From: http://www.nashuatelegraph.com/apps/pbcs.d...0309/-1/opinion

Soap opera star’s salute a crass career move

A Telegraph Column By Darren Garnick

Published: Thursday, March 22, 2007

In 1988, actress Brenda Dickson was on top of the world as Jill Abbott, the scheming brunette bombshell on “The Young and the Restless.” She won the coveted outstanding villainess in a daytime serial award from Soap Opera Digest.

Desperately craving attention today, the 58-year-old actress posts pictures of herself with celebrities on her Web site, www.brendadickson.com. She has her arm around Antonio Banderas, Oscar de la Hoya and 2006 “American Idol” castoff Ace Young, whom she describes as her “dinner companion.”

But the self-absorbed Ace doesn’t have the decency to mention her on his Web site, so Dickson has to find another comeback vehicle. And she has: Adolf Hitler.

After being out of the limelight for two decades, the actress is on the March 20 cover of Soap Opera Weekly magazine. She has grasped her YouTube moment, giving the Nazi salute and chanting “Heil Hitler!” in a Hawaii divorce court.

Dickson claims she’s angling for a recurring role on “Desperate Housewives,” but now she might be the early favorite for the lead in “Silk Swastika Stockings: The Eva Braun Story.” The fact that she dyed her hair Aryan blonde makes her salute all the more convincing.

Despite the fact that her publicity stunt can be used in the next KKK recruitment video, there’s no evidence that Dickson is actually a Nazi sympathizer. But she’s only a few rungs lower on the moron scale: someone who compares every enemy to Hitler and every unpleasant experience to the Holocaust.

Dennis Miller said it best on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” a few years back, slamming anti-war protestors who interchangeably use the terms “Nazi” and “jerk.”

“Everybody in the world is Hitler. Bush is Hitler. Ashcroft is Hitler. Rumsfeld is Hitler. The only guy who isn’t Hitler is the foreign guy with a mustache dropping people who disagree with him into the wood chipper. He’s not Hitler,” Miller said.

The soap opera star’s Hitler is her ex-husband’s attorney. And according to rambling press releases on her Web site, the divorce court judge is head of the Gestapo. Dickson is understandably enraged about having to spend 16 days in a Honolulu jail for refusing to leave her condo in compliance with the divorce settlement.

What she learned was that the Hawaiian jails don’t serve fresh pineapple and macadamia nuts.

“One of the girls (inmates) had lipstick. She let me use it and a little bit of black liner. That’s all I had. I had no way to fix myself up at all,” Dickson told Soap Opera Weekly. “But at least I wasn’t in the orange jumpsuit.”

Besides Nazi imagery, she also likes cowboy metaphors. Dickson told the magazine that the Hawaiian courts are “like the wild West, making up whatever laws they want to make up.”

In the short term, all this Gestapo talk has proven to be a shrewd career move. Before the actress made a buffoon out of herself in court, I had never even heard of her. She must be back on the radar screen for soap opera nation.

But the phrase “Heil Hitler” is also destined for the fifth or sixth paragraph of her obituary. I predict the best villainess award will be unshakable as the lead.

I tried e-mailing Dickson at [email protected], but she must have been too busy clinking champagne glasses with Young to write me back. If a major soap opera convention ever comes to New Hampshire, here’s what I’m burning to ask her: Have you ever considered using your middle finger? It’s so much classier than the Nazi salute.

Interesting article.