Star Fucked
Ordinary People at the Oscars!!
A number of years back I attended an environmental journalism conference in Los Angeles. One of the panel discussions there featured Hollywood actors who leveraged their celebrity to help green activist causes. Ed Begley, Jr. was up there. And Ted Danson. And Alexandra Paul, whose name I didn’t recognize at the time. She played a lifeguard on Baywatch.
Of the three, Danson was the only one I knew much about. I’d grown up watching him play Sam Malone on Cheers. And I’d read somewhere — Outside magazine, I think — that he’d been a bit of a monkeywrencher in his youth, occasionally torching billboards outside his hometown of Flagstaff, Arizona. It was a curious biographical detail and a little hard to square with his impeccably coiffed tv persona. But then people are interesting that way.
Nothing was particularly memorable about that panel, though, except for one thing; the Baywatch woman kept talking about “ordinary people.” She said all she really wanted to do was toil in the trenches like ordinary people. Just let me stuff envelopes was her attitude. But then someone at whatever organization she was with pulled her aside. Alexandra, they said, anybody can stuff envelopes. But you can do more, you can use your celebrity to be a spokesperson. You have a megaphone. Well, she agreed — reluctantly, of course — and she wanted all of us in the audience to know that it was the ordinary people she really admired. If she could use her looks and charm to further the cause, well, she would accept that as her duty. But, rest assured, the ordinary people were her heroes.
I was thinking about Paul’s remarks during the Oscars last night when they ushered the unsuspecting tourists into the ceremony for the surprise of their lives. Host Jimmy Kimmel played up the stunt for all the yucks it was worth. Oh, won’t this be something. Wait till these rubes encounter all this fame, fortune and high fashion in one room. Will they even be able to handle it? Did anyone know CPR? My god, this was going to be something. Ordinary people at the Oscars!
I’m not sure what Kimmel and his writers had in mind, but in the end the collision of worlds was, arguably, even more awkward than the ensuing mix-up over the Best Picture award. And the joke wasn’t so much on the plain folks (joke’s always on us); it was on the stars themselves. Confronted with the normal joes, the celebrities looked a bit shamefaced, as if they been caught doing something unsavory. And in a way they had. What are the Academy Awards, after all, but a big celebrity circle jerk? In the normal state of affairs, with all of America watching on the tube, the stars can forget they exist to satisfy our voyeuristic appetites. And we at home can forget that we’re just feeding their narcissism. But when the adoring fans and the self-adoring stars meet in the flesh, man, the reverie is ruined for everyone. It was like somebody brought in the mop and the Pine-Sol before the peep show had ended.
But getting back to Ms. Paul and that long-ago panel at UCLA, the Baywatch actress not only repeated the word “ordinary” over and over but she kept giving it a strange emphasis, as if to underscore just how exotic the very idea of ordinariness had become to her. Like, gawd, just imagine being ordinary. There was an awkward silence when she finally shut up.
And then Danson broke the tension. Lifting a water glass, he toasted the room, “Hear, hear! Here’s to ordinary people.” Everyone laughed.
In the hallway outside later, I walked past Danson as he checked his cell phone, probably looking to see if his agent had called. I gave him a little nod. Here’s to ordinary people, I said. He gave me the old Sam Malone chuckle, the million-dollar smile, and swatted me on the shoulder, like I was Woody Harrelson on the set of Cheers. Oh man, total brush with fame!
I shot him a look that said don’t touch me.
