Look What Vanity, Stupidity,
Too Much Money, and Rotten Taste
Could Do For You!
Jocelyn Wildenstein, age 74
Net Worth: $500 million. Known for extensive facial surgeries, her divorce from Alec Wildenstein in 1999, and for her extravagant life. She once calculated her yearly telephone bill at $60,000 and food and wine costs at $547,000.
Donatella Versace, age 60
Net Worth: $200 million. However with her 20% stake in the Versace company, if it was to sell at its current valuation she would pocket around $1.7 billion.
Dolly Parton, age 69
Net Worth: $500 million. A sad, grotesque caricature of herself at age 69. The singer, songwriter, actress, author and philanthropist has been writing and performing hit country songs for over 40 years. She has released 41 top-10 country albums, and has had 25 number one singles. And look what it’s bought her.
Those first two photos bear a very strong resemblance to my sister-in-law, who lives in Southern California: silicone breasts (which leaked and caused no end of trouble), Botox on her face, and collagen injections for her lips. And, of course, she turned her hair a platinum blond, a color which doesn't flatter her in the least.
ReplyDeleteOnce a beauty queen and now 57 years old, she now looks simian -- and UGLEEEEE. I don't know why she bothers to posts pictures of herself on her Facebook page.
BTW, my sister-in-law is forever going to photography studios to have glamor portraits taken. Go figure!
DeleteYou told me once she was a liberal, didn't you? Maybe THAT explains it?
DeleteLiberals engage in WISHFUL THINKING, live in a world of VAIN, IDIOTIC PRETENSE and prefer to remain deaf dumb and blind to REALITY.
In THEIR world Good s Bad, Virtue is Vice, Up is Down, White is Black, Beautiful is Ugly, Viciousness is Kind, Tyranny is Liberty, Courtesy is Hypocrisy, Stupidity is Brilliance ----- and VICE VERSA.
And many still say there is no such thing as DEMON POSSESSION. HAH!
Hello Dali! ;)
ReplyDeleteWhy that's LOVELY! --- NOT!!!
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DeleteGovernor Palin having been a former beauty queen and now media star of sorts one can reasonably ask might she take this path. Would be a shame if she does.
ReplyDeleteSarah Palin will be 51 this year. She looks very healthy, strong and wholesome, but she's not blest with good taste in general, shows a lamentable lack of "class," has no fashion sense, no idea how to wear her hair, and no idea how to emphasize her basic good looks to any advantage.
DeleteHer uncultivated, unmodulated voice is almost comically shrill, and she presents herself, perhaps honestly, which may be good, but without a shred of dignity.
The way she and her family have handled their sudden fame strikes me as unwise and anything but admirable.
I like her ideas, but her way of presenting them reduces her potential as a candidate for the highest office in the land to that of a joke.
This may not be fair, but because she is far too easy to parody and caricature in extraordinarily unflattering ways, it's impossible to take her seriously. I'm very much afraid recent experience with notoriety has transformed her into just another whore for attention.
Despite all that, SP does not strike me as either sufficiently vain or sufficiently stupid to turn herself into the sort of monster featured here today -- at leastI sincerely hope not.
IF Sarah Palin were ever to resort to plastic surgery, the best thing she could possibly do for herself would be to have her nose shortened just a wee bit. Discreet rhinoplasty vastly improved the late Marilyn Monroe's already spectacular good looks. A similar procedure done on Betty Ford after her famed bout with breast cancer, was inaccurately described as "a face lift." In my opinion the unacknowledged-but-very-obvious nose bob was not a great success. I liked Mrs. Ford better with her original, rather bony, far-more-prominent proboscis. Betty was always a very good looking woman, but like Sarah Palin she didn't have much-if-any sense of style. Both she and Sarah Palin have suffered from a notable lack of chic -- a hard-to-define quality the late Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis possessed in spades.
Is this important in politics?
I wish it weren't, because preoccupation with such things in public figures reveals a hopelessly unflattering shallowness and intellectual vapidity in the American electorate.
Could we elect a woman who looked like Golda Meir, or Eleanor Roosevelt, or Bess Truman today? I doubt it.
Excellent analysis FreeThinke, you hit the proverbial nail squarely on its head.
DeleteMy only hesitation, and question is does the Governor posses the substance and grit for the national stage? For no the answer is no; in my opinion.
When did Americans become so obsessed with outward appearance to the point that Americans tend to choose political leaders on the good-looks factor?
DeleteFT,
DeleteCould we elect a woman who looked like Golda Meir, or Eleanor Roosevelt, or Bess Truman today? I doubt it.
Or a Winston Churchill, either.
I could name numerous others.
