There's a media game called "The Perp Walk," also known as "The
Frog-March," in which a person who has been arrested is paraded in
front of the media in shackles. Not everybody has to frog-march: The
press doesn't bother with the run-of-the-mill criminals, and the
royalty can always pull strings and avoid the humiliation. It's the
B-Listers and the Superstars who've had the protection of power removed
from them who frog-march.
Which brings me to the sadness of standing in the checkout line today, staring at Valerie Bertinelli's painfully buff 48-year-old celebrity body, displayed in awkward anatomical completeness, like a butterfly pinned to the board of People magazine.
Bertinelli is just two years my senior and played a girl my age on a popular 1970s sitcom. She was almost universally loved by junior-high boys, then went on to marry the quintessential stadium-speed-guitar-god and become the queen of Lifetime movies. Eventually she wound up divorced and overweight and, one supposes, washed up.
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