Judith Light is February’s Garden State Playmate

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“ANGELA!” In my head I can hear Tony Danza’s rough voice ascend into a higher register as he replies to his boss with some mildly comedic response. I grew up watching Who’s The Boss and Judith Light played the uptight, ’80s yuppie Angela Bower to perfection. There were times when I lost a dream or two, but I found the trail and at the end was February’s Garden State Playmate, Judith Light!

Born in Trenton, NJ, Judith Light was starring in TV shows well before she broke out with Who’s the Boss. In fact, all throughout the late ’70s and ’80s you could catch her on TV pretty much any day of the week. She appeared on One Life to Live, St. Elsewhere, Remington Steele, Kojak, and Family Ties.

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One of her most well received performances was in the 1989 made-for-TV movie The Ryan White Story, about a 13 year old hemophiliac who contracted AIDS. In 1999, Light bravely took on the role in the off-Broadway show Wit where she shaved her head completely as she played a “literary academic dying of ovarian cancer” according to IMDB.

More recently, Light has appeared on Law and Order SVU, Ugly Betty, Nurse Jackie, and now you can catch her on one of my favorites…DALLAS! In the TNT reboot of the long running show, she plays Judith Ryland, the rotten and controlling mother (mother? really?) of the 2nd season’s villain.

*She attended St. Mary’s Hall in Burlington, NJ. (IMDB)

America’s Got Taint…ed Rest Stops

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New Jersey might be known for Bruce, Bon Jovi, and MTV’s Jersey Shore, but there was actually a time that the King of All Media himself and the newest judge on America’s Got Talent, Howard Stern, was also the talk of the state. Many years after Howard hosted his own late night TV show in the ’80s on Secaucus NJ’s WWOR channel 9, Howard popped up in another part of Jersey, but in a quite different capacity. Although Howard will forever be associated with New York radio, he’s also etched in the history of a New Jersey rest stop.

While on the air speaking with then-candidate for Governor of NJ, Christie Todd Whitman, Howard half jokingly said he’d endorse her campaign if she dedicated a rest stop to him in Jersey. Whitman wound up getting elected in 1994, and on March 19th, 1995, there indeed was a plaque installed at the rest stop on I-295 in honor of Stern. On the plaque was a cartoonish picture of Stern popping his head out of an outhouse in the Burlington, NJ rest stop. It was stolen merely days later. Just finding a picture of the infamous plaque on the Internet proved to be quite a challenge. (I finally found it thanks to The Jersey Shore Mom!)

The shock jock’s rest stop quickly became seedy. Stern named the rest stop after a segment on his show, the “Show Us Your Tits Scenic Overlook.” Motorists were using the bathrooms at the rest area for sex and who knows what else. Gee, what a surprise! In 2003, Governor McGreevy ordered the rest area to be shut down to save up to $1 Million dollars in operating costs. But it was most likely because of the backlash of people who thought the sexual escapades going on there were indecent. McGreevy later came out of the closet and actually admitted to engaging in sex acts at rest stops in New Jersey.

Since then the area was locked up and all toilets were removed from the premises. As the years passed the rest stop became neglected and started to decay, but it hasn’t been forgotten.

As of 2010, when this AP article was published on NJ.com, rumors were flying that the state was thinking of selling the naming rights of all of our rest stops to large companies. This revenue could add up to over a $1 million dollars a year or more.