The other day I was standing in the checkout line at Wal-Mart; and as people normally do when standing in checkout lines, since there is nothing else to do, I first scanned the assorted items on the shelves to my left, which included candy bars, breath mints, chewing gum, and assorted packages of crackers and chips. Then I scanned the shelves to my right. These are the shelves that invariably contain items the store places there to entice shoppers to purchase things they don’t really need but think they need, things like $1.00 DVDs of movies of which no one has ever heard, roller thingies that remove lint and cat hair from one’s clothes and upholstery, bundles of really ugly dishrags, “collector” baseball cards that will never be worth more than they cost, and Bobble Head candy dispensers.

Deciding against purchasing the DVD Invasion of the Beach Bunny Bimbos, which I suspected Chet already owned, I then focused my attention on the magazine rack. The rack contained the latest editions of Cosmo, Woman’s Day, and Elle, along with several other magazines and assorted tabloids like People, Star, and whatever has replaced the now defunct National Inquirer. And there it was, the headline that caught my eye. Not that I remember it’s exact wording, but the headline was basically announcing to the world that Kirstie Alley has not merely regained all the weight she lost on the Jenny Craig program but has been ousted by Craig and is now dangerously obese, so much so that her friends are concerned that Kirstie is literally killing herself with food.

Poor Kirstie, I thought; and, overcome by curiosity, I snatched a copy of the tabloid from the rack. Thumbing through the pages in search of the article, I occasionally glanced at the shoppers ahead of me in line, hoping they wouldn’t finish checking out before I had a chance to read about Kirstie’s tragic setback.

Naturally, as is usually the case, the article in which I was interested was almost at the very end of the tabloid. I found it, though; and as the woman ahead of me smacked her kid for grabbing a candy bar and inched up a cart-length, I edged in behind her buggy and scrutinized the photos of poor Kirstie.

Yep, I thought, she’s definitely regained some weight, a lot of weight at that. And driving the point home was a photo of Kirstie Alley as the spokesperson for Jenny Craig. Having lost 75 pounds at the time, she was wearing a slinky, low-cut black dress and looked quite sexy indeed. In the other, more recent photos, however, poor Kirstie did not look sexy at all. Wearing what looked like a cross between a Hawaiian moo-moo and a tent, she was woofing down burgers and fries (maybe it was something else, but whatever it was, it was a lot of food); her hair was disheveled and quite greasy looking; her face was puffy; and she wasn’t wearing any makeup. Plus, it looked like Kirstie was sweating, but then, I imagine woofing down all that food was quite physically exerting.

Yet, as I scanned the photos of poor Kirstie, I found myself wondering why we humans are so fascinated by the lives of celebrities, for if we weren’t, the tabloids and shows like Entertainment Tonight would go belly up instead of raking in millions a year, and why we “commoners” seem to derive an almost malicious delight from seeing the rich and famous at their worst. Is it perhaps because we like knowing that underneath all that fame, all that glamour, and all that money, they are merely human? And since they’re human, they too are prone to failure?

Hmm, I thought as I returned the tabloid to the rack. Then again, are celebrities really just like the rest of us? After all, if I gained, lost, and then regained 100 pounds, would my picture be splashed all over the covers of tabloids and magazines? Would anyone care if I drove through the take-out lane at Burger Doodle and ordered a dozen cheeseburgers, ten gigantic bags of fries, and six milkshakes? Would my weight be the headline on countless websites? Would Oprah invite me to come visit her show and cry on her shoulder as we commiserated over the travails of weight reduction? Would some television producer pay me an astronomical sum of money to star in a show called “Fat Writer”? I don’t think so. And that says it all. The rich and famous are different. Moreover, they invariably gain even more wealth and fame by failing.