CELEBRITY DELUSION

CELEBRITY DELUSIONS #1  

‘the mind & the heart’ 
 

                                                                  Hello? David? Are you there? Why won't you pick up? 

                                                                  I keep trying to call to get you to meet me at the beach. 

                                                                  Wear the  two piece pink bikini I like so much. 

                                                                  Please return my call or eventually I'll give up. 

                                                                  Why are you ignoring me? I just want to be friends...*



*fictional, needless to say...    

It’s not that conservatives don’t care. 

We do. We just have different answers than liberals do. It’s a difference of the mind, not of the heart. 

*

I live a pretty simple life. 

*

Son, never throw a punch at a redwood. 

actual Tom Selleck quotes from http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/t/tom_selleck.html              

                                                                                                                            

On a bitter cold night in Calgary, just before the turn of the last century, I stood waiting for the number one Bowness bus to take me home to my damp basement apartment in a working class suburb on the edge of an oil rich city. The bus stop was right beside a posh Italian restaurant. As I stood shivering in the cold a white stretch limousine pulled up and Tom Selleck got out and went into the restaurant without even saying hello to me. Which was not in the least bit surprising because he had only met me once very briefly when I had been an extra in his film Three Men and a Baby several years before in Toronto, and we didn’t actually meet. He just cruised me as he went to his dressing room. I have no proof that he was in fact cruising me but it makes my life a little easier to bear if I tell myself, once every six to eight months, that I was once cruised by a handsome Hollywood star. He did look straight at me, but that may have been due to the fact that I couldn’t stop staring at him. Leonard Nimoy directed the film and spoke to me at one point. He told me to be more animated. I knew he wouldn’t have pointed ears but that didn’t stop me from staring at them. 

That second time Tom and I didn’t actually meet, in Calgary, in the winter, I tried not to stare into the restaurant window too often as I waited for the bus. But it just took so long to come and although I was certain it was Tom Selleck in there, warm and cozy and enjoying fine red wine and pasta or veal or something delicious, I just couldn’t stop looking to make sure it was really him. I knew he was in town making a film so it made sense that the tall handsome guy who got out of the limousine and looked just like him must be him. But that’s the thing about famous people. When I do see them I can’t quite believe that they really exist. Once I shook Pierre Eliot Trudeau’s hand in a crowd of people in my hometown and I wouldn’t let go until I was sure the hand I was clutching belonged to the body of the Prime Minister of Canada. A few more seconds and I might have been arrested. 

I have never had sex with a famous person, and this late in life I don’t expect to, unless I run into David Hyde Pierce or Nathan Lane or Brent Carver at a little fey bistro one foggy night, and they take pity on me and invite me to their place for some scotch and intimate foreplay. It strikes me as an incredible improbability that I would probably never recover from. How can one expect to ever fully recover from having had sex with a celebrity? I know I couldn’t. It would consume me for the rest of my life. For years I believed that a close friend had sexual relations with Tony Perkins when he was in Toronto playing the lead in Equus. It turned out that they had just cruised each other in Yorkville one afternoon. But somehow I managed to carry that bit of false information with me for years without realizing it was untrue. I guess I just wanted to believe it so badly. I would look at my friend and just marvel at how he could actually carry on with his life after having had sex with a movie star. I would probably have a t-shirt made and wear it constantly.  

My naïve, bordering on idiotic gullibility has never ceased to amaze me. I also believed until I was fifteen that a cousin fell into Niagara Falls on a family trip and survived. It turned out that he fell into the swimming pool at the hotel. Years later another cousin actually did jump into the falls. She didn’t make it. Needless to say, tragedy and comedy often occur at different times in the same place. 

The only thing that haunts me more than the possibility of having sex with a celebrity is the chance that perhaps I did have sex with a famous person once and didn’t realize it at the time. Could that have been Mel Gibson or Michel Foucault or John Travolta or Tom Cruise that giddy night at the bathhouse? With my luck it was probably Foucault. I am also probably connected to Nureyev in some way, but for the love of God, who isn’t! 

I did have sex with someone who had sex with someone who had sex with a character on my favourite soap opera. This person, who will remain nameless, took the soap star to his home on a reservation in a coastal Canadian city and his mother was scared the whole time because she thought the guys character on the soap was such an evil person. I was always very impressed that she let her son have sex with another man in her home. Over the years the character’s moral fibre has improved a great deal. Perhaps it was due in part to his experience on the reservation that night.  

The soap in question is made in Hollywood and if you believe in the whole six degrees of separation theory then I have had sex with every major Hollywood star from the past two to three decades and beyond. Rock Hudson tends to cover a lot of ground in the six degrees theory since he was a mid to late century Hollywood icon who slept around. I must be connected to him in some way, which of course means that I slept, by proxy, and only on film, with Doris Day and most of her immediate family. 

But it all just seems so unfair somehow. Once you have fucked the entire tinseltown A-list shouldn’t that exempt you from ever having to wait for public transit on a bitter cold night in an oil rich city while Tom Selleck sits in a warm expensive Italian restaurant trying to avoid eye contact with the delusional freak at the bus stop who keeps pressing his nose up against the window?  I really don’t know, and to use a popular phrase of the day - I’m just saying…