From what I hear, Chrissy Teigen has struggled with her pregnancy. In fact, I think she miscarried. A number of media types and people I know were super chagrined.
Me, I kinda shrugged my shoulders.
I mean, any time a pregnant woman loses her baby is a tragedy. But on the flip side, what are we to expect when a woman her age tries to have a child? I think she’s in her fifties, at least. The very fact they could conceive, I assume through some in vitro test tube, is a miracle of science. Am I supposed to be shocked that it didn’t take?
Her husband, John Legend, we are told, sat by her hospital bed as complications took hold. A harrowing experience, to be sure.
Wait, John Legend? The guy that butchered a John Lennon Christmas song? He’s married Chrissy Teigen? Cougar much, Chrissy?
But then I saw a picture of John Legend standing next to some young African American woman in a hospital bed. Is this a stock pohoto? Because that woman looks nothing likethe actress/model I remember from my youth.
Wait a second…
After weeks of hearing the story, I finally realized that Chrissy Teigen is NOT Cheryl Tiegs. Two ENTIRELY different people.
Chrissy Teigen is only 34 years old, which makes a lost pregnancy all the more ghastly.
Cheryl Tiegs, it turns out, is actually 73 years old. So yeah, medical science or no, she ain’t getting knocked up by a wanna-Beatle any time soon.
I’m really bad at the whole “spot the celebrity” game. It bothers Wife incessantly. I can identify a Phil Collins drumfill in a random one-hit wonder from 1987, but ask me to find the similarities in pictures of Jane Foster and Queen Amidala and I’m at a loss. There’s no way it’s the same actress in each role. I mean, the one next to Hayden Christensen is the second coming of Katherine Hepburn, while the one in the MCU is being out-acted by Kat Dennings.
At least Natalie Portman kept the same hair style in those two movies. Nobody will ever convince me that the Laura Prepon who starred in “That 70’s Show” is the same Laura Prepon who has starred in… well, pretty much everything since “That 70’s Show.” After all, the former was a redhead, while the latter has been, predominantly, a blonde. East is east and west is west and never the twain shall meet. It’s not like L’Oreal makes a compass.
But obviously visuals weren’t my main issue with Chrissy Teigen and Cheryl Tiegs. Their names are way too close together. If this was a book, it would be the mark of a bad author. For instance, I made it 80,000 words into a WIP before realizing that two of the main characters are named Richard and Robbie. It wasn’t until they were in the same scene together that I realized how annoying it will be to read sentences in which they both appear. But unlike Chrissy and Cheryl, I’ll fix that in the second draft, where I’m pretty sure Robbie will become a Willie or a Billy. What are Chrissy Teigen and Cheryl Tiegs’ excuse for not fixing that shit in post-write?
I had a similar problem the first thousand or so times Daughter watched various installments of the “Hotel Transylvania” franchise. Selena Gomez voices the daughter, Mavis, which initially made no sense to me. She seems too professional an actress to be doing cartoon voiceovers, to say nothing of slumming around with Adam Sandler and his ilk. Aside from the fact that Mavis sounds like a legitimate twenty-something. And cartoons have done a good job of making the characters have similar visual characteristics as the actors that play them. Drac’s facial expressions totally match Adam Sandler, and Johnny has Andy Samberg’s weird sideways mouth.
Speaking of which, Andy Samberg and Adam Sandler in the same movie? Was Adam Goldberg unavailable? Fortunately, I’ve watched enough “Brooklyn 99” (and “The Goldbergs”) to know the difference between them, but only because Adam Sandler is about as distinctive as it gets for a guy who went to college in the early 1990s. Bob Barker once called when I was working in the state Capitol to ask my boss to vote for a spay/neuter bill and my first response was that I loved him in “Happy Gilmore.” He said he expected “Price is Right,” because, I guess, he he figured grandmas were the primary demographic for legislative aides. Who did he think I was, Chrissy Teigen?
