Connecting with Celebrities

When it comes to how famous people are viewed and treated, I believe Celebrity should be one thing, and Politician another. However, as of late especially and to annoyance on my part, that line is being consistently crossed. It seems like Sarah Palin is frequently on the cover of People magazine, and the Obamas, as much as I am a huge fan myself, are being paraded incessantly around like Hollywood superstars. Although politicians should not be treated as celebrities, they often are. And the envy I feel for my family having seen/met Barack Obama in the past few days is as deep as if they had all met a mainstream Hollywood star.
For my parents, and for me in the summer when I work, famous politicians often become much less distant and we are able to meet them for visits and important conferences. But most people interact with celebrities in entertainment through the media, unless they happen to work with them just like my parents work with politicians. If someone is able to meet or see a celebrity for whom they have great admiration, it almost seems like an out-of-body experience even for grounded people. It seems so silly but I must admit I’m more “star-struck” than I think, because on the rare occasion that I’ve seen someone famous I’ve been left in awe. Seeing Sarah Jessica Parker on accident while filming her perfume commercial at Opéra led me to exclaim that I was so lucky, it didn’t matter if I never saw another celeb again!
Sarah Jessica has star power, just ask any of the millions of “Sex and the City” fans who love her for the cleverness, wit and high-fashion sense of style she embodied in the role of Carrie Bradshaw. But while she is the persona of a much-coveted New Yorker lifestyle, SJ provokes my interest through her other achievements. She has proved her acting skills by turning down countless typecasting film roles about a single woman in a cosmopolitan setting to take roles in independent, lower budget films very different from her signature Carrie. She also did more theatre acting when she was young and is married to Matthew Broderick, of whom I’m a fan as well. An “ordinary” person’s relationship with a celebrity is meaningful because often the celeb stands for something of great importance to the fan and embodies what the fan aspires to be.