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Star
Treatment
I know
that everyone has been secretly wondering how all of this has been
affecting me, so I've decided to take just a moment and address
the rampant speculation that I'm certain has been zipping back and
forth between the hand-held wireless devices of my friends and acquaintances.
Okay, fine. I want to kick them both in the nuts. Would someone please explain to me how this happened? Would someone please tell me how my two younger brothers have both managed to appear on the glossy, four-color pages of the entertainment press before I did? I want to cackle like a mad man, or just slowly slump to the floor in a corner, my hand at my mouth, failing to contain my great, wet, hiccupping sobs like Rachel Ward pining for Josh Morrow in My Stepson, My Lover on Lifetime. Instead, I eat Breyer's light ice cream bars by the box full, trying to ignore the gnawing fear in the pit of my stomach that I have become a failure by default. Since that moment as a little boy when I first witnessed Julie Andrews twirl across the Alps in a Christmas Eve network broadcast of The Sound of Music on my grandparents' television screen, I have wanted nothing more than to be a famous actor. I began picturing myself on magazine covers shortly thereafter, posing for imaginary photographers in the bathroom mirror while wearing my robes. My robes were actually big pieces of double-knit fabric that my mother had used for tablecloths until they became too stained for Sunday company and they found their way to the dress-up box. You see, when you're a fundamentalist minister's son, and there is no TV to watch in the family room, you are encouraged to read and play dress-up. And when you play dress-up, you dress up like Bible characters -- preferably "Great Men of the Bible." This was fine by me because as we all know, men in Bible times wore robes -- long, flowing robes -- especially Moses. Moses wore especially nice robes, I decided. According to the book of Genesis, when Moses was barely two years old he had been rescued from the Nile River by an Egyptian princess after his desperate mother, Jocabed, sent him floating away in a basket made of bulrushes rather than allow the Pharaoh's men to kill him along with all of the other male children born to the Hebrew slaves. The princess had fallen in love with baby Moses, and taken him to the palace to raise him as her own. I liked playing this young, sexy, late teens/early twenties Prince Moses -- tan, well-groomed, dashing about in a chariot like he owned the place, caught somewhere between bulrushes and burning bush. Then, after I tired of killing the Egyptian taskmaster who beat the Hebrew slaves too hard, I'd pretend to be Julie Andrews in a guest appearance on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. My robe would become an elegant evening gown, and Johnny and I would laugh and chat about my humble beginnings singing in bomb shelters during World War II. We'd reminisce about how Walt Disney had cast me as Mary Poppins for my ability to whistle, and then Johnny would ask me to the mic to sing "My Favorite Things" from The Sound of Music, and I would -- to thunderous applause. Shortly after watching Julie Andrews solve a problem like Maria on national television, I was given the opportunity to act on stage. When I was four years old, my father directed me in my very first play at the Calvary Bible College where he taught in Kansas City, Missouri. I played a little boy who was struck and killed by a Roman chariot while running across the street to meet Jesus. This all happened off-stage, of course. The budget for a one-act Biblical drama at the Bible College did not allow for an actual chariot, but I did have 17 lines and two costumes. Mom had sewn identical, pale green linen tunics with an emerald green trim at the neck, sleeves and hem. One of these had been distressed so that it appeared to have been on the body of a small boy who had met an untimely demise beneath pointy horse hooves and chariot wheels. I believe my mother took a cheese grater to it at one point, though I can't be sure. I do know that it had been ripped and smeared with dirt and plenty of red grease paint meant to look like blood. After the last scene in which I appeared alive, my mom and one of the college girls in the play would take me downstairs to the ladies' room and bloody me up with the same red grease paint. They also used brown stage dirt and eyeliner, smudged to look like bruises, and the occasional hematoma. The make-up always took forever to get out in the shower, but I remember thinking that it was all worth it for the gasps that we got when the college guy who played the head servant walked out with me, limp in his arms. All in all, they did a pretty good job roughing me up. I remember catching a glimpse of myself in the mirror after the transformation one night. Frankly, it was startling, and I made a mental note against death by chariot.
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My
brother, Josh, is on page 22 of last week's STAR magazine. He is
standing on a street corner in New York next to his fiancé,
a rock star, in a candid paparazzi shot, under a hot pink smudge
that reads "Couples News." 
