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Honolulu Lite Charles Memminger |
Always a vacancy
at top of Paris HiltonI have to face facts. I'm officially old. I was hoping to make it to my 50th birthday before I considered myself ancient, and almost made it. But then this whole Paris Hilton thing came up.
I know this will come as a shock to those of you who consider me hip and with it (and a bigger shock to those of you who would never expect me to use such outdated phrases as "hip" and "with it"), but until a few weeks ago I didn't even know who Paris Hilton is.
Seriously, if you had mentioned Paris Hilton a month ago, I would have thought you were talking about a French hotel that lots of rich playboys visit. Paris Hilton, it turns out, is a young blond woman who lots of rich playboys visit. And the reason I suddenly learned her name is that many of them videotaped their "visit" with her, and now their "visits" are all over the Internet.
Paris Hilton is the strikingly beautiful heiress to the Hilton empire that also gave birth to the upscale hotel chain. When they say you can't have beauty, bucks and brains, they were probably thinking of Paris Hilton because she only scores two out of three in that department. (But if you're limited to just two, beauty and bucks is a pretty good combination.)
Just days before she was about to debut on a reality TV show designed to make it gloriously obvious that her cranial cavity is as vacant as the Baghdad Hilton's Presidential Suite, videotapes began surfacing showing her happily (enthusiastically, even) sharing her charms with a number of young men.
NOW, I'M NO prude. I'd be the last one to criticize a young, beautiful single woman for bringing cheer to platoons of lonely guys and memorializing the charity photographically. God bless technology. I am a tad sad that there was no Paris Hilton -- nor even a Gertrude Motel-6 -- available to shepherd me through my formative years. The video record of that event, or even a couple of cloudy black-and-white Polaroids, would be a comfort now that I am elderly.
The horror show must go on, as they say, and so it is with Paris' TV extravaganza "The Simple Life," where she and another spoiled, rich blonde suffering from too much unoccupied square footage in the old penthouse appendage apparently attempt chores accomplished by average, everyday people, like opening a can of Coke without breaking a nail and not walking into the sides of buildings. Judging from the few promos I've seen, their lack of success in these endeavors threatens to fill untold volumes of future "Dumb Blonde" joke books, which, I think, is the whole point.
I'm sorry if this all comes off as the whining of a jealous, decrepit fossil nearly a half-century old. But to suddenly learn that there are such magnificent creatures as Paris Hilton roaming the planet and that you not only have missed the boat, but the hotel, too, is just too much for someone heading into his dotage to take.
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Charles Memminger, winner of National Society of Newspaper Columnists awards, appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. E-mail cmemminger@starbulletin.com
