Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Let Mom Do It For You




When people talk about "helicopter parents" they're not usually talking about parents whose "kids" are in their 30s, and when people talk about "mama's boys" they're not usually talking about 30-ish women who look like boys. But in this post I am.

And while it's currently fashionable to lob disrespect at helicopter parents and mama's boys, it's not fashionable to defend Lindsay Lohan. But then being unfashionable never bothered me in the past so in this post it won't either.

I'm referring, as those who follow celebrity gossip the least bit already know, to Samantha Ronson's mommy trumpeting to the Daily Mail about how she broke up Sam & Lindsay's headline-grabbing relationship a while back, of course after Ms. Ronson had benefited greatly from all the publicity both in her professional career as a trendy DJ and in her personal career as a B-list lesbian. And now that Samantha Ronson once again became "Sam who?" and since Lindsay is once again newsworthy to a public that would rather not think and a Establishment media that would rather keep them that way, we now get to find out that Sammy's mommy is Ann Dexter-Jones and, upon Googling her, that she designs jewelry; in the Daily Mail article itself we're told that she used to be married to somebody named Mick Jones who is apparently still playing in the ancient rock band Foreigner. (But who is apparently not Sam Ronson's daddy, nor that of Sammy's non-identical twin sister Charlotte who designs fashions, not that anybody should care about either.) These people are in the "news" now only because Lindsay Lohan still is, which unless you're impervious to sledgehammer sarcasm, is clearly one of my points.

The other is, as you might have discerned, the real grownups don't allow their mothers to do their lover-ditching for them nor to dictate which lovers get ditched. Most of us settle this when we're 16, or most of us in my generation did, though things might have changed a bit since the year the Ronson Twins were born (the same year I officially lost my virginity at age 14); it's a bit sad to find that an "edgy" record-spinner was letting her mommy do one or the other when she was twice 16 (i.e. 32). 

However, almost 3 years ago Ms. Ronson herself told The Times Magazine (in an article they won't let me have but that's referred to here) that she's really not gay but in fact a switch-hitter (as is yours truly, though I don't get my panties bunched when people call me gay) and that she's "pretty feminine at the end of the day" (unlike yours truly, really) ; and, more to the point here, in that interview she herself said that she broke up with Ms. Lohan because all the attention from the paparazzi got to be too much. Indeed, to quote that article quoting the Times interviewer quoting her, "To be honest, being with her was more of a headache than anything else. Everything I was doing I was already doing. It just meant there were paparazzi pictures documenting it. It sucked, because I’m a pretty private person and I managed to stay under the radar for so long.Uh-huh. That must explain how she managed to avoid being seen for over a year with her much more famous then-paramour at several dozen trendy hotspots where ordinary snapshooters were sure to be, let alone professional shutterbugs who finance their expensive habits stalking "people who are famous for being famous." 

Don't get me wrong, I claim to be a pretty private person myself, but I restrict that to not publishing photos of my ugly mug all over the Web and to not including my home address in my White Pages listing, though under one guise or another I've held myself out to be an Internet Personality since 1994, though of course my presence remains totally obscure to anybody with anything better to do (or at least it should for your sake, really). You might say I'm really a pretty private person because I haven't gone all out to encourage stalkers, and because in my repeated requests for Glock-sent euthanasia I have also failed to include my mug shot and the easiest places to find me: this is because (unlike Ms. Sammy) I'm naturally hideous no matter what I do and (also unlike Mlle. Ronson) Lindaay Lohan has never heard of me and would probably care nothing if she ever does (dammit dammit).

As for my mother, my sister and my (late) father, I'm such a pretty private person that unless you're weird enough to spend money on a search you'll have to take my word for it that I have any relatives at all.

To get to defending "LiLo" specifically, i.e. to opinionate myself on the character of someone I know only 5th or 6th hand (and whose movies I've never seen), I will say this: it's not that I don't think she's fucked up, indeed I'm tempted to believe that she might have some "substance abuse problems" and "personality disorders," it's that these things strike me as perfectly ordinary (as in fact they are) and that under the glamour and fake tan spray Lindsay Lohan is a real human being. Indeed to me she's more human than most celebrities because she's one of the few Famous People who remind me of people I used to know pretty well and care a lot for (even if some didn't look nearly so smashing in an ankle bracelet). Furthermore I'm sure that many of those millions of "edgy" people who are on the Dissing Lindsay bandwagon are themselves far from sober and not overly sane, and one thing that is guaranteed to piss me the fuck off is blatant hypocrisy (even when I haven't been guzzling Cafe Zinfandel). Come the fuck off it, fools.

In short, I much prefer the little I know about Lindsay Lohan to the too much I know about the people who "discreetly confess" to having criticized her. In fact this subject illustrates why I'd much rather sit here late at night boozing alone while "surfing the net":  the common run of humanity makes me sick to think much about let alone have to deal with on a daily basis. (Unlike Lindsay Lohan, who might be fun to know.)

"Let s/he who is without sin cast the first stone," and the only people I want to hear from who are offended by something Lindsay Lohan did are those to whom she did something personally: if the only reason you know who she is is because you heard or read gossip about her you don't fall into either category. Kindly get the fuck over yourselves, or at least have the decency to keep your hypocrisy pretty private.

Ya got that? 

(Oh and Lindsay, if you ever want to hang out with a funny-looking old welfare queen I'm not too hard to find if you've somehow found this.)