Withered by star glower

Withered by star glower
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday August 10, 2013

Last week I had a disheartening conversation with a gaggle of schoolgirls in an icecream shop. My 6-year-old son and his little sister were capitalising on the ‘free taste tests’ from an icecream lady who was tirelessly handing them morsel after morsel on tiny spoons. While two small children debated the merits of bubblegum over banana, I turned to the three teens behind us. “Sorry! Are you in a hurry?” I asked. “This is the most important decision my kids’ll make all week. When I was an icecream scooper, we weren’t allowed to give free tastes!”

The girls laughed and one replied: “Like who’d ever work in an icecream shop!” I was taken aback. “Yep,” I said, “the icecream was so hard, my arms would ache from dragging the scoop through it. I got paid six-bucks an hour.” The girl in the middle snorted. I persevered: “Have you girls got part-time jobs?”

“Nah,” they said, ‘”We’re only 13.”  

Curious, I asked: “So any ideas about what you want to be yet?”

“Famous!” said the girl on giraffe legs, and for a moment I thought she was joking.

“Famous for what?”

She shrugged: “Whatever. Just famous.”

On the walk home with my sticky children, I wondered if those teenagers believed fame was their birthright. Had they been brainwashed into thinking celebrity status comes without hard work?  

Today, the travelling circus we call reality TV sells us overnight successes. It thrusts people into the spotlight for brief applause then discards them as the parade moves on.

The last star I met was Bette Midler. In 1997, I interviewed her in Los Angeles. Her film That Old Feeling was about to premiere in Australia. It was a stinker and I expect she knew.

I walked into a posh hotel suite to find a woman with a huge head sitting on top of a pint-sized body. Her feet and hands were tiny – dainty extremities overwhelmed by a jutting bosom and a mop of frizz. She was sweating under a bank of studio lights which made her skin so dewy, I could barely make out where her face stopped and her neck began. Unaware that journalists should be lap-dogs during the Hollywood interview, I ploughed straight in and asked:  “Do you ever get tired of fame?”

She stared at me, then barked: “Do you?!”

I spluttered something about being a nobody, but it was too late. She sulked for the next 10 minutes. Refusing to make eye contact, she gave my questions one syllable responses, not caring a jot about what Australian audiences would make of her. The interview was a disaster. The dressing down tirade I got from her publicist afterwards was excruciating. I’m still not sure what riled her: my impertinent question or the fact she couldn’t answer it.

I thought fame was unattainable when I was a kid. There were few celebrities in my patch of town, though a girl in my year had a dad who read sport on the TV news. That gave her instant social status at school. She had the kind of prestige that this single child of divorced parents could only fantasise about.

At age eleven, I would tear home on my bike to an empty house, knowing Simon Townsend’s Wonder World was about to start. Our Thorn TV, on its sturdy wooden legs, needed a good ten seconds to warm up and deliver a flickering screen.

Sprawled into a brown corduroy beanbag, I was captivated by the most famous show on kid’s telly. Simon Townsend was a reluctant celebrity. I remember reading in the newspaper that he’d been embarrassed when kids mobbed him at a school visit. I admired him even more for that.

Mum’s rule was no telly after school, but my secret trysts with Simon Townsend made me desperate to become one of his roving reporters.

At puberty, the closest I came to hero-worship was plastering the walls of my bedroom with centrefolds of heart-throb Rob Lowe and posters of Abba.  Celebrities were good wallpaper but their world didn’t intersect with mine.

Now the likes of Kim Kardashian (famous for what, I can’t remember) are slaves to their own publicity. Craving constant attention, they obsess as much about their following as the star-struck fans who stalk them on social media. The more bizarre the celebrity behaviour, the more the money rolls into their account.

I keep thinking about those girls in the ice-cream shop. They didn’t want to become famous for being talented at something they loved. They were convinced stardom was a shortcut to wealth and happiness. But it was their sense of entitlement that puzzled me most.

I tell Mum about them and she remarks: “In our day, if you behaved like a show pony, you were considered undignified. Famous people earned respect when they were humble.”

She was right.

I hate to say it, Bette, but that day we met, you were obnoxious. I liked you better when you sang your way to the top.

