When I started high school, I had to catch a train and went past a newsagent every day. Never much of a girly-girl, beyond liking shoes and my boobs, I used to buy Smash Hits, before it turned into a girl/boy band extravaganza. Or maybe I outgrew girl/boy bands. I disremember.
I bought it so I could wide-eyed stare in at artists, artistes and not-so-either-one (as it sometimes turns out), but also for the letters page. It was usually silly. I was in the year of Whispering Jack, and the beginning of my loving John Farnham. By then, I even had a tape (a tape! I knooow!) with “Sadie the Cleaning Lady” on it, which I thought was musically and lyrically lame, but John Farnham it was, so therefore awesome. Lovely. I outgrew it, which in some ways is a bummer, because outgrowing the belief in a song, or a collection of them, is a sad day. But finding other songs and other artists with whom your own story intersects is still lovely. I suddenly find that rather than embarrassment at thinking John was da bomb, I’m grateful he was a door. (And I still like Whispering Jack, which I no longer own.)
There was an actress I loved, and I honestly cannot remember her name. For someone who is indirectly responsible for the way I think about famous people, it’s my personal (small) shame that I don’t remember. Then again, maybe landing her with blame would be hideous, so it’s just as well.
Smash Hits reported her as “spending time” with a co-star - probably a male, it was the late 80’s after all. It was the first time that I really understood that the writer meant she was having an affair (one of them was married, possibly both). Whether she was having an affair or not, I have no idea, but eew. Smash Hits was something of a bible, so I believed them enough for it to matter.
And I didn’t like her so much after that. Having an affair is wrong, officially, but in my head, mostly eeeeeewwww. (I was twelve or thirteen at the time.) If she was in something I watched it until this article. After it, I didn’t want to. I couldn’t reconcile her work with this aspect of her personal life. Though I’m pretty sure I didn’t think of it in clear terms: I was in waters I was too young to negotiate. I wasn’t having sex myself; I didn’t even KNOW anyone I’d connect to in that way.
Fast forward about nine or ten years, and I have a friend who is having an affair with a married man. I was just (barely) married myself, which somehow ended up being code for I would disapprove with mutual friends.
I can’t help but find that funny, because the only person(s) I have problems with having an affair is my husband or myself. But I was the first of a group to get married, so maybe it’s understandable.
Anyhoo. Friend’s lurv I think is kind of a douche, but I don’t actually care on the “he’s still married” front: maybe this is true love, maybe they are right for each other. (Not so, as it turns out, but, well, bummer.) But I do think he’s kind of a douche. She can do better.
So, when it’s my friend, I’m willing to weigh up whether an affair is eeeewww, or really a discovery of the love of your life. Okay, store that away, thinking.
Alright. Someone I admire has an affair, I don’t like them: check. Someone I know has an affair, and I already loved them: slightly less check.
I wanted to believe my friend had found a good thing. I didn’t really think so, and after meeting him, wow what a complete effing moron. The one time I remember him clearly, he was appallingly rude. Dork.
Anyhoo. Or possibly, anyho (ba-doom-tish). Those couple of years go by, possibly more, and I work in pathology at night. Like most hospital waiting rooms, our tea room is armed with old women’s magazines, and they’re full of Russell Crowe and Meg Ryan. The articles themselves (or rather the magazines they came in) might have only spanned three months, but I read those things over and over…well, the covers at least. A waiting room (our tea room)=old mags. They sat there for close to twelve months, and a year of reading about two celebs something something snore really does validate the old saw: familiarity breeds contempt. Couldn’t care less.
But those mags did something. It made the link between the actress I’d admired, my friend who had an affair and these two actors I liked separately (I hadn’t seen the movie of them together - and, AND, that first actress was holding sway on what I thought about these two).
So here’s the thing. If I were friends with that actress, all those years ago, and she had told me she was having an affair, or if we were friends enough that I worked it out: I’d have still been friends with her. I wouldn’t have stopped watching her stuff. I’m not friends with anyone famous now, so maybe that last point is moot.
But my point really isn’t about that actress, may I hope she’s gone on to far better things: I don’t know these famous people taking up miles of paper, so until I actually do (because, clearly, that will happen, snort) stories about them don’t matter a damn. I don’t even read that kind of thing, much. I follow various famous people, and I pick up silly trivia. If it’s harmless, who cares? If it’s wrong, I might look a bit of a tit, but essentially, who cares? But the serious things? Dude, unless they’re my friend, I avoid.
