, according to GPB. But if you’re expecting Clements to respond to the upsetting letter and subsequent outpouring of support in a public way – you might just turn blue holding your breath.

“She’s a low-key person. he doesn’t want to be a poster child,” McIntyre explained to GPB that a public comment won’t come.

While the school board rejected Clements’ resignation, she has not returned to her position and its currently being filled by the human resources director with the hopes Clements returns.

“It is very heartening to see a community come out so overwhelmingly in support of someone who simply is just, by all accounts, worthy of doing a good job and should continue to be employed by the school district,” Executive Director Jeff Graham told GPB.

Hopefully, the superintendent returns to her post after taking a moment to herself. It’s clear that the community wants her to continue to fill her seat.

Even though it has become a popular internet bit to joke about all of Leonardo DiCaprio’s various young girlfriends, it is based on the well-known fact that this man consistently dates people who weren’t even alive when Titanic hit theaters. And it seems like he’s always been this way, though it was significantly less weird when he was in his 30s.

Still, it is well-known that DiCaprio has a history with younger women, even going back almost 20 years. In a newly resurfaced 2005 Harpers Bazaar interview with The OC star Mischa Barton, the actress claims her team encouraged her to hit on DiCaprio in hopes of advancing her career. Barton, who was 19 at the time, was told by her rep to “go sleep with that man” referring to DiCaprio, “for the sake of [her] career.”

Barton decided to pass at the time, saying “Isn’t Leo, like, 30 or something?” Now, DiCaprio is 48 and still being linked to teenagers, though sometimes he goes above 25, just to keep everyone on their toes. Though breaking up with his last long-term girlfriend right after she turned 25 was a little fishy.

Of course, DiCaprio was probably unaware of the exchange between Barton and her rep (who knows if he was a fan of The OC back in the day) but the fact that this story is from nearly 20 years ago and could still be applied to the actor’s love life today is a bit troubling.

(via Page Six)

Gracie Abrams has a big year ahead of her. Last month, she announced her debut album Good Riddance arriving in just a couple of weeks. Next month, she’ll be bringing those songs out on the road to massive audiences with the one and only Taylor Swift on the much-discussed Eras Tour.

Today, she shared a new Good Riddance single called “Amelie.” The twangy song highlights Abrams’ knack for visceral storytelling right off the bat: “I met a girl once / She sorta ripped me open / She doesn’t even know it.” The whole song is poignant and previews an album that’s likely to be an emotional experience.

About Good Riddance, Abrams crafted a heartfelt message about the record and the help of Aaron Dessner on social media.”It’s difficult to imagine these songs living anywhere other than my most secret places, but @aarondessner reminded me that holding space for brutal honesty in songwriting is kind of the whole point,” Abrams wrote. “I feel an unbelievable amount of gratitude for the opportunity to have made this album. Writing this record allowed me to grow up in ways I needed to. It forced me to reflect and be accountable. It allowed me to walk away from versions of myself that I no longer recognized. It allowed me to let go.”

Listen to “Amelie” above.

Good Riddance is out 2/24 via Interscope Records. Pre-save it here.

Larry the Cable Guy got a taste of conservative outrage after he made a joke about Marjorie Taylor Greene acting out at the State of the Union address. The backlash was particularly ironic given Larry (real name: Dan Whitney) is not shy about his political beliefs, and a bleeding heart liberal he is not.

“This pic reminds me of every comedians x girlfriend coming to their show and sitting in the back 6 days after the breakup,” Larry tweeted along with four photos of Greene’s Cruella-like outfit.

Despite defending Greene in the replies, Larry received pushback from Republicans and fired back on Thursday night.

“This wasn’t a political joke!” The Cable Guy tweeted. “Unbelievable. Lighten up some of you sheesh. It was about a comedian getting heckled by his x at the club. She had all the gestures. Some of you def don’t follow me or you’d think twice on your dumb comments.”

In Larry’s defense, his politics are pretty clear. A quick look through his timeline should’ve put to bed any concerns that he leans heavily to the right. Just take a look at his recent tweets and retweets.