A stake in the cake take

A stake in the cake take
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday August 3, 2013

Sometimes the mother of all inventions should keep her ideas to herself. But it was a slow Sunday morning, so I suggested we should play pretend shop in the front yard with our favourite kids across the road. The smart alec I live with said: “Why don’t you sell real food for real money!” The kids leapt all over him, squealing his praises.

I helped my brood make gingerbread. They created biscuit men with round bellies and stumpy legs modelled on their father. There were biscuit cats and biscuit dogs who crossbred in the oven and came out fused together in awkward positions. The mum over the road wisely kept her three mess-makers out of the kitchen and produced a fat sponge in record time.

My 3-year-old daughter skipped around in her improvised shopkeeper’s outfit – a ballerina’s leotard that kept riding up to expose one cheek of her bottom. Her six-year-old brother took charge of the till. He found an empty Taco box and sealed it with half a roll of sticky tape. He cut a tiny slit in the top of the box so the coins, needing to be forced through the slot, would make a satisfying thump as they hit the bottom of the box. His father baffled the kids by calling out: “Don’t forget to register an ABN!”

At 2pm sharp, our pop-up patisserie opened for business in the driveway. Pre-primed, the couple from next door wandered up, ooh-ing and aah-ing at the spread. My lad absentmindedly fingered his gingerbreads to make them more appetising. The neighbours chose two pieces of virgin sponge. “How much is that please?” the wife asked.

“That’ll be fifty-cents” said six-year-old firmly.

The wife handed him a shiny two-dollar coin and my son pushed it through the slot in his taco till.

“What about her change?” I asked him.

He looked at me, puzzled. “Nothing comes out of the till, Mum – it only goes in.”

Isobel, the old dear from the corner house, stopped at our gate.

“What are you raising money for?” The kids looked at each other nervously.

“Savings!” said the neighbour’s nine-year-old.

“You are not!” piped up my 3-year-old, “You’re gonna buy lots of footy cards!” Isobel winked and bought two gingerbread men. Two 20c coins vanished into the taco box.

“I wanted to do the money!” wailed my toddler, tearing off her leotard and storming into the house, both cheeks now on display.

Business became slow. Nanna arrived as the neighbour’s kids abandoned shop and went scooting up the street to find more customers. My lad, left in charge, was eating the smartie buttons off a gingerbread man, having already licked off its icing smile and dotted eyes.

“Can I re-sell him?” he asked. “Not to me” said Nanna, “I like my men with all their faculties.”

She handed over a fiver and asked for a smorgasbord. “Don’t expect change,” I whispered.

By the time the shop closed at 4pm, the taco till was rattling impressively. My son, corrupted by his new-found wealth, refused to let anyone help him count out the proceeds. His father growled:

“Listen up! Five of you ran the shop, so five of you share the profits.” Small boy took off up the stairs shouting “It’s not fair! That’s my money – I was in charge of it!”

Delusions of power run in the family. One taste of the free market and my six year old had become a tyrant. At his age, I was greedy too.

When I was six, Mum caught me stealing a pet rock from a souvenir shop in Rotorua. One shiny pebble had caught my eye. It was smooth and honey-coloured with little stick-on eyes. I’m sure the shop owner put those pet rocks on the counter because he knew they were irresistible. And so I reached up and stroked that rock and before I knew it, I was walking out of the shop with my new pet clenched in my fist.

I showed it to Mum. “Look! Isn’t he beautiful?”  

“Where did you get that from!”

Her arm tightened around mine and she marched me back into the shop. Mum yanked me up to the counter and demanded I own up to my crime.

I’ve never forgotten the hot stabbing shame, my stammering apology and the crushing realisation that my silky smooth pet rock was not coming home on the plane.

And here I am, about to teach my six-year-old tycoon why the proceeds from our cake shop don’t belong solely to him.

I find him face down on his bed, still moping. I cut a big hole in the Taco till and shake the money out. He perks up at the sound of paydirt  and helps me sort the coins into piles: “We made fifteen dollars!” he shouts excitedly, “I’m going to buy a soccer net!”

“Not so fast,” I say. “You get $3 each remember?”

“Yes I know Mum. But the shop’s open every day of the holidays. We gotta start making more gingerbread!”