Put your best face forward

o I’ve been thinking about celebrities lately, and about what it would take to be a celebrity. Good looks, check. Outgoing personality, check. Rabid megalomania, check, check, and check! I’d make an excellent celebrity.

But mostly I am thinking about types of celebrities. On one hand, you have celebrities that demand “privacy”, denouncing tabloid magazines and being general assholes to fans who approach just wanting an autograph. And when that is done, they turn around and give interviews to magazines discussing a wide range of private issues such as their relationships, their pregnancies, their kids, their heartbreak, etc…. Nicole Kidman, I’m looking at you here. Come to think of it, Justin Timberlake, you’re mega guilty too.

The reality is, when you are “famous”, celebrities exchange a certain modicum of their privacy for the opportunity to get paid god-awful amounts of money for 3 months of work. I’m not minimizing the hard work involved in 4 AM-2 AM shoots, but still $20M for say… 900 hours of work? And on $20M, you would never have to work again. Say, you are a B-list actor and only make $100,000 (for example), make 15-20 movies, and you’re still set for life. The point is, being in the public eye is the price actors/actresses pay for being actors/actresses.

That’s not to say they deserve to be hounded by paparazzi and owe the public all the private details of their lives. The truth is, some people are born with the gift to act, and they act simply for the beautiful and joy of it, not because they want to be celebrities. These people manage to live their lives in relative obscurity. When fans approach them, they are kind, courteous, and graceful about their celebrity-dom. They sign autographs, do their press circuits, but refrain from discussing their husbands/wives/children/dogs/etc. You want to talk about the movie I was just in? Sure, I’ll tell you what it’s like working with Joe Blow. You want to know when and where I’m getting married? You want to follow me with your camera when a loved one dies? No thanks, that’s private.

But you can’t have it both ways. You can’t declare that you deserve privacy, and then discuss your numerous miscarriages in an issue of Rolling Stone. Hm.. last time I checked, having a miscarriage was a hell of a lot more private than say having a lavish multi-million dollar wedding. But what do I know? I’m not a celebrity.

The other thing I’ve been thinking about is how much celebrity lives suck. Take for example me… I am cooking dinner…. I ran of cheese and need to run to the supermarket…. Uh oh… I’m only wearing a ragged pair of pj pants, and a ratty tank top. Who cares? I make my superstore run, and come home to finish supper. However, if I’m a celebrity… I run out in my pj pants and my ratty tank top, and suddenly my red-faced, badly-dressed self is plastered on the front page of People magazine, and fashion “experts” are analyzing my style within the pages. “Gasp! Doesn’t she know that those cheap $10 superstore pants do not match her spring complexion?” Celebrities are expected to be fully coiffed, best-dressed at every moment of their day because who knows who is there to flash pictures at them? Especially in the days of the camera phone, everyone can be the paparazzi these days. It doesn’t matter if you just endured a 12 hour flight from Europe, you’re expected to look like you just walked off the runways of Milan.

I guess this is where my dream of being a celebrity ends, because I certainly couldn’t go out in public looking like this (and this took hours of coiffing so I shudder to think how I’d look sans coif):

Aw shucks.