Tori Spelling Pines

Anyway, I worked on a movie yesterday starring Tori Spelling. She was so disturbingly odd-looking that I meant to go home and do a blog post where I said, "I worked with Tori Spelling today. My mommy said there were no monsters, no real ones. But there are, aren't there?" I even thought about searching the internet for a picture of Newt from ALIENS, thinking myself oh-so-clever.

But as the hours passed, and I saw how friendly and professional on the set she was, it occurred to me, that even though in the Nineties Tori Spelling was a joke among me and my friends,* and a punchline among comedians**, today, she's heads and shoulders more of a real celebrity than the Snookies, Kate Gosselins, and Kardashians who people fawn over twenty-three hours a day.***

I mean, nepotism aside, Tori Spelling actually played a part on that "90210" show, and worked for years on it and other projects, where, talentless or not, she actually held down a job, toed the line, and acted a part . . . which is a hell of a lot more than the worthless, reality-show skanks and cockumentary starlets the tabloids worship today. And I stood there watching Spelling perform memorized dialogue in take after take, realizing that, when you weigh it, she has done more to contribute to the face of entertainment than the vast majority of "celebrities" who make headlines partying or vomiting or buying things or going to rehab or carrying around little dogs or throwing their valuables or copulating for the cameras in the 2010s.

And I simply couldn't make my nasty little anti-Tori Spelling blog post. You see, she's actually a person, I discovered. Whereas the others . . . well, there's not a lot of evidence either way.
Rish Outfield

*My uncle has a house in Las Vegas just a couple blocks up from Torrey Pines Boulevard, and when my roommate John and I would drive up there, we'd always say it was Tori Spelling Pines. Sick, I know, but we were twisted, unloved creatures in those days. And I still am.

**I remember Dennis Miller joking that our society was so out of touch for real celebrities, he had seen the word "zeitgeist" used in a Vanity Fair article about Tori Spelling.

***The other hour, of course, is dedicated to lobbing verbal feces about political candidates and party leaders.