If you are anything like me, you do not get thrilled at the thought of meeting a ‘celebrity,’ as I have always felt that we all bleed red blood in the event of our demise, so, to me, we are all of the same . In my line of business, I speak and meet with celebrities all of the time, or I know someone that knows a celebrity that I may need to reach for a story or an interview, and in some strange way, other people get excited at the thought of me speaking to the ‘celebrity’ (as I put in quotes), but I often times show no excitement, because they genuinely are people just as we are. Here today, and may be gone tomorrow. I often tell the story about the time that I met the late rapper, Tupac Shakur. I had a huge crush on him, and not because of his music, but because I thought that he was handsome. In 1993, my chance came to meet Shakur while I was at a convention in Atlanta, Georgia, and anyone that knows me, knows that I am just not one that easily excites, but when the opportunity presented itself to meet him, I froze up, and complimented him on his teeth (which, by the way, was something that my friend never let me live down). After that, I vowed to never have a star struck moment again, and went back to realizing that though Shakur was a ‘celebrity,’ he still was no different than I was – it was an embarrassing moment to say the least.
I know that I have said a lot in the paragraph above, but I have examples to back up why you should not get so excited about the live of a ‘celebrity, because we all remember how they used to get a lot of publicity . You were excited over MC Hammer or over Vanilla Ice, it just seemed as if their reigns would never end, but then, all of a sudden, they somehow faded into the sunset, and became irrelevant, something that you could not have fathomed would ever occur for such ‘celebrities’ that were on top of their game within the music genre. Now they can use a press kit or EPK to help their public careers get back on track, as they need to now start their PR all over again. The point is that we sometimes get so overwhelmed in the success of these people that we really forget to think about the fact that they are really no better than we are. Why do we care that Madonna is going to adopt another child – as there are many people that adopt children everyday? Why would someone pay a million dollars of a picture of some celebrity’s baby? We are in a recession, so spending that type of money on a picture seems laughable to the laymen, but the reality is that, we as people live for the sensationalism of it all.
Are we trying to live through them because we are bored with our lives, or is it because we look at their success as a blueprint for us? We have to remember that we are the ones that have given them the fame status. You are the reason that they have been labeled a ‘celebrity,’ so, in essence, you are famous, too.