Private Demons

I have a confession to make. Once upon a time, in a haze of pregnancy brain, I was addicted to People magazine. I couldn’t concentrate on actual books (I still can’t face A.S. Byatt’s The Biographer’s Tale, which I tried to read at the time and couldn’t get past the first 20 pages or so–although that could just be Byatt being impenatrable), I needed to read text on page, and People was soothing and unchallenging. Next thing I knew, I was picking up the occasional In Style, and I even (secretly) bought Us Weekly once or twice. I woke up to the problem after the baby was born, and I haven’t bought a gossip rag since. I’ve been clean for years, and since Alice reads like a fiend, I don’t think it’s had any long-term effects.

But Tom has a subscription to People. It’s for work (really!), and it goes to the office, but occasionally (like this week, with Heath Ledger splashed all over the cover), he takes it home. And of course, much as I try to ignore it, it calls to me. Yesterday, I broke down and went through the whole magazine, cover to cover. I’m not proud of it.

As I emerged from my gossip-induced stupor, two stories stuck out for me. First of all, New Kids on the Block are getting back together. I was a little too old for NKOTB–I don’t know any of their music, and the closest I come is some samples on Barenaked Ladies “New Kid (on the Block)”–but Donnie Wahlberg has done some fine work as an actor since they broke up (see The Sixth Sense and the late, lamented TV show Boomtown). I understand it if at heart he’s still a musician, but if you really want to jump-start your musical career, is reforming a universally ridiculed boy band with your fellow almost-40-year-old friends the way to go?

The other story was about a reality TV show, Celebrity Rehab, with a sidebar about the “celebrities” on the show and their addictions. One actress I’d never heard of from a TV show I never watched (Family Matters) has a long-standing addiction to marijuana and was reduced to doing pornography to pay for her habit. Marijuana is often referred to as a gateway drug, and I don’t think I’d ever heard of that severe an addiction. I shared this story with Tom, and he suggested that maybe she was using harder drugs but wasn’t sharing that information. I don’t know–if you’re talking publicly about how drug use drove you to having sex on tape for money, would you really scruple about revealing what drugs you were using?

So, I had a little gossip backslide. But the magazine is in Tom’s briefcase, it’s going back to the office, and I’m getting back to my real reading. Just as soon as I check out what’s going on with Britney . . .