How bad are things? Just gaze upon Julia

The question all Americans want an answer to is this: Why did it take celebrities so long to respond to Hurricane Katrina? They had to see it coming. Celebrities have people who read newspapers and watch television and will keep them apprised of newsworthy developments. There were plenty of warnings a Category 5 storm was bearing down on the Gulf Coast. Yet even a couple of days after the storm hit New Orleans, many celebrities were still in Hollywood and New York and elsewhere. You could hear the anger and frustration in the voices of those hit by the storm. A typical comment: “ What does Céline Dion think? Every day, we hear she’s going to say something, tell the world how upset she is, then another day goes by, and nothing.”

In fact, it wasn’t until Saturday that the singer finally spoke out on Larry King Live. It took until the end of the last week, and the first of this one, for most celebrities to get their act together. Now, they’re scrambling to make up for lost time. Take Julia Roberts. There she was the other day, on Oprah, talking to a family that had been evacuated from New Orleans and was now living in a shelter god knows where. These were folks who’d been through something so traumatic it was almost impossible for the rest of us to comprehend. But then the director went in for a closeup. Not on the people who’d experienced the disaster, but on Julia Roberts, so we could see her reaction to the horror that these people had been through. And then she said something like, “ It’s so sad.”