The Five Strands of A Sedentary Empress

The Gossip

A free morning, not that most of them aren't free. The wee one is at school, after M. and I took her over and stood in the cloakroom with a group of tired, dishevelled parents, and we came home and retreated to our personal corners. He is working on his planes, I am strategizing my course of attack with respect to the household chores. I am still tired, but I hate the idea of wasting a beautiful day by being asleep, which I have done so many times before. This morning could be given to reading Nabokov's 'Lolita', which I started last night or it could be given to watching 'The Way We Were' without a barrage of 'who's that?' 'what's going on there?' from a chipmunked voice wee person. I've never seen that movie, and though it is probably loaded with sentimental fluff, I often go for that sort of thing. I'm all about the love, lately.

A. is in Manhattan at the moment. She called yesterday, oozing with excitement, because she was flying out in the late afternoon, and by evening she would be having dinner/drinks with her favourite soap opera star. I'm not a soap opera person, so I don't get her obsession, but I think it's great that she got to go. They have a business connection, and the meeting will be a result of that, but this meeting for her would be on the same level as me having a martini with Johnny Depp. Over the moon, she was, and she has promised to post pictures on her Facebook page as soon as she can load them. 'Ask him what James Gandolfini is really like. Ask him why he ever dated Tara Reid!'. That was all I had to contribute.

I would not be someone who could appear unimpressed by a celebrity in my presence. I am fine as long as I don't know who they are, but when I do, I am wide-eyed and flustered, a dithering idiot. Obviously, I know that these people are as human as I seem to be, but it's the awareness, the sudden confrontation with their physical presence that becomes overwhelming. I have trouble letting them be ordinary, seeing them as their image, and frankly, most of the ones I've seen in person have a certain kind of 'polish' that the rest of us don't seem to have. You can take an average person and dress them up, put them in heels or give them a uber-trendy hairstyle, and most of them will still look as though they are pretending. Then, you get the 'celebrities', the ones who have been primped and produced for so long that nothing about them seems real, anymore. The connection they had to their former self is done. Now, they're product. Like a homemade cake looks like a homemade cake. A celebrity cake might be festooned with sugary flowers and have the pristine comb marks alongside the edges. There is a difference, even if the inside is just plain old cake.

I don't know if a soap opera star would have any effect on me, though. I can't bear to watch those things. I do admit to loving the gossip, though. I am inexplicably obsessed with reading celebrity blogs, and I have given up trying to figure out why. These people fascinate me, and I sometimes hate myself for it.

My best experience was when I was working in the city and my boss and I decided to walk down to the local bagel shop on a hot, summer Sunday morning. It was quiet, everyone still sleeping, and it was unusual to walk in that area without the sound of a cacophony of idling cars and the click of shoes on the pavement. We chatted happily, until we neared a local wine bar that seemed to have a film crew setting up outside. Of course, I was intrigued, as this wine bar had been a destination spot for the likes of De Niro, Pacino, and more recently at that time, Yoko Ono. As we neared it, my boss went silent, and my eyes scoured the front of the place looking for anyone who might resemble a bonafide 'movie star'. Suddenly, a man was in front of me blocking my way. He wore an open plaid shirt with a white tee underneath, cargo shorts and sandals. He had a crooked smile and seemed to be taunting me. I could not see his eyes beneath his sunglasses, but the way he was grinning and bouncing back and forth made me think he was trying to get a rise out of me. I even remember what I was wearing that day, as one tends to do when such an experience occurs: a long, cornflower blue sundress and flax coloured linen espadrilles. I remember sighing at this man who obviously fancied himself a lady-killer, and making a gesture with my hand which said 'move aside now, or I might have to kill you'. He never lost his smile, and made a gallant sweep with his arm to let me pass, watching as my boss and I moved on. I looked back to see him watching us, amused, and my boss grabbed my arm and dug her nails in, squealing.

'Oh my god!' she hissed. 'Do you know who that was?'

'Uh, no.'

'That was Hugh Grant!'

I turned around again to look at him. Yup. It was.

At the time I was less of a Hugh Grant fan than I am now. I like him a lot, actually, and have seen most of his films and have really liked most of them. Whether or not he's the letch in real life people seem to think he is has no bearing on my love of his on-screen characters. I'm inclined, though, to think he might just be a little bit of a whore but that's okay. He's hilarious and more intelligent than people might think he is, though I have to say, he is shorter than I had imagined. If I'd known straight away who he was, I would have giggled, turned red, and continued giggling until I couldn't see straight. It really was better that I didn't know.

Another time, my boss and I were sitting outside the store on the bench discussing business strategies. Suddenly, her eyes froze on a man who was walking toward us, and I glanced over at him blankly, before looking back at her, confused. I asked if she knew him, and she remained silent. I sat there, silent, wondering if she was having a seizure. When he had passed and rounded the corner, she exclaimed 'That was Kevin Bacon!'. I really had no idea. These people, it turns out, don't look a thing like they do on screen.

