Waiting Room Magazines

While waiting for a routine blood test for an entire hour in the morning, I had occasion to leaf through a whole stack of magazines, of varying vintage.

Several of them where Hello magazines, featuring the lives of royalty and, of course, of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt.  Every issue had something on Prince William and Kate and their fresh, little babies.  Attached to them there was always something about Prince Harry, who hopes to find the love of his life and have children, too, and the late Princess Diana.  We can see whom this magazine is marketed to.  Certainly it serves as a break from the bleak, violent newscasts we suffer from every day, an escape, a comfort of sorts.

Princess Diana, though gone, lives forever.  Sometimes, there were stories about the Queen and Charles and Camilla.  The Queen wears her crown.  Kate wears the Queen's jewels.  Everything is the primmest and properest ever since Downton Abbey, except when we remember that Charles was cheating on Diana with Camilla.  There were Three in the marriage, as Diana said.

But there she is, Diana, with the hands-on parenting, tobogganing down the hill with her boys.  My heart breaks for her. I can see it in her face. What did it take to put up this front for so long? What does it take to be ever so put-together for the camera, in spite of all that goes on?

When we were young, I remember my girl-friend going over a picture of Sophia Loren, and admiring many features.  Personally speaking, I am missing a gene for this sort of showmanship and preening, probably to my detriment.  Perhaps, being a bit vainer would have been a good thing.  It would have seriously never occurred to me "ooh" and "aah" over Sofia Loren.

All the royalty seems to be into having weddings, babies and "Christenings".  Nobody calls it a Baptism, in any captions.  (I have even seen Baptism pictures of Kardashians, in the Holy Land, of all places.)

Well.  I came away with the feeling that maybe it would not hurt to be a little more like them, a little bit more put together, a little bit more graceful and gracious, never mind the larger and smaller, true or untrue, intrigues that we hear about sooner or later.  Under all those fancy arrangements they are just people like you and me.