from www.aolnews.com – By now you’ve probably heard about Jodie Fisher, the actress and marketing contractor whose sexual harassment claim against Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd ended up bringing about Hurd’s resignation last week.
It’s one of those stories with something for everyone. There’s an IT giant for the tech types; market tremors for those who follow the business world; the whiff of sex for scandal junkies (though Fisher maintains that she and Hurd “never had an affair or intimate sexual relationship,” and HP found that Hurd hadn’t violated the company’s harassment policies).
But, someone out there is saying right now, I don’t care about any of this. The only thing I care about in this world is the movie “Little Big League,” Andrew Scheinman’s 1994 family comedy about a 12-year-old who becomes the manager of the Minnesota Twins.
Well, Surge Desk hears you, person with oddly specific interests. But in fact this story has something for you, too. Because it turns out that one of Fisher’s movie credits — seemingly the only one to see the inside of an actual theater — was “Night Nurse #1” in “Night Nurses From Jersey,” the silly porno flick that Billy Heywood, the protagonist of “Little Big League,” orders up in his hotel room.
The scene occurs at about the 55-minute mark: Billy’s sacked out on the bed with what looks like a burger and fries, watching the pay-per-view on screen, where two ladies in lingerie are slinking around a doctor’s office.
Gleefully, Billy calls up his friend and reads the film’s tagline for him: “They’re off the turnpike and on duty for love.”
It’s only slightly naughty — the most memorable bit of dialogue from “Night Nurses” is “What are we going to do about this blood pressure of yours?” As The New York Times noted at the time, “no ‘procedures’ are actually shown.” But the film-within-a-film has turned out to have surprising staying power.
It has, for example, inspired the name of a raucous ska band from Tallahassee. It also served as the title of a thoughtful sports blog that was active for a while in 2008. And the comments of countless Web users, on blogs and comment threads across the land, suggest that “Night Nurses From Jersey” has become an enduring in-joke for those who love movie trivia. (Perhaps not unrelated, it even seems to have become permanently lodged in the sexual imagination of some people who may have seen “Little Big League” at just the right age.)
It’s oddly cheering to know that before she stepped onto the national stage this year, Jodie Fisher had been at least a peripheral presence in pop culture for well over a decade. CEOs come and go, but the night nurses from Jersey endure.