Why are we surprised that Britney Spears burned out?
Rather, why were we so astounded by the vacant expression on her face during her train wreck performance at the VMAs? Why did we bother pretending to be offended, appalled and disappointed by her complete lack of sincerity and effort?
Britney did everything we subconsciously knew and hoped she would. She built a lucrative music career on a mediocre, whispery baby voice that eventually influenced the sound of an entire generation's music. She is credited (blamed) for creating a Lolita whore image that slipped into the teenage fashion industry right under parents' noses. Her grand finale was a climactic disfunctional marriage straight to two children to divorce to complete meltdown in the course of five years. Aside from an Anna Nicole Smith overdose death, Britney has fulfilled all her Hollywood rites of passage before most women have even gotten married.
While Britney was shimmying her beer-bellied way into pop culture history in Las Vegas last night, I was lounging on a Persian rug-upholstered booth a thousand miles away in a San Francisco bar. Thanks to good ol' fashioned phone networking, I'd kept in touch with an old friend from drum corps who invited Brian and I out with his visiting friends from New York. We shared several hookahs and drank mulled wine until midnight, exchanging stories about our jobs that ranged from Lockheed-Martin to a Facebook product company to the military to the newspapers. None of us were older than Britney Spears, but we all had good heads on our shoulders, sound moral compasses and ambition to do more with our lives than get knocked up and burn out before hitting 30.
So when's our damn 15 minutes of fame?
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