You Don’t Know These People

Dolly Parton died.

News I was not ready to hear.

Before I could curse that bitch Jolene for the hundredth time after hearing the news, my legs got swept out from under me in a completely different way.

Tim Curry died.

Damn.

For completely different reasons, both deaths made me think about privacy.

Tim Curry was one of those actors I knew was insanely talented long before I had the vocabulary to explain why. As a kid, I certainly wasn’t sitting there evaluating theatrical technique or an actor’s ability to move between stage-sized performance and film.

I just knew whatever the fuck he was doing worked.

He could be enormous without seeming misplaced. Weird without needing to apologize for it. Theatrical without making film feel like the wrong container for the performance.

Sometimes the people who teach us that weird is acceptable never tell us that directly.

They just refuse to apologize for being weird.

Curry affected the way I understood performance and, probably in some small way, the way I understood myself.

Here is the funny part:

I don’t know shit about Tim Curry.

I never met him. He never met me. I don’t know what he ate for breakfast, what kind of asshole he was when irritated, what he thought about every controversy occurring during his lifetime, or whether we would have liked each other.

And that feels right.

Actually, I think it is kind of beautiful.

Someone can give you something meaningful without giving you themselves.

Public work does not create public ownership of the worker.

The current zeitgeist could stand to sit with that one for a minute.

Curry valued privacy, and the more I thought about that, the stranger the alternative became.

Imagine if the rest of us had to develop a privacy strategy before starting a job.

Congratulations on the promotion, Diane. Before onboarding, please document how you intend to prevent customers from discovering where your children attend school.

Oh, you didn’t prepare one?

Well, you did choose a public-facing occupation.

Ridiculous.

Yet fame creates this strange assumption that visibility somehow converted into consent.

It didn’t.

Visibility is not consent to intimacy.

Buying a ticket gets you the performance.

It does not get you the performer.

If a colleague walked up after your webinar and said, “Great presentation. By the way, you and Jack have been married ten years. Why haven’t you had children?” you would not think, Well, fair question. I did make myself visible on Zoom.

You would be checking whether HR was still online.

Yet we normalize essentially the same transaction when the person asking has a press credential and the person answering happens to be famous.

Then came Dolly.

Ouch.

That woman somehow even found her way onto my breakfast table with a syrup I now have entirely too many feelings about.

And one of my first thoughts after hearing the news was:

I wonder how Miley is doing.

Then I caught myself.

Wow.

What an oddly intimate thing to wonder about a stranger.

My mom eventually sent me a screenshot of Miley talking about what the loss meant to her, and all I could think was how strange the entire transaction is.

Someone is grieving a person dear to them, and somewhere around that grief sits an expectation that the public will eventually receive a statement.

Maybe she wanted to share it.

That is entirely hers to decide.

The interesting part is that the machinery was ready for it either way.

Of course people wondered what she would say.

Of course the statement became something to consume.

Of course silence would probably have become something to discuss too.

But none of that answers a fairly simple question:

Why are we entitled to it?

She sings for a living.

At what point did publicly processing grief become part of the job description?

Celebrity culture has accumulated a bizarre collection of what I have called Invisipoints for years.

Invisible points awarded according to rules nobody formally agreed to.

Good celebrity: shares enough.

Bad celebrity: asks for privacy.

Good fan: knows everything.

Bad fan: apparently just watches the movies.

Good conversationalist: participates in whatever interaction has been placed in front of them.

The points are made up.

The consequences are not.

And celebrity culture is only the industrial version of something we do to each other constantly.

You tell me you like something.

I recognize the information.

That can be the entire transaction.

Relatability does not require access.

It also does not require action.

You like Android.

Cool.

I use an iPhone.