Paris, Parading

 HOW OLD is Paris Hilton now? Like, maybe thirty five? Or is she, like Annette Funicello,  your prototypical eternal teenager? Well, like, whatever. No matter how hard she tries, Paris simply cannot seem to elude the harsh glare of the celebrity spotlight. Especially when she's running towards rather than away from it. Now, she's complaining, again, and law suiting, again, about her upbringing, about her time spent in a tough love boarding-reform school in Utah, to which she was kidnapped and summarily sent by Nick and Cathy Hilton as a last resort, in her chaotic teen years, in a desperate to save her life and straighten her out a bit. The allegation is that the young recalcitrant lady was disciplined a bit too hare, licked in bare rooms naked, that sort of thing, and it may well be true. Stay tuned. This reality drama, you can sense, has but barely begun. Paris, much like her immaculately groomed and mad up parents, seems to have wanted somewhat more than her allotted fifteen minutes of fame, and, like Nick and Cathy Hilton, she, like got it. Teen sex videos, her the star, the high profile glam parties, the clothing, or lack of it, the whole gamut, she ran it. The great Hilton celebrity parade stopped. She was raised that way. Raised to have no idea how clothing thrown on the floor got clean. Raised never to have heard, until early adulthood, if you can call it that, of Wal Mart. Wealth, privilege, and the never ending noble cause of getting as many people as possible to pay attention to it, were her and her parent's cause celeb. to this I can relate, because Kathy and Nick are my age, and I have often wondered how on Earth I would have raised a daughter like Paris without losing my sanity and blood pressure monitor. i wouldn't have. Praise be to Nick and Kathy. We insecure baby boomers were raised religiously with the gospel of wealth and upward mobility, and, for icing on the cake, power and prestige. We were taught, aglow on victorious post war euphoric fantasy, to take these values to heart, to worship them, and to either achieve them or applaud those who did. Hence the Hiltons, hence Paris. Since we don't change much after childhood, Paris will likely always be either running away or towards the bright lights and cameras, her parents will remain impeccably groomed and class conscious, and most of the rest of us will forever remain firmly ensconced on the sidelines, applauding it all.