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Archive for 8. March 2009

Celebrity Sighting: Travel Town…

8. March 2009 by PB Rippey.

A problem with Los Angeles is that you can’t always have a low-key family outing to Griffith Park’s Travel Town (of all the funky, super-unglamorous, kid-infested spots in LA, yes there’s the sweet—considerably creaky—train ride, but please, the rest of the site is weird, is where trains come to die and if you’re inside a train it’s so musty parents and children rock the antique cars with their sneezes), can’t have a benign family stroll in your grungy clothes with other sleepless parents in their rumpled clothes, bed-head, splotches of morning banana cereal on our jeans, can’t just stroll in the odd, out-of-the-way LA venue without, even here, running into celebrities toting their born-famous brood, designer diaper bags and, sadly, completely all got-up.

Today, as we neared the only passenger car without a Thomas The Train or Sponge Bob party raging inside of it, a car where we usually let T run from one musty end to the other with the secret plan of wearing him out for his afternoon nap, I became vaguley aware of IT emanating from parents leaving the area, their faces frozen in the didyousee, didyousee expression that can only mean CELEBRITY—IT, i.e., body-slamming waves of celebrity-sighting-euphoria. Still not totally conscious of what was happening, I lifted T to take him up the awkward steps of the train.

Before we could go up, she descended with her kid in her arms to a bunch of her peeps waiting for her outside the train, peeps who had glared at me when I pushed politely through them in my zeal to get my son inside the train and running nap-laps, glares I realized later signaled that the peeps were being protective of their mommy celebrity, in case I was some star-gazing stalker-mommy who didn’t care she was committing a major celebrity-personal-space violation, because everyone who lives in LA knows that once a celebrity enters Travel Town it is no longer a public venue. Rules change. Cameras flash. People mutter and stare blatantly, jaws slack. Distances are kept. After she disembarked from the passenger car (slow motion descension, her coiffed celebrityness penetrating my sunglasses: ribbon-shiny platinum hair, chic black shawl, combat boots, the signature red lipstick–so important to wear lipstick in Travel Town) and made off with her protective peeps, my husband grabbed my arm. “Did you see who that was??? Did you see??? Now THAT’S a major celebrity sighting!” he hissed, IT emanating from him so intensely T and I were almost body-slammed to Travel Town’s loose rock surface.

I regained my footing, shifted T in my arms, shrugged. “So?”

To which he responded, disgruntled and disbelieving and suspicious, “Come on, babe! You’ve got to admit that’s a pretty major sighting.”

To which I did not respond, but ascended into the train and set our son loose, focusing on him and only him, the subject of the celebrity sighting have gone on way too long for my peace of mind. Later, waiting to ride the creaky train, we noticed heads turning in unison to our right—and there she was again with her kid and her peeps and suddenly those in line were making snide-ish comments about her, from her platinum hair to her boots to her “stupid bright orange bag” (a man said), a bright orange designer diaper bag slung from her shoulder. And then I turned and then I looked.

The bag was bright, clashing I’m not sure how smartly with her chic black shawl. Her peeps, I noticed, weren’t dressed like her. No lipstick. No combat boots. Her dad or father-in-law carried her other kid, a sweet-faced little baby wrapped in a fuzzy blanket. All I could think about was seeing her in that music video where she wears a cape, silly leotard, tights and boots, marching around, uttering the same inane, de-feminizing lyric over and over. And I recalled an article I skimmed in some magazine where she claimed to drop her clothes all over the house and luckily had “people” to pick everything up after her. Her big house. Her hugely huge mansion. With, no doubt, a park for a back yard, ponies trotting around freely, fountains, roses, frolicking labradors…

I hate seeing celebrities. It’s not that I want to be one. I do want a few things, but it’s not that ever-hopeful wanting that irks me and will bring on the recurring nightmare that I’m Brangelina’s stressed-out nanny once I close my eyes in the king sized bed tonight. It’s IT that irks me: the hype and the lipstick and the gazes and the cameras and the snide comments and the slack jaws. Look to your own backyard. Who said that? Because in your own backyard is a little boy with amazing blue eyes and a laugh that goes into your bones and shakes them into a revitalized You. Is this really so hard to remember when confronted with celebrities out in public? I don’t know. When you’re sleepless parents, it’s hard to remember anything, easier just to look, slack-jawed, rumpled, then look away. Take your husband’s hand. Squeeze it. And go and have some lunch.

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