Midnight Mutterings | Celebrities

Last week I was visiting Rose and Molly (the cats) and my son in Bellingham when I complained to him I was having increasing difficulty finding something to write about in these columns. Then I told him I was thinking about writing about celebrities. At that he gently reminded me that I don’t know anything about celebrities. Which is so true. Then he made up a cheat sheet for me so I could write about the Super Bowl which you will be watching tomorrow, while you eat a lot of salty snacks and drink too much beer. Unfortunately, I lost that valuable sheet of notebook paper and had to look up what little I now know about the Super Bowl and the important half time show, which I might actually like, but it’s just not worth sitting through the actual game for me. Instead, I’ll relate the sad, deprived story of how I came to not care about celebrities and how they might be related to professional sports.

When I was five years old, my family moved back to where we had lived when I was born to our house in the middle of a seventy acre forest. I had no memory of having lived there before and for the first year it was just my mother, whom I didn’t know well, and me. We didn’t have any neighbors and my three older siblings were in school, and my father was at work during the day. (At six, when I went to school, my mother went back to work. I had the only mother with an outside job, and I used to lie about it as it was embarrassing. And, yes, I regret that now.)

No television. Maybe a staticy radio. I don’t recall. What we did have was a big box of random books my mother had bought at an auction. So when I was not outside playing with the animals or getting lost in the woods, I was reading those books. And getting uninformed about the world at large. I was a precocious reader which didn’t mean I understood what I was reading. For example, one of my favorite books from the box was about child rearing by an English expert. It fascinated me. For example, there was advice about fresh air for children. In addition to what the nanny was to do in the park with the pram (not that I knew what a park was, much less a pram) there was a complicated illustration of how to build a wire cage affair that projected outside an upper floor window that you put a naked baby in for fresh air. This was apparently in a multistory apartment building in London or some other large city. There were warnings about smoky fog, about which I knew nothing, only to learn it was bad for baby’s lungs, whatever those were. And then the advice about what different colored stools meant. I really couldn’t understand how stools could change color because of a baby’s diet, as I knew stools only as kitchen furniture. I’m not sure why I didn’t ask my mother, but assume that I was unwilling to risk the potential loss of such an interesting book. There were also some magazines, possibly New Yorkers with cartoons I didn’t get. Then there were some men’s magazines that interested my brother, but only confused me about why those nice ladies had no clothes.

This is only to illustrate that I knew nothing about the outside world until I went to school in town and visited new friends’ houses where there were comic books and movie magazines and other evidence of another world beyond my experience. We did have magazines at home. I remember Life (where I saw photographs of skeletal bald people who were released from concentration camps across the ocean), and Saturday Evening Post which had stories I didn’t appreciate given that they weren’t about child rearing in London or naked adult women sitting around on fancy furniture.

Then, even as I grew up, went to school and had friends with richer lives, I never quite caught up. I didn’t see a lot of movies or have favorite movie stars. I didn’t play any team sports or care about them. I did participate in water ballet in college, but was too nearsighted to see the signals without my glasses and soon dropped out. I had a very pretty and very unreliable horse who was my only solo transportation until I had a driver’s license, but six miles to town was a bit much except on the occasional week end day in good weather. Sure, I went to some games, reluctantly, but only really enjoyed college basketball, which I understood mildly. I’m pretty sure most of my dates were more impressed by the fact that I generally had access to free seats in the Press Box, (courtesy of something or other about my father) than my good company.

And now I’m old, still not interested in celebrities or professional sports or fashion or famous chefs. However, it did get my attention recently that there is a rumor that Taylor Swift is part of the deep state and will be soon encouraging her fans to support Joe Biden. And how dare she? According to what I remember from the cheat sheet my son made for me, Ms Swift only encouraged people to vote, not whom to vote for, and only actually voiced support for two Democrats in prior minor Tennessee (her home state) elections. My children grew up to be avid sports fans, especially baseball as their father saved them from my ignorance. And yes, they grew up interested in politics and pop culture as well.

All this leads up to the fact that I have been made aware that tomorrow is Super Bowl LVIII, and Travis Kelsey will be the tight end (as mysterious to me as parks and prams) for the Kansas City Chiefs, and even more important, Taylor Swift will be in Las Vagas to watch him play. All her fans will be watching for a glimpse of someone who can, apparently, throw a national election, even if she doesn’t mean to.

In reading up a bit on these heavy subjects, I did learn a some minutia about blood sports. Specifically that they come in some categories, of which I was unaware. There are human-human sports, human-animal sports (example: alligator wrestling) and animal-animal sports. The latter category includes some animals I have never heard of as well as cricket-cricket matches. But I don’t think human team sports are listed as blood sports. Though it’s hard to forget the number of brain-injured former professional football players we know of. Just hope that if Travis Kelce and Ms. Swift stay together and possibly have children (as his brother Jason, another professional football player has) that the athletes will recognize those children as they age.

The only blood sport I actually follow with interest is politics. And now, so it seems, our major celebrity, Taylor Swift is being dragged into that arena, without her actual participation. Oh, the cost of popularity. I imagine she can afford it financially, if not personally.

Anyway, Happy Super Bowl to you. I might go out for a hike. Imagine the trails will be empty tomorrow during game time.