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So let's say, just for the hell of it, that you're 42 years old and world famous. Though you've been married twice to beautiful women and linked to another whose English still hasn't improved, rumors abound concerning your sexual orientation, about which you've sworn to be doggedly litigious. You're all man, no doubt about it, but you believe your private life should be private, and you even became publicly indignant when Princess Diana died because you, too, had been pursued by paparazzi through that very same tunnel in France. You're looking pretty damn good these days, you've got a Spielberg film coming out, and now, coincidentally, you're head over heels again. Do you:
- Call your family and friends with the good news but request that they remain silent about your great new love.
- Call your family and friends with the good news but request that they remain silent about the fact that your great new love's claim to fame was Dawson's Creek.
- Call you family and friends with the good news but request that they remain silent about the fact that your great new love wasn't even the best actor on Dawson's Creek.
- Go on Oprah Winfrey's show, jump on her furniture, pump your fists like you've just won the Showcase Showdown on The Price is Right, then spend the following week on Access Hollywood discussing the crackpot philosophy that forbids you from experiencing the psychiatric help you so desperately need.
If you answered "d," you are Tom Cruise, you crazy little bastard, and this is an intervention. Take it down a notch or two, Tommy Boy. At this point, you're scaring the beejeesus out of small children and dogs.
I've seen all kinds of heterosexual guys find love, Tom, and I'm always happy for them. Love can really change a guy. Warms the heart, doesn't it? None of those guys, however—including the ones managing to score someone 16 years their junior—jumped on the furniture, Tom. Not a single one. Not in the first blush of love when they were randy college boys, and certainly not at age 42. I don't think I've ever seen even an end table threatened by a straight guy's romantic bliss. I'm just sayin'.
And Access Hollywood, Tom? Slumming it, aren't we? And was it really the best idea to call psychiatry "a fraud," given your participation in a religion whose founder believed we were all once space beings called "thetans" who somehow ended up on Earth as clams?
"I'm going right after psychiatry and these false labels and this pseudo-science," you said. "I was diagnosed as dyslexic; I had a lot of energy as a child. They wanted to put me on drugs. My mother said, 'No, absolutely not.' Had I been put on those drugs, I never would be here today. I never would have the career that I'm having. Am I making people aware of it by discussing it openly and saying what a fraud psychiatry is? You bet I am. I feel responsibility because I care."
Tom, honey, please. We all care. We all want you to be better. We all feel responsibility. In fact, the second I'm done with this column, I'm going to pound out a furious message to your mother about the benefits of Ritalin.
swiecking@seattleweekly.com
