TUESDAY

Gene Gene the Dancing Machine, the Unknown Comic, Jaye P. Morgan: Any of these Z-list Gong Show stalwarts surely would have made a better CIA assassin than homonculitic show creator and host Chuck Barris. But in his recently reissued “unauthorized” autobiography, 1982’s Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Barris boldly boasts that, in the ’70s, he was a trash-TV maven by day (Barris also created The Dating Game and The Newlywed Game) and a lethal weapon by night (total secret-op kills: 33). It’s all a bunch of bullshit, of course. Despite Barris’ slyly maintaining to this day that he was indeed a cold-blooded killer, his book is basically Fear and Loathing in Game Show Land, in which truth and fiction are fuzzed out with a profanity-prone purple crayon, and the wildly insecure Barris, revealed to be a progenitor of the reality-television scourge, gets to indulge in some big-balled James Bond fantasies. (The much-ballyhooed movie version of Dangerous Mind, directed by George Clooney, adapted by twisted scripter Charlie Kaufman, and starring Sam Rockwell as Barris, is due in D.C. theaters Jan. 24.) Snuffing out lives aside, Barris’ lowest, and all too true, moment may have come when he put the infamous Popsicle Twins—one 15, the other 17; both with “fresh, full, succulent bodies”—on The Gong Show. He writes: “The girls skipped onto the stage barefoot, sat down on the floor side by side, crossed their legs Indian-style, and began to…” Oh boy. Ask Barris to finish the sentence at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 21, at Olsson’s Books & Records, 2111 Wilson Blvd., Arlington. Free. (703) 525-4227. (Sean Daly)