On top of that, Larry actually likes Greene and made it a point to defend her after making his “joke.” He also shut down a Twitter user who accused of him voting for Biden.

In short, as much as conservatives love to complain about liberal snowflakes and how no one can take a joke anymore, they should probably take a good look in the mirror. When you’re accusing freaking Larry the Cable Guy from The Blue Comedy Tour fame of being “woke,” something’s gone wrong.

(Via Larry the Cable Guy on Twitter)

If Magic Mike was a movie about the realities of male stripping, Magic Mike XXL was a movie about the fantasy of male stripping. In bringing back director Steven Soderbergh for part three (Gregory Edwards directed the second), I was hoping the third might combine some of the grit of the first with some of the fun of the second.

Magic Mike’s Last Dance is certainly an attempt at another romp, but Soderbergh’s return seems less to have brought it back to reality and mostly to have stripped it of kitsch. Which for a franchise about all-male revues is sort of like losing a pitching arm (a kitsching arm?). If Magic Mike was “what does the dick shaking really mean?” and Magic Mike XXL asked “what if even more dicks shaking?” Magic Mike’s Last Dance offers us “the dicks are still shaking, but they have British accents now.”

We catch up with Magic Mike Whateverhislastnameis (star/producer Channing Tatum) as he’s bartending a charity gala at a rich lady’s home. The rich lady, wouldn’t you know it, has lost her mojo, but she’s gotten a hot tip from a gal pal that the guy behind the bar was up until recently the world’s foremost purveyor of the art of getting ladies’ grooves back. This lady, Maxendra Mendoza, played by Salma Hayek, corners Magic Mike after the other guests have left and coyly attempts to inquire if perchance he might grace her with some hearty thrusting.

“Sorry, M’lady, I’m retired,” growls Mike. She asks him to name his price, he says 60 grand basically as a joke, but she offers him six for real and soon they’re making sweat angels on her satin sheets.

“So, was that Magic Mike’s last dance?” she asks huskily, cuing the pointing DiCaprio gif.

Maxendra has her groove back, in spades. To the point that she now demands Mike fly to London with her for a surprise job. The surprise, it turns out, is that Maxendra has taken over a London theater in a pre-divorce agreement (don’t ask) with her most recent ex, a rich Rupert Murdoch-esque media titan-type guy. Up until now, the theater has been staging Isabel Ascended, a stuffy Jane Austen-esque play about a Victorian lady trying to choose whether to wed for love or for money. Maxendra has hired Magic Mike as the new creative director in the hopes of adapting his life-changing private dickmatism into a stage show for London’s literati. Who’s more sexually repressed than the British, after all. Magic Mike’s Last Dance then becomes the latest entry in the good ol’ fashioned “puttin’ on a show” genre.

Maxendra’s goal with this stage show is, supposedly, to shatter the myth that Isabel should be forced to choose between two boring chodes, the rich dud or the broke Romeo. “Why can’t she just shag them all and then do as she pleases?” fumes Hannah (Juliette Motamed), the only actor from the original Isabel Ascended to stay on for the male revue version.

Why indeed (I mean, lots of reasons, probably, but put a pin in that one for now).

I’ve always said that Magic Mike was a guy movie masquerading as a girl movie. It’s ostensibly about male stripping but really it’s about broke dudes trying to wrap their brains around what it means to be a man through a kind of kitschy gender play. Magic Mike‘s Last Dance clearly actually wants to be a movie for women and about women, only it can never quite escape the fact that it’s still made by men, who can only really know women so well. Their relative unfamiliarity shows in a series of weak generalizations.

Magic Mike never tried to be something for all men, because they knew that would’ve been foolish to try (and that no one would expect them to, which is an underrated facet of “privilege”). It was about one weird subculture with guidance from a guy who was actually part of it (Tatum famously being a former male stripper). And yet now that Magic Mike’s Last Dance is deliberately about women, it gets over-broad and corny, asking unanswerable women’s mag headlines like “what do women really want?” and “can the modern woman really have it all?”

