Gawker
As ABC lawyers continue to pore through the "Legitimate Grounds for Shitcanning" paragraph in Isaiah Washington's contract, the disgraced Grey's Anatomy actor with the well-documented prejudice against Hollywood's hard-working sodomites has been taking every possible measure to save his job reach across sexual preference lines to make amends. Washington fired his longtime publicist Cynthia Snyder, presumably for her failure to stuff a cocktail napkin into his mouth before the fatal slur could re-emerge; in her place he hired Kelly "I managed to get the world to stop talking about R. Kelly peeing on a 14-year-old and start talking about 'Trapped in a Closet!'" Mullens and her partner in damage control crime, Allen Mayer. First order of business: Getting Washington into a roomful of Gays. Reports the AP:
"He seemed very sincere in his interest in working with us in an ongoing basis," Kevin Jennings, executive director of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network. "We emphasized that this is not a one-shot deal, but an ongoing thing. He was very open to doing this."
By coincidence, Jennings noted, Monday was the start of "No Name-Calling Week," coordinated by GLSEN with national educational partners to help schools find ways to eliminate bullying and slurs of all kinds.
There's great serendipity in Washington's apology tour falling on "No Name-Calling Week," a coincidence that could only have been more appropriate if it also happened to be "No Bald-Faced Lying to Access Hollywood's Billy Bush and Nancy O'Dell Week." Still, the well-timed reparations tour still may not be enough to save Washington's job, posing Shonda Rhimes, the show's creator, with a serious character arc conundrum: Having originally dismissed the idea of replacing Washington by saying, "[T]he (idea) that one black man was interchangeable with another seemed disturbing to me," Rhimes now has to figure out how to justify that Dr. Burke's three-episode departure from the Seattle Grace Hospital for treatment by an out-of-state specialist resulted in a rare, skin-fading side-effect that transformed him into a Josh Duhamel-lookalike, aka "McTasty."
