MARKET WATCH COLUMNIST
“Your Invitation, Please?” Ellis Henican Column, Newsday, November 29, 2009
What is it about the Salahis?
These fame-seeking missiles! These low-class, high-gloss wannabes!
With a flash of moxie and a laser-focused self-promotion streak, they hijacked the national conversation from health care, climate change and Afghanistan. Suddenly, it was all about THEM!
And Door Buster Special had a meaning no one had ever imagined before. It meant Michaele and Tareq Salahi at Barack Obama’s house.
The predictable reactions are all now in. The Secret Service is embarrassed. The security experts are alarmed. And the Bravo cable network is uncomfortably trying to explain: How did a contract video crew from “The Real Housewives of D.C.” happen to follow these “reality” contestants at least as far as the White House gate?
But all that misses the lasting meaning in the pop-culture buzz. Something has changed that will never go back again. We’ve reached a new level of fame.
It isn’t just a quest for attention that motivates these two. Their thirst is not for achievement or riches, that’s for sure. It’s access and proximity and a chance to declare: “I am here. You’re not. So there.”
Last month, a family told a lie they knew would be discovered, that their 6-year-old was floating toward the heavens in a shiny balloon. Why be obscure when we can all be famous? This is Balloon Boy in Washington.
Get drunk, get naked, get whatever it takes for YouTube!
Crash a state dinner for a chance to appear on a TV show where everyone comes off as a shallow jerk anyway.
It’s not just fame for fame’s sake. It’s attention at any price at all.
And that door, as the Salahis have shown us now, is off the hinges for good.
CRASH LANDERS
1.Tiger starts his engine
2.Jon & Kate plus hate
3.Bloomberg’s 7-figure campaign bill
4.Deadbeat Dubai
5.The Salahis do Washington
CHENEY NORTH: Authorities say Robert Robar, a 52-year-old hunter from Valley Stream, somehow mistook Terry Pelton, a 40-year-old hunter from upstate Sparrowbush, for a deer. Robar’s been in the Sullivan County jail on a reckless endangerment charge as State Police quiz everyone and try to figure out how. The good news: Pelton, shot in the pelvis, survives.
WHO’S COUNTING: Of the 110 Owen Wilson/Vince Vaughn “Wedding Crashers’ Rules,” how many apply perfectly well to crashing an official state dinner at the White House. By my count, about 80. Confirm me at tinyurl.com/WHcrash.
ASKED AND UNANSWERED: Why stop with the Horoskis of East Patchogue? Any other shaky mortgages Justice Jeffrey A. Spinner would like to wipe clean? How ’bout the Henicans’? . . . Did anyone write the Black Friday headline everyone wanted to read? “No Tramplings This Year.” . . . Are sympathetic Florida golfers really calling Tiger’s vehicular chip shot a hydrant trap? . . . What is the technical term for an incumbent office holder who’s trailing by 213 votes with only 623 left to count (not counting about 500 challenged ballots)? “In a real Suozzi”? . . . Bob Sheppard’s official Yankee Stadium goodbye isn’t giving Alex Anthony any ideas, is it now? Bob is 99! Alex has at least a few good seasons left in the Citi Field announcer booth . . . Did you remember to avoid all political discussion at the Thanksgiving table? Even when Uncle Vic started laying out his reverse-birther theories? . . . Is there a Zhu Zhu Pets Index for a recovering retail economy? Must mean something when the robotic hamsters are harder to find than six-figure jobs with benefits . . . What lessons are being learned from the three car-on-bike collisions in the past six weeks? Are any? The friends and family of Ronkonkoma’s Nicholas Svercel, dead at 15, certainly hope so.
ELLIS’ HEROES OF THE WEEK
MISSOURI MILL DOGS
They flew Pet Airways. How else were they supposed to get here? After Thanksgiving dinner in Chicago, 50 puppy-mill refugees from Missouri are looking past one last stopover – at Port Washington’s North Shore Animal League – at 50 loving Long Island homes. These dogs, like so many other profit-bred animals, crave life outside a wire cage and all the caring attention only a family can provide. They’ll get it too. Because of all the publicity this cross-country rescue has generated. And because – well, that’s just the kind of people that we are.
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