A Day in the Life of a Celebrity

Waking up in another hotel room, he couldn’t help thinking he was really tired, both physically and at heart, although the latter more, of course. None of his old friends or his family could really understand him on that. A day in the life of a celebrity is probably something anyone would like to experience. Generally, a day from a famous person’s life is seen by most people as a number of exciting and pleasurable events, a day full of surprises. They are almost sure that celebrities get almost everything they want immediately and that they enjoy universal admiration and love. Of course, this sounds like a perfect life everyone desires. Why is celebrity status so attractive for the majority of people, why do they pay so much attention to the tabloid gossip, why do they strive so desperately to reach stardom? In my opinion, the explanation is quite simple: vanity is the key to the phenomenon of celebrities and their popularity. Recognition from society is one of the criteria of success imposed upon the minds of people from the very childhood. Consequently, everyone is sure a celebrity’s life is a firework of entertainment. But he knew the day that he was about to live with killing precision and certainty, and that depressed him.

During his young years, he had seen some parts of the backstage life – enough to fall in love with that lifestyle. Sophia Loren once said: “Sex appeal is fifty percent of what you really got plus fifty percent of what people think you’ve got” (Small, p.120). Paraphrasing this, he would say that stardom is only half of what you really enjoy, the other half is what people think you enjoy. The celebrity status, the special conditions, and the luxury items that famous people use are just the top of the iceberg. All the other things, like hard work, lack of personal time, psychological pressure, harsh dieting, and constant intrusion into privacy, are left behind everybody’s attention. He remembered himself a young boy wishing everyone knew him and admired his talents. Now he understood this was pretty much a cry for attention.

He left the hotel suite at 10 a.m. Not very early because people of performance professions work evenings and are not obliged to be in the office at a certain fixed time. This may seem really flattering and relaxing, but soon, after the wakeup, the work and training must start, most often of all. First, he had choreography, then rehearsals, and vocal lessons afterward. Nowadays, the entertainment industry contains so much competition that one cannot allow himself to be left behind just because of his laziness and unwillingness to develop his skills. Aside from that, the performance sphere has become increasingly younger. Therefore, young and energetic rivals leave their colleagues no choice but to work as hard as they can to keep up. He felt all that pressure with all his heart.

Logically, the afternoon should include dinner or at least some resemblance of it. Most of the celebrities, as we all know, hire their own nutrition specialists, who consult them on their eating habits. It has already been proven that a correctly composed diet can significantly help you make the best out of your fitness sessions and keep your body in a good shape. Therefore, after the rehearsals and the dinner again comes the hard work. He secretly thought, the best thing one can do is have an hour-long nap and make the “beauty sleep” that earned itself such a good reputation among movie stars and popular singers, but he never uttered it out loud. However, daytime sleeping is a luxury for most of us, and celebrities are not exclusion. Sometimes, sleep can be substituted by massage or spa therapy in salons with a good reputation, because a famous person is obliged to keep appearance everyone would die to have.

A lucky celebrity would snatch an hour or two to spend time with friends, relatives, and beloved ones. Some of the less lucky ones meet their agents to discuss financial and legislative issues, which, to be perfectly clear, does not happen very often. Maybe he could spend a couple of spare minutes surfing the Internet and browsing the latest celebrity news to check out whether there is something posted about them. In most cases, stars are anxious not to disappear from the social radar and be talked about as much as possible. He was so bored with this vanity fair already.

As evening fell, he started preparing himself or herself for the show, feeling extremely lonely and tired. The preparation process included the final rehearsal or a discussion with the organizers of the show, a sound check or any other technically necessary process. It is quite common for today’s celebrities to record small videos or to take pictures of the ongoing events and post it instantly on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. In this manner, the numerous fans have a unique chance to receive the latest information directly from their idol and not from his or her PR agent. As a logical ending of an exhausting day comes the hour of the performance. He believed his colleagues when they said that the minutes of public attention and admiration coming from hundreds or even thousands of people, worth the work. The energy exchanged during performances, no matter theatre, musical, or TV, is enormous, and it gives the celebrities the power and the drive to keep the pace up. After everything is over, the star is supposed to host an improvised autograph session, thirty minutes long at least. Otherwise, a refusal to do so may fuel gossip about the celebrity as a stuck-up and selfish person.

He never stopped thinking about a quote he recently read in a magazine: “A celebrity is a person who works really hard all his life to become well-known and then spends the rest of his life wearing dark glasses to avoid being recognized” (Marshall, p.202). And, he always carried with himself a letter written by his 7-year-old fan who called him his role model – just to remind himself why he still hadn’t quit.