Watching the morning so-called news, I often have to shake my head sharply to break the trance and remind myself that the three or four celebrities being paraded before me over and over will never enter my real life. Their faces, and faces of other characters in the media, become more familiar than those of people who live right up the road from me. The details of their lives replace the more boring statistics about the millions of people who could live happily for a year on what one of the beautiful people spends on dog food in a week.
Actors are creepy anyway. They can synthesize all the great and small emotions in realistic, close-up detail. At least some of them can. Then there are the great stone-faced leading men, who can suppress all the great emotions until they become exquisitely nuanced grimaces.
Either way, they aren’t bumbling into my path. I can’t do anything for or about them. But there they are, dancing behind the glass.
I hear that Drew Barrymore frequents the coffee shop where I get my morning jolt in the summer. Ben Affleck supposedly spent a weekend in town last summer. Tim Daly or Steven Weber used the restroom at the deli out back once. Cal wasn’t sure which one it was, but, “it was one of those guys from ‘Wings.’”
Couldn’t prove it by me. It just proves that this is a big little world, and all you have to do is open the left door instead of the right one to miss seeing the big pink elephant go by.
Celebrities seem like mythical creatures, like animated cartoons. Or they’re like rare birds one watches the meadows and trees to spot once in a lifetime.
Of course they must gather in certain places and become mundane to the people around them there. But their images are beamed around constantly, keeping the notion of their existence and importance alive in the minds of all the people they’ve never heard of.
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