Candle in the Wind
12 February 2007
Last week a legend was born out of the ashes of an infamous life.
Blonde and bosomy bombshell, Anna Nicole Smith, imploded mysteriously as the lifeline from her public persona to her authentic self, disconnected permanently.
I felt sad reading of Anna Nicole’s death. I thought she was enviably gorgeous and sexy and blonde and since living in the Bahamas, very tanned and even more blonde.
It was all an illusion though.
And when fantasy collides with reality, such that the pressure to live one’s self-created façade is greater than the ability to be true to the core of who one is, then something has to give - as it did.
I can’t imagine what it would be like to stage-manage my appearance in the image of a feminine ideal that’s incongruous with who I really am inside. It would be like living a fractured fairy tale.
So why do it? Why live like that?
Presumably because men with wealth and power covet beauty in its ideal va-va-voom form, and moneyed men are ultimately vehicles to money for the women they covet.
In other words, the Anna Nicoles of this world suffer from MMFP syndrome.
They imagine that cultivating The Body, hair and face, and then attaching to the Men with Money, Fame and Power is the way to the good life.
Maybe Anna Nicole did get the man - many men in fact - the money and fame.
But it appears she had no authority over the sex-symbol image of her own creation, after all, apparently it got her good life in the end.
I wonder if the message in Anna Nicole’s premature death is something as simple as:
Be comfortable in your own skin
Live life authentically
Eventually the right bloke will turn up
Eventually the money will come
As for fame, are you kidding, I’ll take my fifteen minutes when it comes around!
As for power, Anna Nicole’s was as fragile as a candle in the wind.
That’s the nature of power - it thrives in the right conditions, but then it’s just as easily extinguished.
