Originally posted June 5, 2006 by RODNEY HO/rho@ajc.com
Comedian and pop culture observer Kathy Griffin will never be an A-list celebrity, and she knows it. And she's fine with that.
"I have the best of both worlds," she told me by phone last week, on the eve of the second season of her "Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List" reality show on Bravo, which debuts Tuesday at 9 p.m. "I get to make a living doing something I love, and nobody is going through my garbage. And nobody cares if I'm eating at In-and-Out Burger."
Among the funniest moments of the first show is Griffin receiving the "key" to the city of Louisville, Ky., before eight city employees and one actual fan. And she tries to auction for charity a weekend with her at her home and finds out that the top bidder, who offered $28,000, wasn't serious. And neither were the next dozen or so.
The winner ended up paying $5,000, a major ego hit for Griffin. "I could have called a gay guy I already know to pay that," she cracked. She said the second episode will feature said winner hanging out at her house, bored to tears and oddly obsessed with Geri Halliwell, former Spice Girl.
Griffin, who was fired from the E! network last year partly for making a joke about former Conyers actress Dakota Fanning being in rehab (not true, of course), recently got into a tiff with Dunwoody High grad and her E! replacement Ryan Seacrest on Seacrest's Los Angeles radio show. She was teasing him about his short romantic fling with Teri Hatcher, and Griffin said he hung up on her.
"His team was calling my publicist saying he was upset I was starting a rumor, [so] he hung up on me," she said. "He was going to send out a press release saying I was making it up for publicity. That would have been a dream come true!" (Seacrest publicist Meredith O'Sullivan didn't respond to a request for comment.)
To see Griffin's stand-up show live, mark your calendar for Friday, Oct.13, at the Ferst Center for the Arts, with a second date to be added, according to www.kathygriffin.net, her official Web site.
