J Lo - Oh No

Since I seem to feel the need to begin each rant or rave with the insider information that I'm in love, I'll say right now that I don't love the New York Post... But I sure do like it, especially the top-grade, meanest of meanie mean spirits who contribute to the gossip page.
You can keep your Liz Smiths and Cindy Adamses (I like my gossip columnists like I like my Beaujolais Nouveau - tart, tangy and well ahead of the 'best before' date) the juiciest part of the column is Page Six.
Each and every day, heaping helpings of the worst - and sometimes best, though I skip over that part - antics of NYC's rich and famous are arrayed. I know there are those who think an interest in such meaningless mush the height of pointlessness. To them I say... So's your mother!
(It's the best I can do.)
Can I help it if I find distraction and humour in campy crap? I spend my days (these days) immersed in the details of brain death and organ transplant issues; if I also enjoy hearing about Puffy and Paris, tell me: who gets hurt?
Anyway, today's lead story is worth sharing if only to note the irony and unintentional humour at the heart of so much of that which is crap - the re-jigging of a celebrity's image.
Come on down Jennifer Lopez!
All agog with girlish glee, Page Six smirkily reports that a new 'sympathetic image' is being crafted for the bounteously-bummed popstar. Lopez handlers are working overtime honing the new low-maintenance, low-key 'Jenny From the Block'-style facsimile just days before its proposed launch on the upcoming televised broadcast of Nickleodeon's 'Kid's Choice Awards'.The new, improved, demurer-than-daisies Jenny is apparently looking forward to being slimed with the ubiquitous cartoon channel slathering of green goo, all in an effort to distract the press from the demanding diva image that somehow managed to slip out of the normally tightly buttoned-down pup-tents of Camp Lopez.
Further evidence of the studiedly downmarket transformation has the Grammy winning heartbreaker eschewing the services of her regular beauty parlour operator. According to the Post he's "...no longer allowed to throw fits or demand limos, airplanes and $20,000 a day." She went to a movie recently (in a public theatre!) with just two bodyguards and one hanger-on. The mind boggles at the sacrifice.
But the self-inflicted personal deprivation doesn't stop there. A source close to Ben Affleck's ex provides the down low on the unprecedented lack of basic requirements.
"There have been no high-diva demands," the source confirms. "There will be no more absurd requests for white lilies in her rooms, 600-thread-count sheets in her hotel rooms or anything like that. She really is just a normal girl."
I'm the nobodiest of nobodies, but even I have the odd contact or two, so I can confirm that an unimpeachable source had the opportunity to observe the lovely Latina from close range in a Los Angeles restaurant. Jenny, so I'm told, breezed in to the popular upscale eatery with nary a reservation, though fully equipped with a posse of 20 or so people-shaped, sycophantic barnacles. After accommodating the (loud, drunken, vulgar) group, my source reports Jenny herself deigned to address the hired help, at least so far as to berate them virtually nonstop from the moment of clamourous arrival, until the last magnum of Cristal was slurped noisily dry. It was a performance, my contact reports, that could have sold more tickets than a regularly scheduled concert and given its audience more than a little insight into the multi-millionaire singing sensation.
But everything happens for a reason, or so I'm told, and perhaps this divestiture of material excesses is just a rehearsal for the future. If 'Jenny From the Block's' teenage fans could see the 'normal girl' for who she really is, they might well stop buying whatever image she sells.