What’s it all about, anyway?

For the past few years, since I resigned from the world of whoring for mortgage rates, I have been helping my dear friend get fancy homes ready for famous people who flock to the mountains for Christmas and New Year’s. It is a bizarre gig that flummoxes me every year. On the one hand it pays well, on the other hand it is just too weird for words. Why can’t these people decorate their own damn trees? Are they too fancy to hang ornaments?
But there are a few perks about the job- nothing tangible, just things that I would not normally get to hear or see in my everyday life at The Manor. My friend has been helping this one fellow for over 30 years, and so from time to time, she yaks about the things she has seen and done. She’ll drop a name about a superstar who did this or said that, or who went to rehab but showed up on New Year’s Eve high as anything, or who is supposed to be straight but always travels with an entourage of blindingly handsome young men. As we are hanging garland among works of art that are so rare they should be in a museum, it all takes on an even better gleam for me. It is better than anything in People magazine or anything on the E! channel. It cracks me up to know that these weird people that grace the covers of magazines are really just people: their farts stink, their hearts break and they say -at least according to my friend- some pretty silly stuff.
When it all comes down to it, none of it really means much of anything, but it is amusing. For example, the other afternoon one of the lawyers for the famous fellow called in a complete tizzy. Sin of all sins, the famous fellow’s name and address are currently listed in one of the local phone directories. It is the phonebook that nobody really reads, not Dex. Plus, we live in a small area. Everybody knows where so and so and such and such lives, anyway. But from all of the ensuing phonecalls and drama you would think that it was something akin to Bush actually finding those WMD over yonder. My poor friend spent the majority of the afternoon fielding phone calls and rolling her eyes. She tried to tell the secretary that the phone book company would not give a damn what she had to say. She then told the accountant the same thing and one of the lawyers the same thing. Did anybody listen? No. And what are they going to do? Go out and track down every phone book and demand the owner return it?
The next drama will come when the West Coast assistant requests orchids be placed all over the houses and the nanny demand poinsettas instead. I have witnessed this fight for the past two years. Not a pretty one. I would prefer the phone book drama instead.