“Is this stage show about male strippers sufficiently feminist?” is not a question I imagine any prospective Magic Mike’s Last Dance viewer needed asked. Is it feminist to pay $6,000 for sex? Maybe? I guess? Who cares? Probably it’s most feminist not to have to ask.

Soderbergh and screenwriter Reid Carolin seem to belatedly realize that “what does this particular woman want” is a more interesting question, attempting to draw a parallel between Maxenda and the fictional Isabel (she has a rich dud and broke stud too, get it?!). That could’ve, and should’ve, been kitschy and cute and the heart of the movie. Instead, it gets bogged down in weird minutia like the theater’s building codes, the sociological history of dance, and Maxenda and her ex’s confusing British non-divorce. (A British divorce isn’t final until a man in a powdered wig decides who gets the puddings). There’s a series of sexy buff English dudes brought in to do the dick shaking but we literally never even learn their names.

It’s also hard to figure out what the conflict actually is. What’s actually stopping Maxenda from just shagging them all and then doing what she wants? A woman writer and/or director might have actually had an answer to that, but Carolin and Soderbergh don’t, and so they substitute a series of contrived obstacles instead.

It’s not hard to watch Channing Tatum dance sexily with a sopping wet, barely clothed ballerina (as he does with real-life ballerina Kylie Shea in the finale), but didn’t we already do that in the Step Up movies? Magic Mike’s Last Dance pretends to be something more but in the end really isn’t.

‘Magic Mike’s Last Dance’ is available now only in theaters. Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can read more of his reviews here.

Just like us, Beck understands heartbreak is inevitable. The singer-songwriter shows this on his new single titled “Thinking About You,” which dropped with an accompanying visual.

The song — his first new single since late 2019, save for his contribution to McCartney III Imagined — seemingly centers on his longing for a romantic partner that has left him. Throughout the almost four-minute track, Beck broods over losing the love of his life as the guitar strums along with feelings of melancholy in the background. The song gives an acoustic, stripped-down feel as if you were almost watching the “Super Cool” singer perform it live.

“I pull the curtain and lay in bed/ I’ve got fifteen movies of you, playing in my head,” he sings. “Watching the ocean turn blue/Just thinking about you.”

The single comes ahead of the singer’s upcoming tour with Phoneix, which is set to kick off this August at the Climate Pledge Arena in Seattle. The North American tour is expected to make stops in major US and Canadian cities like Los Angeles, Houston, Boston, New York, and Toronto. Jenny Lewis, Japanese Breakfast, Weyes Blood, and Sir Chloe are also set to appear as openers on the tour.

Check out Beck’s “Thinking About You” above.

Three of the NBA’s most prominent players will not be able to play in the All-Star Game next week due to injuries. A pair of longtime All-Star staples, Kevin Durant and Steph Curry, won’t be able to go in Salt Lake City, while an up-and-coming star in Zion Williamson is likewise relegated to the sideline. Durant is dealing with an MCL sprain, Curry has a leg injury, and Williamson is recovering from an injury to his hamstring.

With this year’s All-Star voting featuring a number of players who unfortunately missed out on the game, there are more than enough deserving replacements for that trio. And on Friday afternoon, Adrian Wojnarowski of ESPN reported that Anthony Edwards of the Minnesota Timberwolves, De’Aaron Fox of the Sacramento Kings, and Pascal Siakam of the Toronto Raptors are all heading to Salt Lake City to participate in this year’s game.

Shortly after Wojnarowski’s report, the NBA confirmed that this trio will make up the game’s injury replacements.

Because all three players were voted in as starters, the league went on to announce the trio of players who will slide into the starting lineup: Joel Embiid, Lauri Markkanen, and Ja Morant.

This will mark the second time that Siakam is an All-Star, as he previously made it in 2020. Edwards and Fox, meanwhile, are going to participate in the game for the first time.

