The Age of Tinsel
"A celebrity is a person who is well-known for their well-knownness".

Precious. Found link (sort of) in rebecca's pocket (what she’s reading).

What happens is this: An Israeli model gets a little part in a soap on cable. For about a week, she is happy just to manage to learn the lines reasonably well (thank God there are no three syllable words). Then things start getting frantic. She’s continually on the front pages of the newspapers and gets invited to all the best chat shows; thirteen year-old girls scream when they see her on the street and crowd around her for autographs. She soon comes to the realization that she is a very talented actress.

Now this is where she gets it wrong. Instead of continuing to milk the local cow till everyone is sick of her (including herself), she gets greedy. And so, off she trots to Hollywood to find fame and fortune. Being so wonderfully talented and beautiful, she must share herself with the rest of the world, it’s only fair.

But (gasp!) no one is waiting. After about three years of hustling, she gets a tiny part (‘woman in store’) in some obscure TV mini-series, by pulling every last string she has (it’s a Haim Saban production). No one ever actually gets to see it, but she is hailed all over Israeli media as an international star, as the one who finally made it. When she comes home for a visit, after yet another year of waiting tables, she appears on all the chat shows as ‘our very own success story in Hollywood’, and lands an advertising campaign, selling a new fad diet. Three years later she marries a rich American Jew in his seventies, thus managing to save face at home.

(Don’t try and work out who I’m talking about, I’m not. I just threw that together using details from the stories of various local egomaniacs, and not only female ones)

I have a new motto (translation from the Hebrew): ‘Not Everything That Sparkles Is Gold’.

I find it, along with ‘Istra Belagina Kish Kish Karya’, extremely consoling. Helps me handle the loud, shallow, lazy, silicone-and-buttox, stupidity-is-beautiful, atmosphere that has overrun a certain place where I am paid to spend a large part of every day.

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On the other hand, sometimes glitz is good. I really have to get one of those garish cycling t-shirts - all the better to SEE me with. Oh oh, I forgot to tell you the best news ever – Bish got a bike, just like mine (a Giant Sedona hybrid) but bigger. Thank you, R.T., for all your help. We’ve just got back from our first ride together. He’s all aches and pains, but he had a good time. I am suddenly aware of how very fit I am. Yippee.