Bracing for disaster and slew of celebs
Well, I don’t want to be too presumptuous, but I felt she was speaking for me when she said that. Then she gave the survivors a hug. And not just any hug. It was a slowmotion hug. I’m guessing celebrities take lessons in how to move really slowly. And then there was music. Some tinkly piano music. Sentimental, bittersweet, background music. That’s when I knew I was supposed to feel REALLY sad. Next was Chris Rock, who came upon a young girl in a shelter who was about the same age as his own daughter, and Chris Rock said, “ Whoa, she reminds me of my own little girl,” and suddenly the story was about how fortunate Chris Rock felt that this had not happened to his family, which was way more interesting than focusing in on the family it actually happened to, because they’d never been in a movie or had their own comedy special. We need celebrities in disaster zones. We need to see their reaction to events so that we know how to feel. Celebrities are paid millions of dollars to pretend to be happy, or sad, or even devastated, so when the camera zooms in to get their reaction to someone else’s misery, you can bet you’re going to get your money’s worth.
I’m sure there’ll be an inquiry to see why they were so slow off the mark, but Iwouldn’t be surprised to see the establishment of a Celebrity Emergency Response Team ( CERT).
Before you could find this sort of thing on the Web, I went into the Museum of Television and Radio in New York one time to see CBS archival footage of Walter Cronkite telling Americans that President Kennedy had just died in Dallas. Cronkite’s in a shirt and tie, no jacket, and as he delivers the bulletin, he pauses, removes his huge blackframed glasses for a moment, steels himself for what he knows will be the toughest day he’ll ever spend in the news business, slides the glasses back on, and keeps on going. You have to wonder, today, what sort of music they’d want to run with that. For sure, they’d want to go slow- mo when he does the thing with the glasses. Linwood Barclay’s column appears on Monday, Friday and Saturday. Email: lbarclay@thestar.ca.