Connecting With Celebrities

If I am being honest, I have been putting writing this blog off for quite some time. Not because I had trouble figuring out a celebrity to write about, but because I have been having trouble coming up with an intelligent reason as to why I follow a celebrity’s career, which I do. It seems that I have just been doing it for so long that I now do it without thinking.

Looking at my long history of celebrity following, it seems that it began with George Clooney. I’ve been following his career ever since his days on ER, which, if you do the math, started when I was about 11 (the shows been on since 1993, but that would mean that I’ve been following him since I was five. Not likely).

To give you an idea of how much I love him, I will give you an example of my adoration. Last Thursday was my 21st birthday, which also happened to coincide with Clooney’s return episode on ER, and I seriously considered staying home to watch it. If it weren’t for online television, I don’t know what I would have done. Try to out-pathetic me there!

When reflecting on my admiration for George Clooney, it is difficult to decipher why I admire him so much. He is obviously a very good looking man; he’s got a lot of charisma and a good sense of humor that comes through in his work and various interviews. He also has a very old-Hollywood way about him. You can just picture him getting along with the likes of Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra. I feel like his personal style is a throwback to that era, which I find very glamorous and appealing.

I don’t know how real my admiration for George Clooney can be because I’ve been able to know him through two mediums, television and film. While they do tell me what he looks and sounds like, it only presents me his characters and his public persona. They do not indicate what he would be like on a more personal level and in that respect I most definitely do not know him.

I think that my admiration for sarcastic, self depreciating humor like his is what causes me to admire him as much as I do. I admire his quick wit, and I wish I could emulate it (it takes me at least five minutes to come up with a good comeback).

I feel like he is so familiar to me because he has been such a prominent figure in the public eye for a large part of my life. I almost feel like I grew up watching him on TV and in films. At the same time, I realize that he is involved in a completely different world than I am, that is both physically different as well as being a different type of environment. In that way, I feel very distant from him.

The fact that we can feel connected to a public figure both interests and confuses me. While we may never meet them, it is one of the easiest relationships we can have in life. They don’t expect anything from us. They entertain us without us having to entertain them in return. At the same time, the relationship will likely never be personal, but this does not deter us from following their careers. We just have to accept it for what it is and enjoy it.