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

which anger, jealousy, and humiliation hang. How, therefore, could this have been easy? I know what it feels like to feel less than. No matter how great, how rich, how brilliant, how fat, there will always be someone else with more. This, perhaps, is the hurt we humans have never learned how to hold.
    The Dream
    I might have been eight or nine, at that age when your dreams are so vivid you sometimes fear falling asleep. The age of night-lights and worlds beneath the bed. And one night I went to bed and I had a dream that has stayed with me forever, a dream so palatable I could practically taste it on my tongue when I woke up.
    My mother was sick and I knew it. While my father hadn’t ever actually told us the nature of the illness, I knew she was dying. It was then when fame came to me as not a possibility but a necessity. With fame came money and with money came cure.
    My dream was more like a picture than a dream, because the images are so still, so defined, so Crayola bright. I saw a swing set, entirely unoccupied, each swing moving with the wind, suggesting sadness, and spirits. I saw the sky, enamel blue and perfect. I saw the grass, every blade just barely curved, and the grass too was moving. I was there, kneeling by the sandbox, scratching in the sand with my fingers, feeling before seeing the coolness of coins buried there, sweeping the grains away to find handfuls of silver and copper coins—money! A lot of money! The distinct feeling of muchness, because this wasn’t just one or two pennies, this wasn’t a stray nickel or dime, this was a gaggle, a flock, a brood, a litter of little coins that were now mine. I felt indescribably
lucky
. I felt the way you would feel if you were a miner trapped underground for hours or days, and suddenly you see the first crack of light when the stones are moved to show the sky, a helping hand. I felt
reprieve
. It was not greed. I felt relief, which is the best, most powerful, most intoxicating emotion there is—not joy, but the long longed-for absence of pain or fear.

    That dream has stayed with me and is emblematic in my life, the hook on which I hang the explanation for many of my pursuits. Part of me has always wanted to make art, but then also part of me has longed simply, and primitively, for money, because it equaled from a young age the possibility of life over death. And you don’t have to have a mother dying from cancer to make this equation. You don’t have to have anything except citizenship in the United States of America to learn the lesson that money does not grow on trees; in our country
money is the tree itself
. If you have money, you have life, you have air, you have leaves and shelter and wood and the possibility of being a planet, a star in the sky.
    A significant percent of lottery winners are broke within four years. Something like 75 percent of them develop an addiction or a mood disorder, like depression, that they never had before they won their loot. I’m not here to say money is the root of all evil; it has allowed me to live a kind of life that is so incomparably easier than it would have been had I, say, been a schoolteacher, and for that I’m very grateful. I see all it’s done for me. When I know that if any family member or friend is sick I will be able to get them the care they need. When I know I will never have to worry about retirement, or whether my kids can go to college. When I know I don’t have to worry about paying my bills or getting that loan. When I know that if I get the flu at the same time as my kids, I won’t have to do what almost every mother in America has probably had to do at one point in her life, puke in one bowl while she holds her kid’s head as he pukes in another. Sometimes I can’t imagine how people do it, real life, and I believe perhaps it’s good that I have the money, because maybe God knew I didn’t have the mettle to make it through without.
    That said, I also know money is not the tree of life. It