What’s in celebrity handbags this week? Is it lip gloss and sunglasses? Car keys and chewing gum? We’ll never know, because Us magazine this week deprives us of its weekly feature ‘What’s in my purse?’ which gives “celebrities” aspiring to rise to the D-List the opportunity to fill their tote bags with healthy snacks they’d never usually eat, products they’re paid to promote, and books they’d like to be seen reading. Has Us mag run out of celebrities? Has this window into stars’ private lives become too intrusive? Or could it be because every “celebrity” purse carries the same dull, predictable contents week after week? And why have we seen inside dozens of celebrities’ purses yet never encountered a single one with any condoms, soiled Kleenex, or medication for their bipolar disorder? They can’t have dropped the feature because there’s too much real news, because that’s one thing sorely lacking in this week’s celebrity magazines and tabloids.
O.J. Simpson attempted a jail break, scooping out a shallow trench beneath the razor wire surrounding Nevada’s Lovelock Correctional Center, claims the Globe, which says that he was caught red-handed. It’s hard to imagine that one of the most recognizable inmates in the US prison system would try to escape under the eye of 213 prison guards and CCTV into a flat expanse of desert without any accomplices outside to help him flee, yet that’s what the Globe would have us believe. Or maybe he was just walking too close to the fence, and tripped?
The pro-Trump tabloids continue their attacks on Hillary Clinton, with mounting desperation. President Reagan’s shooter John Hinckley Jr has won release from a mental institution, and is “set free to kill!’ according to the Globe, which helpfully explains: “Why you should blame the Clintons.” Evidently the judge who released Hinckley was “appointed when Bill and Hillary Clinton ran the White House.” Because as every Globe readers knows, Hillary previously ran the White House for eight years, and personally appointed all members of the judiciary.
The National Enquirer’s front page screams that Donald Trump will take “revenge on Hillary & her puppets,” and discloses his “plot to get even.” Explaining that “Donald is determined to protect America,” it unveils his “no hold-barred strategy to expose their darkest secrets.” According to a “well-informed source,” these secrets include ”shocking details of President Obama’s cocaine rampages and homosexual romps” in Chicago decades ago, and evidence that he was born in Kenya and is a “secret Muslim.” But these aren’t secrets. They are long-discredited, thoroughly disproved and unsubstantiated tabloid tales of yesteryear exhumed from the vault for the sake of political muckraking. Fortunately, the world knows that Trump would never recklessly repeat unproven allegations from the Enquirer. Unless, of course, it’s to accuse Ted Cruz’s father of plotting with Lee Harvey Oswald to kill President John F Kennedy, as Trump did in May.
Are Cameron Diaz and Jennifer Garner pregnant? They are according to the Enquirer and Globe respectively, which means that both have simply been photographed with the slightest of stomach bulges, and the tabloids’ crack team of psychic gynecologists made the medical diagnosis.
For those watching the Nick Nolte Death Countdown, the excitement mounts: there are only two weeks left before he shuffles off this mortal coil, according to the Globe, which two weeks ago gave the actor just a month to live.
This week Nolte is joined by a host of other dying stars who “fight for life” in their “sad last days,” according to the National Examiner. Robert Redford, Julie Andrews, Al Pacino, Ryan O’Neal, Valerie Harper, Howie Mandel, Shelley Long, Gene Wilder, Joan Baez, Carol Burnett and Jim Nabors are all on their way out, claims the Examiner, which by the law of averages is likely to strike it lucky and be right with at least one of them in the coming year. Amazingly, Nick Nolte isn’t on the Examiner’s list. Don’t they know he only has two weeks left to live? Nor is Cher, who has been given “weeks to live” numerous times over the past decade. According to the Globe, that’s because Cher’s “life was saved” by “controversial stem cell treatments.” But there’s a catch: “The life-saving therapy destroyed her body – and her famous face,” says the Globe, which claims her visage is “drooping and sagging.” I believe doctors call this phenomenon “aging,” but evidently the Globe thinks that 70-year-old Cher should still look like she did at 30. Then they ruin it all by including a photograph of Cher without makeup looking, frankly, sensational for her age, with no sign of jowls, no wrinkles, no wattle neck. Maybe they didn’t bother looking at her photo when they wrote the article.
Fortunately we have Us magazine’s crack investigative team to tell us that Yara Shahidi (Who she, Ed?) wore it best, that US Olympic athlete Simone Biles is “a Justin Bieber fan” whose favorite color is purple, and the stars are just like us: they skateboard, carry groceries, and walk their dogs.
Country singing star Blake Shelton tells how Gwen Stefani “saved my life,” which evidently didn’t include a near-drowning rescue at sea, and had more to do with how they comforted one another as their marriages fell apart, according to Us mag, which simply lifted its quotes from an interview Shelton gave to Billboard magazine and put them on its cover.
We don’t know what’s in a celebrity purse this week, but by way of compensation Us mag tells us what’s in the lunch box of the seven-year-old daughter of ‘American Pie’ actress Alyson Hannifin. Because enquiring minds want to know that her little girl loves “a banana and almond butter sandwich shaped like an owl.” Well, who doesn’t?
TV’s ‘Bachelorette’ JoJo Fletcher’s choice of Jordan Rodgers as the love of her life dominates the cover of People magazine, which reveals that “she calls him ‘lovey;’ he calls her ‘babe.’” And that’s about as revealing as it gets.
For truly chilling news we must turn to the National Examiner, which reveals that “children with soulless black eyes terrorize residents foolish enough to let them in” across the globe. Once considered an urban legend, inspiring a clutch of horror movies, the Examiner claims that there really are black-eyed children who appear on doorsteps seeking shelter, bringing paranormal mayhem in their wake. One woman who encountered two such children claims that since they departed, “three of her cats have gone missing and her husband has had severe nosebleeds and skin cancer.” There’s no way that could be a statistical anomaly – it has to be the curse of the “horror kids,” with eyes “as chilling and empty as the void of deep space.”
I fully expect the Enquirer to reveal next week that Hillary Clinton was a black-eyed child in her youth.
Onwards and downwards . . .