Gene Simmons and I go back. A key formative experience of my life was when my teenaged cousin played me a KISS album (a real vinyl, round, black thing) and gave me some posters and a scratched and chipped copy of KISS Alive. For the next year or two I did little else but listen to, read about and talk about KISS. That lasted until I was eight or nine. By then I had become a lifelong music fan, but KISS faded in my rearview mirror.

More recently I thumbed through Gene Simmons' book Sex, Money, Kiss, and was impressed with his penny-pinching ways. It was also nice to see he related practical advice about using credit cards to his fans who...well, they're guys who still paint their faces and wag their tongues at 45, and they don't get paid like Gene to do it, so they could probably use any common sense tip they could get. But I even know a MBA in the Financial department at Lockheed-Martin who collects Gene Simmons' books and tapes of his speeches like some collect Tony Robbins.

So though Donald Trump's Celebrity Apprentice sounded like a lame attempt to resucitate a floundering show, I was eager to see how Gene Simmons would fare. I was sure he would stick around until the end because he was one of the show's biggest celebrities. Tiffany Fallon? Cute, but the Olympic medalist girl who remains is actually better looking, so Fallon was expendable. Nadia Comaneci was big news in 1976, but not a bright star these days. Adios! Next?...GENE?

Simmons got off to a great start by dismissing Donald Trump's daughter, Ivanka, from a meeting as though she was some C-grade stripper. He won the round as project manager, though. On this latest round, however, he skipped a meeting with the top executives from Kodak as though they were C-grade strippers. "I don't want an executive with a fixed viewpoint influencing my thinking," he explained. The executives then rejected his ad campaign because it didn't include any elements of their desired message, which Gene made it clear he wasn't interested in, anyhow. He didn't even know the name of the product! "We succeded, they just didn't recognize it," Gene said in a line I'll use at some point.

The project manager gets to bring two people he feels fell down on the job back to the board room for Trump to consider firing. Gene brought two ladies everyone agreed were blameless for the project's failure, assuring he would get fired, and he was. Trump and cohort Jim Cramer were in disbelief anyone could be so dense. Simmons said he believed in sticking by his ideas as he rode off into the night (he's now been called "the Rock n' Roll George Bush" on a KISS chat board).

It looks like he got himself fired on purpose so he could go do something else, but...what? Is another casino tour with 1/2 the original members of KISS more important than the publicity and notoriety such a tour could gain from being part of a NBC TV show? Who knows. I'm sure Gene is working on a seemingly-logical explanation as we speak.

Going by his Sex, Money, Kiss book, I think he should consider recasting himself as a Suze Orman for the average beer-bellied ding-dong. Like her, he also likes women, and he talked about finance in extremely broad, simplistic terms a guy like me can follow, and he has the "clout" of having lived the rock star lifestyle so many aspire to even in our middle age.

Think about it.

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