Celebrity Detox: (the fame game) by Rosie O'Donnell Page A

from this point on will affect hundreds of thousands of years and the future generations consigned to life during those years—our children. Our children’s children.
    The government doesn’t want us to know these facts. They want the pennies in their pockets now, and they’re addicted to oil in a way that makes the sickest heroin junkie look healthy. What I feel in my bones is that the earth is at a true tipping point. I know people have been saying this since Homo sapiens became bipedal—
it’s the end of the world; Christ is coming; it will rain birds and bats; a great gap will open up and the sinners will burn
, etc., etc. I know prophesies of catastrophe are as common and inevitable as drizzle in Seattle, but this is different. This is science. This is math. Dead Iraqis are a fact. Global warming is a fact. It is a fact that those of us alive in this slice of time stand at a fork in the global road, and many of us will live long enough to see the start of the devastation, if we haven’t already. I have four children, and what mother could not but imagine their faces in the walls of water?
    We have work to do. So when I see my face on the front page of a major news source and conduit of public information, next to a survey about some silly joke I told, I feel bad. Stop staring at me, okay? Why are you taking up so much space? And why are we talking about this when we should be talking about
this
?
    So I could see, immediately, that my life was going to radically change. It was like flipping a switch and, boom, I woke up in Oz. But unlike Dorothy, I’d been there before, I’ve dreamed this before, and the lion, the scarecrow, the tin man, they’re old friends of mine. Hello, fame. The chill, and the thrill, of déjà vu.
    And that was the hardest part for me, plus how Kelli felt about it, even though she supported me at every turn. My children? Thank goodness they’re not adolescents. What they know is that Mama is on TV; everyone knows Mama; wherever we go people want only to talk to Mama; we are not noticed, Mama is. They know she is a big mama. I worry that that, in turn, must make them feel so small. Which is fine when you are young, but it becomes less fine as you emerge into adulthood.

    I know Elisabeth and Joy felt it too. Of course it was all over the papers: “Elisabeth and Rosie Fighting at
The View
,” “Backstage Distress,” etc. This was true, but only to a point, and that point ended far earlier than the media reported. But in the very beginning, yes, I felt as though Joy had her claws out; she was ready to pounce, and she did. Joy is older than I am, Streisand’s age, and she didn’t start as a comedian until she was forty, and she’s funny as hell, I truly think that, so I have only admiration for her talent. But in the beginning she didn’t know this.
    Elisabeth, antiabortion, pro Bush, pro war, believes in everything I don’t, and I believe in everything she doesn’t. She’s as slender as I am fat, as restrained as I am vociferous, as polite as I am frank. She’s the Emily Dickinson poem incarnate, “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant/Success in Circuit lies,” while I’m the Dylan Thomas poem incarnate: “Do not go gentle into that good night . . . Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” Elisabeth. I can tell you this. Right from the start I could see in this slip of a girl so different from me, I could see something fierce, a fist in the frill, and I liked that. But we had no language in common.
    If we had a language in common, perhaps we would have found our way to a connection sooner than we did, but I doubt that. Because, personality differences aside, there was always the fame problem to contend with. There was always the sense that by introducing me into
The View
’s configuration, you were shifting the pyramid’s building blocks, giving it a point it hadn’t had before. Fame is the ultimate expression of hierarchy. And hierarchy is the ultimate structure on