Being famous has its ups and downs

You know, it's hard for the rich and famous. Being pretty famous myself, I gotta say it's so annoying sometimes to deal with the "little people" or the paparazzi.

Just the other day at Maple View Farms, there was a man ahead of me in line who was ordering enough ice cream to feed a family of 112, and every order was different, which he was reading from a list apparently written by a chimpanzee.

Finally, I said quietly, "Um, excuse me. I hate to do this, but would you mind if I went ahead of you real quick?" And, I smiled that huge, winning, famous smile.

"Hell, yes, I'd mind!" he replied belligerently.

I smiled shyly and took off my sunglasses. "Sooo," I said modestly, "does that help?"

He stared at me blankly. Obviously, he didn't want to announce my famousness all over Maple View Farms, so I just stepped back behind him and pretended I was nobody. We famous people have to do that all the time ... (ahem).

Anyway, last week my friend, in whose mountain vacation house I've been staying, and who teaches tennis clinics during the summer at the spa where we work out (and I, personally, use that term loosely) -- Westglow -- came home and said excitedly, "Hey, this woman came to the clinic and she was really funny and I just started giving her grief and we were having fun, and at the end she asked if I'd give her and her "production crew" a private lesson. So, I asked her what she did, and she said she had a late-night talk show in Atlanta. Her name is Mo'Nique. Every heard of her?"

I was writing a column at the time, and to be honest was only registering about every fourth word she said, until she got to the name Mo'Nique. (I immediately registered the correct spelling in my head, because I'd seen it before and wondered what letter the apostrophe was standing in for, which is stupid, because no letter exists on earth that would make sense.)

"Oh ... my ..." I stuttered. "Of course I've heard of her, you freak!" (My friends don't mind me calling them names like "freak" because I'm Italian and it could be so much worse.) "She doesn't just have a talk show, she's won a freakin' Academy Award for that movie 'Precious'! What did you say? Did you make a fool of yourself? Did you tell her about me?" Not that it's about me or anything.

She assured me that she had, indeed, made a fool of herself, but Mo'Nique still requested a private lesson the next day, and if I wanted to come watch, then she'd introduce me. Naturally, I never heard her finish that sentence. I was already in the closet pawing through my totally inadequate clothes.

The next day, when I met Mo'Nique (who has lost weight, and who had run her tail off on that tennis court in defiance of the heat stroke and heart attack that would surely have awaited, say, me) she hugged me so hard and so long that I felt I knew her intimately. Then, I realized it was one of those "I'm famous, you're famous" hugs that she wouldn't give just anybody but me ... and my friend ... and Terry, the groundskeeper who happened to walk by with a shovel, but still, it was a great hug.

Then, we all sat down -- well, not Terry, who had wandered away a bit dazed -- and drank some cold bottled water, and talked and talked and talked. She told us all about her show on BET ("Baby, we just have a ball. Y'all have got to come!") and her diet ("Ooooh, girl, it's so hard!") and her exercise ("The first few times I tried to climb that rock wall, I couldn't do it, no way, baby. The first time I got to the top, though, honey I just cried.") and her husband ("Ooooh, my sisters, he is just SO fine! I'm tellin' you, if he was here right now, and all sweat-glistenin', well, girls, he and I'd have to leave the court for just a few minutes, if you know what I'm sayin'!").

We had a blast! She drinks Nonni and pomegranate juice and takes B6, and swears by both of them. She believes one of her 4-year-old twin boys can see her now-deceased grandmother and sometimes plays with her. She doesn't want to get below 200 pounds, because "I like my curves, baby! That's who I am!" I love this woman.

I asked for the particulars on the B6 and the Nonni juice, but she didn't know them, so she asked for my e-mail address -- we famous folks do that all the time.

Vicki Wentz's column, which appears here on Sundays, is published in newspapers across the country. She is a high school teacher who lives in Chapel Hill, N.C. Readers may contact her at vwentz@mindspring.com.