Happy anniversary, Rob Lowe in Atlanta!
July 25, 2008 at 8:20 am by David Lee Simmons in A&EI’m sure someone in Atlanta’s media somewhere commemorated the 20th anniversary this past week of the Democratic National Convention being held in Atlanta, where the Dems chose the cerebral Michael Dukakis to take a very smart ass-pounding by George H.W. Bush. But that wasn’t the best thing to come out of the convention; it was the sex scandal surrounding then-heartthrob Rob Lowe, who videotaped himself trying to get out the vote among some of the city’s younger women. (Giving a new meaning to the term “glad-handing.”)
The scandal provided a bit of a career road bump for Lowe, but provided a helluva career boost for Emory University graduate and former Creative Loafing intern Mike Sager (pictured), who wrote an amazing chronicle of the incident for Rolling Stone magazine in 1989. The story is included in the first of three collections of Sager’s magazine works, Scary Monsters, Super Freaks (Perseus Books); his second book, Revenge of the Donut Boys, came out last year. His third and final collection, Wounded Warriors: Those For Whom the War Never Ends, will be released in October, while his debut novel, Deviant Behavior, was released this past spring. Sager will promote his new books at next month’s AJC Decatur Book Festival, where I will have the privilege of interviewing him about his work.
As for Lowe, 20 years on, most people know about his new scandal that broke this past spring involving his nanny situation — which is now in the courts. For me, I’ll always admire Lowe’s work on the multiple-Emmy-winning TV show “The West Wing,” but also for the hilariously timed (and woefully underrated) 1990 thriller, Bad Influence, which had a little sex, lies and videotape moment of its own. Enjoy …
(Sager photo courtesy Perseus Books)
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