So I settled down with the Sunday newspapers the other day and was rather disconcerted to find a picture of Nicole Kidman on the cover of one of the accompanying magazines. Not that there is anything inherently disconcerting about the actress, but I stared at the photograph for a while, trying to figure out what looked wrong.
Then I saw it. Those pouty, slightly pulpy lips, as if she was recovering from having walked face-first into a plate-glass door. Evidently she, too, had succumbed to the lure of the injectable and the appeal of the scalpel, two things that seem to claim even the world's most beautiful women. (Seriously, did anyone know that Halle Berry and Salma Hayek have apparently had nose jobs?)
A couple of days later, as I was ensconced on the couch enjoying a break with The Ellen Show, along came Cher, there to promote her ongoing gig in Las Vegas. She's 62 and, yes, looks astonishingly good. Ellen DeGeneres wanted to know how she did it. This should be good, I thought: Cher - along with Joan Rivers and Michael Jackson - has probably endured more surgical procedures than all the inhabitants of the Intensive Care Unit at the Adventist combined. But she didn't really come clean, instead attributing her radiant good looks to working out.
In truth, however, there is nothing the singing diva and fabulous gay icon hasn't had done - boobs, tummy, nose, lips, face. She looks less real than the Cher doll I had as a child, which caused me to remember just how stunning she was on those televised episodes of The Sonny & Cher show in the 1970s, when, with a flick of her wrist along her shiny black hair, I had my first girl-crush.
But alas, that Cher is no more. She, along with at least half of Hollywood, is helping to keep Beverly Hills medical practices afloat at the moment.
That same night, I settled in to get my daily TMZ fix, a 22-minute show with bite-sized gossip about the people who keep tabloids and the paparazzi gainfully employed. Along came Shauna Sands, who's probably not well known outside C-list Hollywood, but still a compelling figure. The former Playboy Playmate was once married to borderline-sleazo hunk Lorenzo Lamas, with whom she has three children - something you would never guess given the size of her pelvis and the tightness of her tummy.
Sands has no qualms about the ways in which she contrives to 'look good' - that in itself being a questionable fact. She has been filmed emerging from her cosmetic surgeon's office holding ice packs to her cheek after being injected with cow udders or whatever they use. She trollops around town in dresses no bigger than the ones I put on my Barbie, and in super-high stripper shoes (even when she took her kids to a farm to pick pumpkins), all in a bid to show off that physician-shaped abdomen and gams.