I’m a trash TV and online gossip site junky, so I tend to read a lot about those crazy celebrities and their wacky lives. I’ve also been known to watch the occasional E! True Hollywood Story. It’s a nasty and unseemly habit, all of this celebrity ogling, I’ll confess, and I probably shouldn’t spend so much of my time indulging in it, but I do.
Here’s the thing about celebrities though; with all of their glamour, their fame, and wealth, they really are ordinary, average people—just like you and me. They have the same foibles, the same challenges, the same fears, and the same insecurities. They just have a lot more money for Midtown Manhattan therapy and fancier crutches.
Occasionally, though, when I’m cruising the sites and/or channel surfing, one celebrity in particular will capture my attention. It’s usually because they’re beginning to run off the rails and well, I’m tempted to watch. It’s a tad bit Romanesque, I know, with all the public bloodletting and all, but, I can’t help it. It’s like an out of control kite in one of those wild, free fall death spirals—you just have to look.
You’ve seen it: the kite is whipping and twisting frantically in the sky, rolling and thrashing, dipping and diving, searching for that next gust of wind that will lift it up and help it find its flight once again. Sometimes it does and the kite almost seems to bow in appreciation as it dances lightly on the breeze, climbing higher, higher, and higher.
But then, the wind, as if it is playing some kind of a wicked game, releases its aerial embrace, abandoning the kite. You can’t help but hold your breath as you watch the kite shudder and stall, suspended against the backdrop of the sky. As you watch, you wonder if the wind will once again show mercy. But it doesn’t and so, tragically, the kite turns and takes its final, Kamikaze dive—straight into the ground.
Hollywood fame seems to be just as cruel. Whispering seductive and sexy promises of wealth, power, and adulation into the ears of the innocent and the naïve; luring them into the deep, dark, unholy places of the heart, only to mock them, deride them and laugh them to scorn when someone else who is younger, fresher, and more relevant comes along.
Take Lindsay Lohan for example: young, attractive, and talented (supposedly), but, without a doubt, a bonafide train wreck. Yet, like so many other young, Hollywood starlets who are washed up before they are thirty, she didn’t start out that way.
Before she was even twelve years old, Lindsey was launched like a bottle rocket straight into the black velvet skyline of celebrity to take her place among the other shiny, twinkling stars. For a time, the bombs seemed to burst in the air for Lindsey with one movie success after another. I guess you could even say she had her own rocket’s red glare.
But, before too long, her razzle dazzle burned out and instead of watching her shine on the silver screen we were watching her stumble out of nightclubs drunk. We watched as she crashed her Mercedes into a tree and before the paramedics and EMTs arrived, take a quick power nap—complete with a gaping mouth and drool running down her neck.
She frolicked, without shame, or panties, into the Hollywood night with Britney and Paris. She was publically scolded by a Hollywood executive for her lack of professionalism. She reconciled with her dad. She broke up with her dad. And just when it all became unmanageable, she did what every good Hollywood celebrity would do—she checked into rehab. Meanwhile, her mother (Hello? Where the hell was she, anyway?) issued press release after press release reminding us that “girls just want to have fun” and that dear Lindsay was just fine.
It’s been difficult, even for me, to watch all of that familial dysfunction being worked out in the tabloids, on the television and basically in front of any camera that is willing to record it. Oh, yeah, sure, they complain about the constant intrusion into their lives. How difficult it is to be chased around by the paparazzi day in and day out. And that none of us, at least, those who are watching, really understand what it is like to have lives that are so interesting and so important that you are hunted down like a dog. It’s so horrible to be stalked and preyed upon, sniff, sniff, sniff and … wait … where’s the camera?
