Tattle: Susan Boyle goes from 0 to $229 in a second

IT LOOKS LIKE the dream that Susan Boyle dreamed on "Britain's Got Talent" is coming true.

According to London's News of the World, Boyle's moonlighting while performing on the "Britain's Got Talent" concert tour.

But she's not doing weddings, Bar Mitzvahs or karaoke nights.

Boyle is performing for corporate clients and charging in the tony neighborhood of $165,000 for a set. A 12-minute set.

That's about $13,750 per minute or $229 a second.

And Boyle hasn't even signed her record deal yet.

Ironically, at a BGT concert in Sheffield this weekend, Boyle was singing "Memory" and forgot the words.

Mississippi lawyering

Demaris Meyer, the woman in the passenger seat the August night that Morgan Freeman crashed a car on a rural Mississippi highway, was partly to blame for the accident, Morgan's attorney, Jack H. Hayes Jr., said Friday in court papers.

What are you implying, sir?

Demaris is suing Morgan, claiming that he was negligent when the car he was driving ran off the side of the road seriously injuring both of them.

Meyer sued Freeman in February for medical expenses, pain and suffering, lost wages, permanent disability and property damage. The suit alleged that Freeman was drinking that night, though it stops short of saying that he was intoxicated. No charges were filed.

Hayes responded to that suit by denying almost all the allegations, but saying that Freeman admitted driving the car, and that it left the road and "sustained significant damages." The filing said that he "would show [that Meyer] is comparatively negligent," though it did not describe what that means.

Nursing their wounds

The latest group to be offended by television? Nurses.

In the pilot for Showtime's "Nurse Jackie," Edie Falco's Jackie snorts drugs, steals money, forges an organ donor's card, has sex on the job with a pharmacist and flushes a severed body part down the toilet.

This offends certain nurses because they say nurses don't do these things.

At least not in a single half hour.

It's drama, folks. An exaggeration of life. Anybody who watches "Nurse Jackie" and believes that Jackie represents all nurses must also believe that pill-popping, misogynistic, genius "House" represents all doctors. Or "The Mentalist" represents all crime-solvers. Or Jon & Kate represent all parents of eight.

When did we become so humorless and literal?

In Friday's Tattle, in an item about 40-year-old Chastity Bono deciding to become a man, we wrote that some women will do anything to get out of menopause. Some people - thankfully very few - took the parenthetical comment literally.

It was a joke. Of course, no one would make such a monumental decision as changing one's own gender to avoid hot flashes - that's what makes it a joke.

Whether it's a funny joke or not may be debated, but my boss laughed and she's a woman - at least last time we checked.

As for the headline written by our clever news editor, ". . . Chastity wants a Bono": Iin the biz we call that a play on words.

One reader, however, wrote that it was "tasteless and offensive." What? Another wrote that it was "disgustingly bigoted." Huh? A third wrote "Thanks for making my day. Now that's funny."

Aw, shucks.

Bill Maher cracked a joke on his HBO show Friday night about the Holocaust Memorial shooter, akin to him saying that it was at least nice to see an active senior citizen. Now that is a tasteless joke. A man died, for goodness sake.

But it was a joke. Maher wasn't being serious, calling for hate-filled old folks to rise up with handguns.

When you tell a lot of jokes some of them are going to be bad. Some of them are going to be offensive. But the occasional groaners and wincers are certainly better than no jokes at all. *

Daily News wire services contributed to this report.

Send e-mail to gensleh@phillynews.com.