I couldn't have been less surprised by this week's firing if NBC had posted a giant "Countdown to Toral's Pink Slip" clock on the screen; of course, I still thoroughly enjoyed watching her squirm for an hour straight. If you tuned in, you had the good fortune to witness Mean Girls in their natural habitat — singling out one of the herd for swift and merciless disposal. Awe-inspiring, really. And when they weren't channeling Animal Planet, Capital Edge was busy tanking the design-a-new-promotional-character-for-Dairy-Queen task; honestly, I felt a twinge of vertigo coming on every time I tried to look at that googly-eyed "Zip" thing. Meanwhile, Excel came together in a glorious display of teamwork and really snippy leadership to create "Jenny the Genie" — a rather clever 2-D sketch that materialized into every Kabuki nightmare I've ever had, once good ol' boy Mark slipped into that soft-serve wig. (And let us not forget the delightfully traumatic experience of listening to
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Question: Some years ago I saw a Lifetime TV-movie with Dana Delany (the reason I stopped channel-surfing) in which she and her husband adopt his sister's children when the sister and her husband die on the same day, she of cancer and he in a commuter train accident. A few years later I was reading Kurt Vonnegut's TimeQuake, in which he describes adopting his sister's children under identical circumstances. He also mentioned that one of the adopted boys works in TV, so can you tell me whether this movie was written by said adopted Vonnegut child? Answer: The Dana Delany movie you saw was A Promise to Keep (1990) and is about writer Kurt Vonnegut 's adoption of his orphaned nephews. But it wasn't written by one of the children; it was based on the memoir Ange
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