Spectacle meltdowns

I came across an unusual book this week. It was titled The Pop-Up Book of Celebrity Meltdowns.

The only way I can think of to describe it is as having the stylistics of Mad Magazine with the aesthetic construction of a seven-year-old kid's Clifford popup book.

Even though I got a few chuckles out of the illustrations it made me wonder why meltdowns of celebrities are portrayed as something to be laughed about and mocked.

Yeah, people do some weird stuff that doesn't make sense to everyone but maybe to the public figure in question, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Everyone has one of those days. However, celebrities don't have bad days, they have "meltdowns."

Britney Spears shaved her head like she was reenacting a scene from G.I. Jane.

Tom Cruise acted like a 6-year-old who just drank four Red Bulls on Oprah, and let's not forget how Michael Richards, also known as Kramer from Seinfeld, went on to scream racist remarks to his audience during a "comedy" set. What a set of fiascos! E! and VH1 always have specials on how celebrities fall on their own sword. "Best Week Ever" on VH1 usually has a spot where a celebrity is poked fun at for something they said or did during the past week. I have heard the phrase "never take yourself too seriously." But when celebrities take that quote too seriously they end up being a running joke or a cautionary tale. Every week a stack of tabloids have pictures of some famous person with an outrageous headline accompanying it.

Do celebrities have a different set of standards when it comes to having a bad day? According to media and society they do. Ordinary people don't have photographers lurking around the corner waiting for them to make the wrong move. That is the main difference between the life of a public figure and the life of an average person.

In everyday life people may have the humiliation of getting photographed in an awkward position while they're drunk or have to face the "walk of shame" at work the following Monday. But how would ordinary people deal with having their most embarrassing moments splashed across the magazine rack in the grocery store?

How long will "meltdowns" be in the mind of the masses? For celebrities, in comparison to normal people, it's like the weekend you'll never live down times 100.

Many of the stories printed about celebrities are so ridiculous and elaborate that I think they have to be lies. Who seriously knows all these little bits of information that goes on in someone's life?

The social hierarchy of Hollywood celebrities seems like a more elaborate version of high school. Everyone has dirt on each other, and no one wants to keep their "information" a secret. Unlike high school, where everyone spends his or her time listening to the gossip in the locker room about who's backstabbing and cheating, we read about celebrity's dirty laundry in Us Weekly.