Friday, December 1, 2006
Page 11
AT THE SIDEBAR (Column)
Celebrity Weddings a Fleeting Thing
By J’AMY PACHECO
Is there anything weirder than a celebrity marriage?
I just read this week’s big news: Pamela Anderson and Kid Rock have filed for divorce, just four months after they were married. And married again, and again.
Personally, I found it weird enough that their reported repeated nuptials made the news in the first place. I don’t exactly follow celebrity news, but even uninformed I knew they’d taken a couple of rides on the marriage-go-round last summer. I didn’t exactly know what they’d done professionally, since Baywatch anyway, but I’d seen their wedding pictures.
Now, I can see the marriage of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes making big news. Mind you, I didn’t say that it SHOULD be big news, only that I can understand why it was. After all, Tom Cruise is a huge star, a mega-millionaire, an unwed father (until recently, anyway), a self-appointed expert in postpartum depression, and sort of weird to boot. Who wouldn’t want to see him tie the knot…again?
And then, there’s Britney Spears. Remember when she got married, and famously unmarried two days later? That was weird. Almost as weird as Britney and her next hubby, Kevin Federline, who have filed for divorce just two months after their latest collaboration, a baby boy, joined his parents on the stage of life.
Drew Barrymore, who rose to fame as the little girl in E.T.: The Extraterrestrial, also had a short-lived marriage. Apparently hers ended after just six months. I wonder if she kept the gifts?
And if my Internet sources are reliable, basketball star Dennis Rodman and Carmen Electra spent nine whole days as husband and wife. No word on how many of those days were spent as blissful newlyweds, and how many were spent working on those irreconcilable differences.
But I’m not sure altar-bound celebrities come any weirder than Angelina Jolie. Although she’s recently been portrayed in the news primarily as a humanitarian and Brad Pitt’s main squeeze, she’s the epitome of the weird celebrity.
Angelina is reported to have walked down the aisle the first time with her groom’s name scrawled across the front of her shirt — in blood.
Remember when she was married to Billy Bob Thornton? That’s when she took to wearing a really unusual accessory: a vial of her husband’s blood as a pendant. But even that celebrity marriage bit the dust, eventually, which was probably a good thing. I can’t wait to see the next installment.
Surely celebrities can’t all be weird. Maybe actor Paul Newman should open a school for the marriage-minded celebrity. Although he, too, is on his second marriage, he and his wife Joanne Woodward have been married longer than I’ve been alive. (Trust me, that’s a really long time – even for a non-celebrity marriage!) And I’ve never heard a single weird thing about either one of them.
Maybe it’s the price one has to pay for being a celebrity — having their moments of weirdness out there for everyone to see. Maybe a lot of ordinary people are just as weird and un-committed, but don’t make the news.
Perhaps I just don’t get it, having had only one husband and 26 years of togetherness. Which is not to say we don’t have our own moments of occasional weirdness. My husband once set a toilet bowl on fire to put an end to a mysterious clog that turned out to be a wedged spindle. But compared to many celebrity marriages, we’re relatively normal. Most days, anyway.
I can’t wait for Lindsay Lohan or Paris Hilton to get married. Those two have been so paparazzi-hounded — and foolish — that they’re bound to make good celebrity weird wedding copy. For those who follow such things, I mean.
To be honest, I feel a little bit sorry for Pamela and Kid Rock. To have made such a huge – and repeated – show of the whole thing, only to see their marriage crumble so quickly, must have been terribly embarrassing. But that’s probably good for their careers.
I’ve never attended a celebrity wedding, but I’m wondering if there is a different version of a traditional vow in which celebrities take one another “For better, for worse, for at least as long as it takes these pictures to get posted on the Internet and the cover of the National Enquirer.”
Now, that would be weird. But not a surprise.
Copyright 2006, Metropolitan News Company