This is about Celine Dion. But please, bear with me.
She ended her show in Las Vegas, said her good-byes and apparently cried a bit. All this Celine attention is taking me back.
Remember
when she was just so darn big? Way back in the “Titanic days.” We heard,
time and again, her story: roraied in poverty in Quebec, voice of an
angel, gets a manager as a young teen, and (this is where we all start
to squirm) falls in love with said manager, career goes pretty well,
sings hit theme ballad to hit cloying love story movie and for years –
literally years – her big nasally voice played on a loop inside our heads,
near, far, wherever we were? Remember?
And some people loved her, they just loved her. Read this for a taste of that crazy.
But
this is not my good-bye to Celine Dion, because I never cared for her
music or her voice or her uplifting life tale, rags to riches, all
that. Never had a burning desire to see her show in Vegas. Ever. This
isn’t about Celine the entertainer.
This is about how I still give her bits of my attention, because we have a connection, me and Celine: she was my pregnant celebrity. Oh, shut up, you had one too. The celebrity who was pregnant the same time you were? You followed her pregnancy, watched her stay skinny while you bloated into something approximating the size of Montana. (Or were you lucky enough to get Selma Hayek?)
I wasn’t lucky and I got Dion, when she was still popular, real popular. She was everywhere. I couldn’t help but follow the details of her pregnancy. I read about manager/husband Rene’s cancer and how she underwent fertility treatments to get pregnant. She talked about the embryo that wasn’t implanted, talked about it as a sibling for the boy she eventually gave birth to, another Rene, just a few weeks before I had my first baby.
My pregnant celebrity and I made major career decisions around the same time: I decided to step back from my career and stay home with the baby for a few years; Celine signed papers with Vegas promoters to have her little circus show put on stage. She had a sweet deal – put baby to bed, go to work, see him all day. See, I know that stuff. Not only was she my pregnant celebrity, she was my post-partum celebrity too.
But the kids grew up and I got out of the house and I lost touch with Celine over the years. So, maybe she’s going to unfreeze that embryo and do right by big boy Rene. If so, I’ll gladly pass the torch and she can be your pregnant celebrity too. Any takers?
Who were your pregnant celebrities? Are you embarrassed by the random facts you know about her? Oh, oh, anybody have an adoption celebrity?
