This whole Britney Spears meltdown is making Chernobyl look like a water leak. And just when we thought things couldn't get any worse, they did.
It was hard not to feel a little compassion when the former teen and tween fave had her kids taken away from her. And it was hard not to feel embarrassed on her behalf when she crashed and burned at the MTV awards, dancing vacantly in a sequined black bikini. And it was harder still not to think, 'What the ...?' when watching her switch back and forth between her Southern accent to a surprisingly convincing British one, as if she were Madonna's baby sister.
But lately, every time I turn on the TV or pick up a gossip rag, it's all Britney, all the time. And the news is worse than ever. In the past two weeks alone, she's been admitted to a psych ward, been dropped by her lawyers, had a former assistant extort her for money, had her affairs and control of her estate put in the hands of a father she's been at war with for years.
Now, news is emerging that a number of the paparazzi brigade that follow her all over LA are throwing in their lens caps because they think that pursuing Spears for that elusive shot is potentially dangerous to them. These are the same men who tailed Julia Roberts to her children's school, who have almost caused countless accidents outside Hollywood hotspots, who routinely get their cameras broken by an irate celeb. That they find pursuing Britney too dicey now says a lot about just how out-of-control the situation has become. There are often at least 40 or 50 of them, crushing against each other for another shot of Spears in a ratty pink wig and miniskirt, coming out of Starbucks, as if that wasn't something she did every day.
Now several of them are saying they're going to stop chasing Britney, insisting that rival photo agencies have been infiltrated by members of local gangs who are really menacing out there on the Britney trail. Honestly, you couldn't make this stuff up.
But it's also an open secret that someone in Britney's camp is often the first one to alert photographers that the wayward pop strumpet will be out and about; the word in Hollywood is that while Britney screams at and berates the photographers who pursue her, she can't live without them. (She even took up with one recently, inviting him back to her place after he had followed her around all evening, and has since been seen everywhere with him. When he started selling naked pictures of her to his outlet, she still didn't get the memo that maybe he wasn't really all that into her.)
