Trade war with China. Mass shootings on a weekly basis. A constitutional crisis as the "president" continues to thumb his nose at Congress. The Middle East. There are all kinds of things about which an individual could choose to lose sleep. This week I have been tossing and turning because of the possible futures of Britney Spears.
You remember Britney, don't you? She of the Mickey Mouse Club, where she hung out with a baby Justin Timberlake and a pre-hunk Ryan Gosling. The Britney Spears who sold more than twenty million copies of her second album. The young lady who signed a two-year endorsement contract with Pepsi before she turned twenty to the tune of kerjillion dollars. She appeared at the MTV Video awards not with Justin or Ryan, but with a large albino python. Her first marriage lasted fifty-five hours before it was annulled. Remarried, this time long enough to have her first child at twenty-four., subsequently photographed driving with her infant in her lap. A month after being investigated by the Los Angeles Department of Children and Family Services after her son falls from a highchair, Britney announces that she is pregnant with baby number two. Two months after the birth of her second son, she filed for divorce from husband number two. Checks into a rehab facility. Checks out the next day. Two days later, she shaved her head. Bald. She lost physical custody of her two boys a few months later. Lost visitation rights to her sons after an encounter with police. Checked into the UCLA Med School Psychiatric Ward. For a month. She appeared in an episode of Glee devoted to her and her music. In 2015 she landed a residency at the Planet Hollywood hotel in Las Vegas.
On the edge of returning to Vegas, she was hospitalized in order to get "some needed me time." And now the powers that be suggest she may never perform again.
Which would be a tragedy of some proportion. And perhaps a release for Ms. Spears who has spent almost her entire life, from age nine, in the white hot glare of superstardom. And she may not be entirely well. So I am suggesting that we let the last twenty-six years stand as her body of work and let her be. Whatever she will be.
And now back to the regularly scheduled turmoil.
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