I thin you must now, AOW, hat the concentration on CHARISMA -- I define it as "SEX APPEAL" or "ANIMAL MAGNETISM" -- began when JFK came out the clear 'winner" in the very first televised debate between presidential candidates. Women thought the flashy bon vivant JFK was "cute," but found the more earnest and sincere Nixon "grim and forbidding."
DeleteThat was The Beginning of the End of dignity and integrity in American politics in my never humble opinion.
TV -- an ideal tool for shaping public opinion through an insidious form of Mass Hypnosis -- has had a deleterious effect in the quality of American life and culture.
The Freak Show has only JUST begun!
ReplyDeleteUGH! Sorry, but even though I identify as a libertarian in spirit, I can't STAND it.
DeleteWhat next? SHE-MALES engaging in publicly exhibited prick-measuring contests followed by SHE-HE'S exhibiting their flaccid fake penises and plastic balls?
PLEASE make it STOP -- or at least go underground to the netherworld where it belongs. PLEASE!
What do I care? I'll always have the classics. :)
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ReplyDeleteHey! I think Dolly looks damn good, especially for her age.
ReplyDeleteFor the record, the boobs are hers. I had the pleasure of being up close to them as a young man back before she got really famous and had the money to have such a surgery.
The first two pictures are grotesque, and AOW's sister-in-law is going down a sad path that is sadly very well trod in this country.
Having said all that, I sympathize. Women are held to different standards than men. It's not fair, but that's the way it is.
" I think Dolly looks damn good, especially for her age."
DeleteEt tu, Kurtus? (:-o
I wish you hadn't said that. If you are serious, it reveals something I'd rather not have known.
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PS: I've always LIKED Dolly Parton -- not as a "singer," of course, but as a person. She once cheerfully admitted, "Everything about me is fake -- even my boobs," a remark that forever endeared her to me, because it was candid, yet left one to give no other response but "Yes, but your heart is real, and that's all that's truly important about you, dear lady."
She was never "pretty," but she always had an inner radiance that made up for her lack of beauty.
In attempting to preserve her image through plastic surgery, however, she has -- like so many others transformed herself into a grotesque, –– rather frightening –– CARICATURE of the commercially successful IMAGE -- always a MASK even in the best of times -- that helped make her famous.
SAD!
Unfortunately, FT, Female performers end up going down that path because they feel they must. Performers want to perform, and applause and adulation are their wine and caviar.
DeleteNo kidding, the word verification word was 'VBUST'!!!
I don't understand what you find disturbing in my view of it. The first two women have clearly gone overboard, we agree, but female performers have an expectation, unfair or not, to live up to.
And just to get the facts straight, Dolly was naturally well-endowed, and she had the full figure to go with those front-mounted cannons. But she lost a lot of weight in the 80's and those famous orbs headed south, so she had some surgical enhancement done.
No kidding, the word verification word for submitting my last comment was 'VBUST'!
Deletebtw, I can send you picture of Dolly and me if you're curious. I was a grade-schooler at the time. You can see what she looked like before all the enhancements.
ReplyDeleteSend away, please. I've been well aware of DP for about thirty years, and as I said, I've always found her very likable and refreshingly "authentic." She's a good actress too. I loved her in Steel Magnolias and in Nine to Five. Just wish she'd done more work as an actress and less as a "singer." I'm sorry, but that "Nashville sound" does nothing for me at all. In fact it grates on my nerves something fierce. ;-)
DeleteI feel that way about Oprah Winfrey too. As a show host, "TV personality" and "Icon" she's merely "okay," but as an ACTRESS she's dynamite. Her performance in The Color Purple is unforgettable -- just brilliant, and extraordinarily touching.
Though I generally despise popular culture, as well you now, I admire these women for the great financial success they've achieved and for the stability and sanity of their private lives.
$60,000 phone bill?
ReplyDeleteThat's $170 a day.
How does she find time for surgery (some of which went badly wrong?).
What's with this fixation wealthy white women have on trying to have niggalips? I don't get it.
ReplyDelete... Naira Trebila Ami
It is also quite lamentable that perfectly presentable white women are shooting goo in their asses the get that black woman booty look.
DeleteUGH!!! Just horrible!!!
It's an interesting question that deserves an answer, Naira, but please don't use racially charged pejorative terminology in future. It would have been better if you had asked, "What is compelling rich white women to pay surgeons large sums of money to give them bad imitations of Sub-Saharan African women's lips?
DeleteIt would be all right with me, if you had said negroid lips, though leftists have done their best to vilify the use of Negro, Negress, Negroid and probably Negritude as well, but their opposition is absurd and unwarranted.
At any rate what Wildenstein and Versace have had done to themselves is far uglier and more grotesque than any naturally-occurring phenomenon in the Negro populations I have ever seen.
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