Tarnish

I admit to sometimes falling into celebrity gossip – just like high school - well, there wasn’t really anything that interesting in my high school. One girl was considered a slut but she wasn’t particularly popular – just a bottle blonde with a good tan – and rumored to have been a bed mat for several men. She was a cheerleader. I went to an unusual high school. The cheerleaders weren’t popular but were considered dorks and at pep rallies, the custom was to throw pennies at them, which we did – if we even attended them. I remember at one of the few football games I attended that the players from the rival school talked about how hot she was. (This being the cheerleader or the girl with the tarnished reputation, however you look at it) True, for the squad, she was hot, although the prettiest girls weren’t actually on the cheerleading squad. They were too busy playing tennis or volleyball – the cool sports. Did I mention that I went to a high school by the beach? I took this in and thought, of course they’d like her… Then I went on contemplating life and its cruelties – I was one of those brooding high school kids who thought fun, beneath them.

So when I think of celebrity gossip, I consider it as the same stupidity given to caring about what the popular kids did. In the face of global warming, famine, war, who gives a rat ass that Brittany showed her cooch? And how does this become a lead story on an actual newscast? That doesn’t mean that I didn’t search online news about Lindsey Lohan’s car chase with her assistant. After working in entertainment, I know these things happen but I’m always amazed at people’s lack of boundaries in this business. The line between employee/friend/and in some cases, sex buddy is often blurred. Is it because show people are out of touch with reality? Are so insecure that they expect the utmost loyalty around them? That they are given so much praise and exaltation that they somehow think they are invincible?
This exaltation given to actors and actresses is out of balance as to really who and what they are. The question is, why? Why are they described as stars? And why do we relish when their lives are anything but – when the gown seems tarnished – the silver tarnished, the sheen only an allusion of silver plating put on a less desirable metal? At once we see then as different then us only to prove that they are the same when they do fall from the sky we put them in. We revel in it – their hurt feelings, disappointments – they aren’t above us as their wealth and seeming power seem to suggest, And as they are stalked by the paparazzi, our seeing eyes, prying into their domain, we see them. Would we believe them to be real without doing it? Without the pictures catching and capturing the stars? Would they cease to exist? The light put out? What happens when their faces disappear from the magazines or the screens? When out of the spotlight – when things are less shiny, what does happen to them… in those darkest of places? Do they wither with weeping? Or in their only respite are they truly able to be themselves – scared, disfigured by the shadows there – unrecognizable only to themselves – the secret self that no one else knows about. The only place where they are able to be free…. Or is this in everyone? Only we’d rather look at someone else - in a magazine – where in can be tossed out and discarded when it no longer interests us. To quote a tarnished TV show, “Save the cheerleader, save the world.”