I still remember helping a couple in the store for close to an hour without suspecting who they were. When it finally dawned on me that they were Ashford and Simpson (wrote Ain't No Valley High Enough), I was beyond excited, but no one I worked with had any idea who they were. The way I recognized them, finally, was through Nickolas Ashford's blue contact lenses which he favoured at the time. Turned out that the long hair he wore on the job was not his own, though, as Mr. Ashford had very short hair in real life. They seemed to get on quite well with one another too, like they genuinely liked one another. I remember them as being very nice, attentive and unpretentious. This is an unusual trait for celebrities.

My friend Liz had to work at a higher volume store further downtown and she would often tell me horror stories about certain celebrities. The worst she had to wardrobe were Michelle Pfeiffer and Rebecca De Mornay. Bitches, she said, through and through. Michelle apparently couldn't deal with the fact that she'd gained a little weight and insisted that she was a size four even though she clearly wasn't. When she'd try on a pair of jeans and could barely breathe in them, she'd take them off and throw them at Liz who had to stand there and take it. 'There's something wrong with these clothes!', she'd bellowed. Liz said it was all she could not to knock the woman down. Martha, another friend, told me about the day she had to wheel out a rack of clothes to a limousine parked on the curb by the store front. Demi Moore was inside the car, and she had Martha sort through the rack in front of her before selecting something with a wordless wave and sending her 'people' inside to deal with the payment. 'She wouldn't even get out of the car, for godsake', Martha said disgusted.

Some are outright crazy, but somehow they hide it well. I recall having to hunt around the city for sun-coloured socks for Kirstie Alley (who looks much older in person), who only wanted that colour for her kids. I had to Fedex them to her house. One pair per package. Crazy. I heard stories about Sharon Stone going into another store, cackling madly and buying everything in sight, and the staff at the store said that she is indisputably beautiful in person, even if she is cracked.

The nicest one was Eugene Levy, who often came in to the store with his wife and kids. He would stand at the changeroom door, holding their coats and his wife's purse, pleasantly talking about how they were going to miss the beginning of the movie 'again', because they used to come in on Saturday afternoons before whichever matinee they planned to see. Though a friend of mine was a comedienne who knew him from the comedy clubs and told me about a more sordid part of his personality, I never personally saw it. He was an 'everyman' from where I stood. He did not make me nervous.

Nowadays, the one everyone knows around here is a comedy legend who I don't think I'll name. He likes young girls and white powder even though he is married with children. He cruises the downtown area, often in a convertible, and ends up at a local bar that plays live music, holding court at a central table. He then takes the hangers-on back to his house, somewhere on the outskirts of the city, and they party until the next day, doing what you might think they're doing, snorting what you might think they're snorting. A former co-worker of mine went to his place a few times and developed a sort of nameless 'friendship' with him. It didn't last, though, because there are always people wanting to be the next best friend or sex partner. Needless to say, it was uncomfortable for her whenever the wife would pop into the store to shop, though I'm fairly certain he didn't remember anything about the girl the moment she left his home. These little romps never happened in her presence, and I'd say it was impossible for her not to know about them except for the fact that she's not that sharp a tool. Pretty, but dumb.

My old friend Stacy had a very cool aunt who used to summer in Greece. She used to talk about her American friends that she met while spending time there, how they'd get together to drink wine and smoke pot at night, talking about nothing and everything. Stacy didn't care much about it until one day her aunt mentioned that they were apparently actors. Stacy asked what kind of actors they were, and her aunt said she thought that her friend Jen was on a sitcom, but she rarely watched television so she wasn't sure which one. When she pulled out her photos of the two it turned out to be Jennifer Aniston and Tate Donovan. When Stacy showed these to us, we were dying! Now when I hear about Aniston being a major pothead, I know there's a kernel of truth.

So, now A. is living it up with an overly-tanned, overly white-toothed soap opera guy who thinks he's way more important than he really is. She says she'll play it cool, but I know she'll be a mess because he's her idol and that's how we react to idols. I can't imagine having an in depth conversation with someone who is accustomed to being worshipped, buying into their own hype. How would you start a conversation with someone like that, knowing that they've heard every compliment before and no longer find anything endearing about it? Acting aloof won't get you very far, either. The reason Stacy's aunt got on so well with Tate and Jen was because she had no idea who they were, and even when she did, as someone who doesn't care about celebrities, it didn't make any kind of impression on her. To her they were common folk, a nice young couple, and she was just as cool as they were. Too bad they never made it as a couple, though.

I don't think I'd like to be celebrity, though. The money would be great, sure, but the constant scrutiny, the pressure to be something you can never truly be would be devastating. I think that the bad humour of some of these people might just be the release of people who've had enough of being analyzed. It isn't natural to be revered by masses of strangers, all of whom have decided they know who you are when you haven't even figured it out yet. The financial freedom would meaning nothing when you have no personal freedom, I think. They drink or do drugs to make it through the day. They fall in and out of love constantly because they are surrounded by illusions and have lost their grip on what is real. They marry because it looks good and they have children because it sells magazines. I would hate that life. I would be unable to find joy in the things that make me happy now. I can't imagine what it must be like to have millions of people I don't know gossiping about me in their blogs (like this one). I think you lose all the things you were and replace them with things you'll never be.

And this is how I make myself feel better about my life. It works, really.