Virginia expresses the mild but still unnecessary worry that being nominated for this contest may imply that she’s a Mariah-like diva. Uh, no, dear lady. No way. And a good thing, too.

I mean, see whether you can tell the difference between these two women in blue:

Hmmm…. A real toughie, huh? I mean, the sense of unshowy authority just emanates equally from both. Of course, it doesn’t help Mariah that she appears to have taken Virginia’s support for elective plastic surgery to a greater extreme than one might have liked.

Virginia’s post does raise the droll question of who might, in fact, qualify as a Mariah-like right-wing diva. Let’s see…nugatory technical flourishes…caterwauling tone…valuable sentiments hammered redundantly away at until you want to scream…I’m thinking, unsurprisingly, Ann Coulter. Of course, I don’t think she has a blog.

One final observation: I don’t see why being a diva in the pop sense has to be worse than being a diva in the opera sense, despite the crass badness with which so many singers, in practice, handle being stars. Virginia’s not Mariah, thankfully, but I could see her as sort of like early Phoebe Snow–sober and unhurried and interested in how city and suburban living affect people.

Added later: I remember in the late ’80s seeing some Entertainment Tonight-ish show on which a stylist (they weren’t really major public commentators then) said that things had changed to the point that looking as if your hear were all natural was no longer the prime object when wearing hairpieces. This was several years before weaves and extensions took off in a big way even in the suburbs. It was like, “If you’re at a party and no one can tell you’re wearing a hairpiece, that’s fine; and if people know, that’s fine, too. It’s just decoration.” How odd it sounded.

I can’t imagine that even celebrities think of plastic surgery quite the same way by this point, but they do often come off as if they weren’t even trying. It seems to be pretty much assumed that everyone famous in Hollywood and New York has multiple procedures as a matter of routine, and a lot of it is so obvious that even if it doesn’t look obviously fake, it just looks bad.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 19th, 2006 at 07:40 and is filed under misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.