Super Bowl LVII is just two days away. While sports fanatics are looking forward to the NFL’s top two titans battling it out during the big game, others will be tuning in solely for the halftime show starring Rihanna. Although the Fenty Beauty boss has changed her setlist for her performance 39 times, the world is sure to be satisfied with whatever she delivers as it will be the recording artist’s return to a musical stage. However, before the “Lift Me Up” singer grabs a microphone, the pre-game concerts are warming up the Arizona crowd.

One of the acts featured in the pre-game festivities included Paramore. As the group continues to rev up promotions on their just-released new album, This Is Why, they performed several singles off the album, including “C’est Comme Ça” at Super Bowl Music Fest yesterday (February 9).

Between songs, Williams thanked the crowd for attending the show, then jokingly said, “Thank you for celebrating sports,” before screaming, “F*ck yeah, sports!”

Meanwhile, Williams recently said of Paramore, “At this point, I don’t understand how we’re still doing it. Because it just feels like against all odds every single time — which, honestly, I feel like we’re the most annoying band in the world because it’s always like, ‘Oh, we overcame this, and now we’re making this album.’”

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Super Bowl Sunday is the perfect party to break out your batched cocktail skills. Who wants to be shaking and stirring cocktails all day (and night) when you should be socializing, eating wings, and watching the game? Wouldn’t it be much easier to simply pour a delicious and batched old fashioned over some ice and dive in?! But batching cocktails isn’t as simple as increasing ingredients and hoping for the best. There’s some nuance and I’m here to guide you.

The key to batching ready-to-serve cocktails is knowing the dilution ratio. Very quickly, every cocktail is a mix of a base spirit, sugar, bitters, and water. Usually, water is added to the cocktail during the stirring or shaking step when the ice melts into the drink (and cools it). It’s crucial to creating a balanced drink and is the most often skipped step when making ready-to-drink batched cocktails.

Sure, you can batch a cocktail that you then stir or shake with every drink so that you get that vital water element. But that adds time to the whole process and kind of negates batching cocktails in the first place. So below, I’m going to lay out how easy it is to batch a ready-to-drink old fashioned cocktail that you can just pour over some ice and serve. Let’s dive in!

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Batched Old Fashioned

Ingredients:

• 1 bottle of rye whiskey (750ml)
• 4 oz. water
• 2.5 oz. Angostura Bitters
• 2.5 oz. demerara sugar
• Large ice cubes
• Orange peel
• Cherry

I’m using a barrel-proof rye whiskey that’s really tasty. Always make cocktails with booze that you actually enjoy drinking. No rotgut. No swill.

You’ll end up with 35 ounces of old fashioned with this recipe. Aim for three-ounce pours. You don’t have to be exact, but you should be able to get 10-12 pours from this batch.

What You’ll Need:

• Pitcher
• Barspoon
• Measuring cup
• Rock glass

Method:

• Add all the ingredients to the pitcher. Stir until well incorporated. Taste for sweetness and overall flavor. I didn’t need more sweetness, but an extra 0.5 oz. of sugar will go a long way if you want it sweeter.
• Place a lid on the pitcher or funnel into a bottle and keep it in the refrigerator.
• Prechill a glass and place a large cube in it. Pour the batched old fashioned over the cube and garnish with an orange peel (make sure to express the oils over the cocktail) and cherry. Serve.

Bottom Line:

This is delicious. I shocked myself (not easy these days) with the depth of the flavor profile of this cocktail. The Stellum Rye really popped with a deep dark cherry next to clove, cinnamon, and cedar bark that’s accented by the rich botanical barks from the bitters. The sweetness was just there, adding a nice lush mouthfeel (thanks to using thicker sugar syrup). The orange oils expressed over the cocktail really tied everything together and helped it pop on the palate.

Not to brag but.. this is the best old fashioned I’ve had in a while.

Since I’m making this ahead of time, I put it into a storage bottle and put it in the fridge. But I’m guessing I’m going to have to refill this bottle before Sunday.