FAME

Fame fame fame fame fame fame fame. What’s your name?

Ah, Mr.Bowie and Mr. Lennon. They so knew about fame. Yet even Mr.Lennon, who paid the ultimate price for being famous, would be even more disturbed and depressed by the nature of fame these days. I would wish it on no one I cared for. I would not wish it on someone I felt neutral towards. I would only wish it on the most heinous of people, the most crass, soulless, handicapped-space parking stealers on earth, or Paris Hilton. I wish she would be running through some water and a dog would knock her down not once, but twice. And then the dog would pee on her while standing on her back, and then there would be a YouTube of it within five minutes with 1,000,000 hits within an hour. HA.

Celebrity, fame, infamy, notoriety. What makes the hunger for appreciation and attention, which we all have to some degree, turn into psychic hyperphagia? Because I am thoughtful, I will here provide you with the definition of hyperphagia so you don’t have to Google it and come back: “to eat without stopping.” This is what you must have to want to get famous to begin with, an insatiable need to HAVE IT. Think about what it must be like. You wake up, sleepy and groggy from a dream about being famous, then you realize OMG I AM REALLY FAMOUS! Because you worked hard for this by appearing in a short-lived FOX series about physically-attractive and sincere morons and threw up outside of the Roxy while fighting with Christian Bale, you are happy to know that your day will be filled with the attention of the world. Your five cell phones, ordered in your ginormous purse by hierarchy, will vibrate constantly, letting you know YOU ARE WANTED. Short, comb-over-with-ponytail-haired, schlubby paparazzi are camped outside your Hollywood Hills home, waiting to get a long-lensed blurry photo of you by 11AM to get over to People before deadline. They will get twice as much if you have any sort of cellulite showing. Your assistant, pretty but not prettier than you, will keep you moving from interview to the gym to the shrink to your agent’s cooler-than-cool office that still feels slimy, to lunch with one of the Olsen twins (who will not eat but will make pouty lips at the paparazzi), to your mani/pedi girl, and on and on and on. It is all about YOU. Your small dog will poop inside the Fred Segal on Melrose and a smiling young salesgirl will say, “Oh, ha ha, no problem, isn’t he so cuuuuute?” When she takes the poop outside to the dumpster, she will whip out her cell phone, speed dial The National Enquirer, where your dog’s poop will make Mike Walker’s gossip column, which kicks back a few bucks to the salesgirl, which is a pretty good payout for cleaning up Chihuahua scat.

It will end. Oh, it has to end. The wall comes earlier and earlier these days, and you will hit it before you are 30. Newer and stupider celebutards will come to take your place, and what will you do then? Totter around on higher heels, take on some fashionable anorexia, date an 18-year-old son of a movie mogul, and look for “serious dramatic work to show range.” The fear will be in your eyes. Your 15 minutes are up. Time to marry the 18-year-old’s dad and retire into drugged but luxurious obscurity. The mogul won’t even care if you do the pool boy on the side.

Fame, what you like is in the limo
Fame, what you get is no tomorrow
Fame, what you need you have to borrow
Fame

At least John Lennon left us with songs, and words, and ideas. You, Chihuahua-Clutching Pinhead, leave us poorer for knowing you.