Celebrity Stalking

Barring unavoidable volunteer commitments, every Friday morning for the past four years, I’ve taken myself on a vacation. I get both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and head to a Starbucks that’s just far enough afield that I won’t run into everyone I know from the PTA. I get a Grande Sugar-Free Vanilla Skim Latte (which they now insist is called a Skinny Vanilla Latte, um, ewww) and an oatmeal with all three toppings. And then I sit there for an hour and do nothing but enjoy my coffee and read the paper. This is the most crazy decadent thing, I know. As my new hero Simon Cowell would say, this is “indulgent nonsense,” but I firmly believe that it is this nonsense alone that has prevented me from driving my car off a cliff or smothering a close family member with a pillow.

My Friday Starbucks happens to be in strip mall that also houses a Borders store. So after my leisurely coffee, I spend a leisurely half hour browsing at the bookstore. While I do like to know what’s going on in the world of fiction publishing (gives me the illusion that getting a degree in English was time well spent), I rarely buy fiction for myself any more. It’s not that I don’t want to curl up with a juicy novel. I simply don’t have the attention span these days. I need to water the plants, get the piano tuned, figure out what’s for dinner, obsess about American Idol, do research for my pseudo-job, make sure we have poster board in the house, remember if this is my car pool day, schedule the exterminator, sew labels on the camp clothing, yadda, yadda, yadda. I know I need breaks from the hamster wheel of Mommy life; thus the Friday vacations, but after an hour or so, the drone of obligations begins to buzz again. My solution is magazines. They provide bite-sized breaks in the buzz. So, I spend my time book browsing, but I spend my money in the magazine section.

And truly, I am the easiest of magazine dates. I’ll take anyone home with me. Oooh, Beadwork, pretty little balls. Popular Mechanics, well why not. Country Living, hey that knotty pine table looks nice. Several times a year I bring home men’s magazines like Esquire and GQ. The writing is always amusing in a hyper-macho, no-we’re-really-heterosexual way and the restaurants they recommend seem like they’d be places you might actually get a decent meal.

The May 2009 cover of GQ features on over-photoshopped Zac Efron with a tiny body, a giant head, and even gianter hair. Inside, there are nine full pages of Zactastic photos and interviews. I like Zac Efron. I really do. And only in a slightly Mrs. Robinson way. (I say this with no hint of irony — I really enjoy High School Musical. I have watched myself when the kids weren’t even home.)  While Zac seems like a mensch, the article reads like something out of GQ parody book. Some choice quotes:

- “There are bobcats around, but Efron is not afraid of them.”

- “A guy a worked with recently told me, ‘You have to earn the right to hold a gun.’”

- “It’s Sean Penn, drunk as a slab of tiramisu, dispensing gnomic Sean Penn wisdom.”

Drunk as a slab of tiramisu? And people make fun of High School Musical?

Moving on …

While GQ is aimed at men, they often publish letters written by women readers drooling over their male cover celebs. Here is my attempt:

Thank you GQ for giving this Mrs. Robinson her dignity back at the newsstand. My tweenage daughters can now stop asking me why I’m buying Teen Beat, Pop Star, and J-14 “for them.” Your piece on Zac Efron gives me hope that my crush can now take on a more adult form. That boy is becoming a man.

OK, how INSANELY embarrassing would it be if this got published. Let’s just see

People Magazine comes to our house every week.

Full disclosure time: My husband happens to work for Time Inc., the parent company of People, Entertainment Weekly, Time, Sports Illustrated and a rapidly-shrinking list of other publications (Oh please, bad economy, hang in there just a little longer. Must fund those college savings accounts.)  He works on the business end of things and has no influence whatsoever on if/when/how anything gets published. If he did have any influence, I would have surely taken advantage of it years ago. Nonetheless, because hubby works for Time, we happen to get many of its publications sent to our house for free. Shhh, don’t tell, that’s a not-insignificant chunk of the reason I married him.

Free or not, I have to say that People is not my favorite rag. Don’t get me wrong, I’m just as much of a celebrity gossip junkie as the next gal. I’ll be the polite one letting you cut ahead of me the in grocery line because I secretly want to finish that tabloid article about Jennifer Aniston’s break-up. I think it’s that I find People to be too, well, nice. Too polite. Too airbrushed. I want my voyuerism to be of the peeping-tom variety. Let’s see those mug shots, cellulite, and bad nose jobs. Celebrities are just like us. Except for the mug shots and nose jobs part.

Since People is primarily a venue for news about the world of celebs, many of the Letters to the Editor printed in People are about those celebs. Often they praise an article about a star as inspirational. As in, “Thank you for running that photo of Jessica Simpson. I think she’s a wonderful role model for curvy girls. Bless her for having the courage to wear those mom jeans.” Or they give a wayward star some fan-based encouragement, “Poor Rihanna, hang in there girl. We love you!”

I understand why someone would write a letter to the New York Times about their coverage of healthcare reform or the AIG bailout. You do this because you want to correct the record or uncover bias or further the dialogue. But why write to People? I’m perfectly happy to waste my time reading about Jennifer’s latest break-up (I still think Brad done her wrong), but taking that extra step to add my two cents about it, in a public forum, seems odd and more than borderline creepy.

The subset of Letters that comment about a celebrity death are particularly icky. “Bless you John Travolta. Your sweet son is in heaven now.” Yes, I hope that he is, but why as completely unrelated party would I want to interject myself into that? Sympathy by association? Pathological inability to separate real friends from the people that periodically show up on that shiny box in the living room? And beyond that, why does a celebrity-focused magazine run letters like this? It seems like a nesting-doll of empathy: I read the article about the celebrity death and I feel badly, I read the letter written by someone who read the article just like me, and I feel my pain and their pain. At the end you need a magnifying glass to find the real emotion.

Whatever the rationale on either side, the comment-on-the-obituary genre is a staple of the Letters to the Editor section of People, Us, OK and many other celebrity mags. I decided to try my hand at it.

People ran the obligatory obit cover story about Natasha Richardson yesterday.

THIS online clip is not the exact article that ran in print, but is quite close to it.

Here is the Letter to the Editor I’ve sent to People:

To the Editor:

Thank you for your heartfelt tribute to Natasha Richardson. I had the good fortune of seeing her playing with her sons in Central Park several times. In addition to being an extraordinary actress, I can attest to her grace and gentleness as a mother. Those boys were clearly the center of her life. My prayers goes out to them and her entire family.

The letter is true. Many years ago when I lived in Manhattan, our apartment was about three blocks away from the Neeson-Richardson’s. Twice I actually did see them at a playground in Central Park with their kids. And once I pushed my daughter in a swing right next to Richardson pushing her son in a swing for maybe a full three minutes. I didn’t talk to her because A) bothering celebrities who are going about their regular lives is considered poor form in New York, and B) I was too intimidated. While I didn’t talk to her, I did, of course, watch her like a hawk. She was indeed very sweet with her son, kind and patient, and she had the best mom-voice ever.

Yet truly, I feel dirty after having written this. What business is it of mine? The family asked for privacy. Who am I to stick my nose into this honestly tragic event? But yet, as inappropriate Letters about celebrity obits go, I think it’s pretty good. Short and sweet. It has that little personal twist. And I invoked a higher power, which is always important in the obit letter; take a look at People the next time a famous person dies and you’ll see.

Let’s see if my letter ends up getting published.