I’m sure it shouldn’t shock you to know that, whoever I was thinking played the voice of Mavis, it sure as hell wasn’t Selena Gomez. I finally saw a behind-the-scenes video showing the actors do the voicework and Selena Gomez, would you believe it, is actually a twenty-something who looks a bit like Mavis, her character.
The problem is that I have no idea who I thought “Selena Gomez” was referring to. I’m pretty sure this was the first time I realized Selena Gomez existed as a human being. I never explicitly thought of anyone in particular, but had the general sense of a middle-aged Latina. Perhaps Salma Hayek, because their first names have a lot of the same letters, but I kinda got a Jennifer Lopez visual in my head, which of course looks nothing like Mavis. Or Selena Gomez.
Obviously I know who J-Lo is, and her name is nowhere close to Selena Gomez. But hear me out. She played the original Selena in her biopic.
Okay, maybe you didn’t need to hear me out, cause that’s all I’ve got.
Obviously Selena Gomez isn’t that Selena, because she died long before “Hotel Transylvania.” But that at least gets me over the “Jennifer Lopez is Selena” hurdle. Add in the fact that Selena Gomez dated Justin Bieber, while J-Lo dated Alex Rodriguez, and I hate both of them. Incidentally, I thought it was Tom Brady that J-Lo dated, but a Google search told me it was the other overrated sports figure in the northeast that I stopped watching ESPN because of. And no, Salma Hayek never dated Tom Brady, either.
To be fair, unlike C. Teigen and C. Tiegs, I never explicitly thought Selena Gomez was Jennifer Lopez. I just had a general idea in my head that Selena Gomez was a fifty-something singer/actress who had been around since the mid-1990s. So maybe I really did just think she was the dead Selena.
Finally, let me head off the potential woke response of me being a typical white male who can’t distinguish between individual members of other ethnicities. Because I can’t tell white dudes apart, either.
Harry Styles is, allegedly, yet another singer and actor. Does anybody do one or the other anymore? I guess most actors stay in their lane, at least since the glory that was Eddie Murphy’s “Party All the Time,” but singers, it appears, must now become actors. I blame it on Justin Timberlake. Or Frank Sinatra. They might as well be the same person.
Not that I get them confused.
For some reason, Harry Styles pops up in my news feed from time to time. Maybe he’s dating someone? Or has some political view that he needs to inform everybody about? I’m not sure and I don’t want to google it lest I get MORE headlines about Harry Styles – I’m already suffering from a slew of Selena Gomez info since I wrote the first part of this blog post yesterday.
If I had to guess, though, I think Harry Styles is some sort of fashionista. I don’t know if that’s a gendered word. A fashionister? Or maybe fashionisto? fashionistx? As an aside, I heard someone refer to a number of major league baseball players as Latinx, which confused me because I thought we were only supposed to use Latinx to refer to a group with both Latinos and Latinas. Is Latino offensive even if it’s a group of males of Latin American origin? Of course, I’m only asking the white people this, because no person of Latin American origin uses the phrase Latinx because it makes absolutely no fucking sense in Spanish.
Sorry, where was I? Right. Harry Styles. I couldn’t figure out why Harry Styles was making headlines for things like who he was dating or his new hairstyle. I mean, even when the dude was relevant, what, twenty years ago, I would never have called him hip. Hilarious, sure, but he’s tall and lanky, a goofy body frame perfect for physical comedy and not much else.
Have you spotted my train track yet? I was thinking of Ryan Stiles, the improv actor most notable for being on every single episode of “Whose Line is it, Anyway?”, both the English (good) and Drew Carey (bad) iterations. From this mid-40s perspective, he’s the far more important and influential of the Stileses, but I’m slowly coming to realize that he isn’t the ONLY of the Stileses.
It’s tough being me sometimes. Probably even tougher being my wife.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to research the subtle distinction between Jimmy Dean and James Dean.
The Writing Wombat 