Navigation Salon Salon People email print
Arts & Entertainment
Books
Comics
Health & Body
Media
Mothers Who Think
News
.People
Politics2000
Technology
- Free Software Project
Travel & Food
_______
Columnists

- - - - - - - - - - - -


Salon People is sponsored by Lexus

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Also Today

For a full list of today's Salon People stories, go to the People home page.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Search Salon


  
Advanced Search  |  Help

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Salon Columnists
Follow these links for the most recent column by:
Susie Bright
Robert Burton, M.D.
Joe Conason
Sean Elder
David Horowitz
Garrison Keillor
Anne Lamott
Greil Marcus
Joyce Millman
Camille Paglia
Amy Reiter
Mary Roach
Scott Rosenberg
Ruth Shalit
Michael Sragow
Virginia Vitzthum
Sarah Vowell
Cintra Wilson
Burt Wolf

+ Columnists' schedule

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon People

People Feature
Swimming through the looking glass
In which onetime movie mermaid Esther Williams turns on, meets the man in the mirror, drops out.

By Lorenzo W. Milam
[10/18/99]

Rogues' Gallery
Lawsuits, flamingos and the spin doctor bombs
No "cheesy, sleazy, one-night stand behavior" for Sharon Stone; PR from the Unabomber: I may be a killer, but I'm no kook!

By Douglas Cruickshank
[10/16/99]

People Feature
The kid's alright
Harmony Korine strikes a dissonant chord with grown-up America.

By Daniel Kraus
[10/16/99]

Nothing Personal
Four score and seven votes ... tops
The "higher consciousness candidate" on calling dead presidents, the IQ of corpses and insect diplomacy. Plus: Gary Coleman, plaything of the press?

By Amy Reiter
[10/15/99]

People Feature
To hell with curfew
That's no gang of thugs terrorizing midnight's mean streets, it's a congregation of God's children reclaiming souls on the swing shift.

By Carina Chocano
[10/15/99]

Complete archives for People

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -




Reiter

Sad moms scarf Jif
This is Marie Osmond off drugs; music lovers to Nancy Kerrigan: "Why you?"; and Mark Harmon, potty mouth. Plus: Mare and Rho return!

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Amy Reiter

Oct. 18, 1999 | She's a little bit country, and a little bit bummed. In an upcoming issue of TV Guide, Marie Osmond reveals that there's one sad, sad lady behind that smiley, smiley face.

Osmond says she first found herself in an "incredibly dark place" after the birth of her seventh child, Matthew. It hit her one night in the kitchen. "I remember opening up the refrigerator and the cupboard, thinking nothing is here," she recalls. "I opened up a jar of peanut butter and ate it with a spoon and it was at that point I think I started to go into the depression." (The Skippy done her in.)

Down, down, down she spiraled -- then she just took off on her own. "I basically gave the baby to the babysitter, gave her the credit card, got in my car and just really felt that my kids would be better off if they did not have a mother," she tells the magazine, "and I just left, never thinking I would come back, not really knowing where I was going or what I was doing."

Her husband, Brian Blosil, managed to reach her on her cell phone and talk her into pulling over and checking into a hotel. And when she returned several days later, the doctor put her on Zoloft -- but only briefly. "I couldn't handle it," she says of the anti-depressant. "Not only did it take away the low, it took away all the joy."

Osmond says she still struggles against the darkness daily. That "little bit of music in her soul" sounds pretty bleak. Maybe Donny could lend her his lucky purple socks.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

The Magic Bus is rollin' on gold

"We're such tarts, we're very expensive tarts. Even Bill Gates couldn't afford us."

-- Roger Daltrey on the Who's decision to perform later this month at a corporate event in Las Vegas for an undisclosed sum.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

The ice lady sings

Here's an album that's sure to sell out faster than you can say "Why meee?" -- a compilation of figure-skating music called "Reflections off the Ice: A Musical Tribute to Skating," featuring a single sung by none other than ice princess Nancy Kerrigan.

Kerrigan's dance tune was sent out to radio stations last week, but Ms. Frosty says she recorded the bonus track just "for fun." She has no intention of forfeiting her ice time for a career in music.

"I don't expect everybody to like it," she recently told the press. "I'm not trying to be Barbra Streisand or something."

Babs'll be so relieved.

- - - - - - - - - - - -




Amy Reiter

Amy Reiter's column appears daily on the People site, Monday through Friday.

+ Biography
+ Archives


Got a hot tip? Tell Amy!



Careful, Ms. Rivers. You might break a nail

"She's on her way through here, honey, and then it's outta here. Hillary's going through the state so fast that her campaign button has the back of her head on it."

-- Giuliani supporter Joan Rivers, taking a shot at the first lady in the New York Daily News.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Juicy bits

Matt Drudge is reporting it, so it must be true. According to Friday's Drudge Report, Ken Starr feels mighty sorry for a certain tape-recorder-wielding little lady and is doing his best to make sure she's emotionally provided for once he leaves the Office of the Independent Counsel. "She came to us, and she risked her well-being for us," Drudge, who maintains he once saw Ken and Linda hug, says Starr told one of his deputies. "We must not, indeed we will not, let her down." Uh, could you speak into microphone, Mr. Starr?

They say "shit happens." And now they say it on prime-time TV, or at least Mark Harmon does. As Dr. Jack McNeil, he belted it out loud and proud on "Chicago Hope." By letting the epithet pass -- for purposes of "artistic truthfulness," according to the Associated Press -- CBS has done what no other network TV station has done before. But, warns network spokesman Chris Ender, "Clearly this is not something happening on a weekly basis. This is an isolated incident. It's not a sign or a signal that CBS is loosening its standards." Fuck no.

So much for saying aloha to the new millennium, mates. Michael Jackson has canceled his millennial concerts in Australia and Hawaii in order to concentrate on recording a new album. Well, he couldn't very well blame it on Debbie and the kids.

Guess they couldn't get Vincent Price's niece's cousin's son. Edgar Allan Poe's great-great nephew, Edgar Allan Poe, will appear on an upcoming episode of "Sabrina, the Teenage Witch" as the ghost of his namesake. It's Poe's TV debut. Will he do it again? A little bird tells me "Nevermore."

So, did Mary Richards make it after all? And how did old Rhoda fare? Mary Tyler Moore and Valerie Harper are teaming up on a TV movie that catches up with Mary and Rho. TV Guide reports that Mary is a widow working as a "lowly segment producer" at a TV station and coping with a daughter who has dropped out of NYU to pursue a career in stand-up comedy. Rhoda, meanwhile, is a twice-divorced mother, whose daughter, pre-med at Columbia, hates her. Geez, what would Mr. Grant say?
salon.com | Oct. 18, 1999

 

- - - - - - - - - - - -

About the writer
Amy Reiter is a staff writer for Salon People. For more columns by Amy Reiter, visit her column archive.

Table Talk
No Rhoda? Deconstruct TV Guide's 50 greatest characters list.

Sound off
Send us a Letter to the Editor

Send e-mail to Amy Reiter

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Print this story  Get a printer-friendly version

Email this story  E-mail a friend about this article

Backflip This Story  Backflip this article to find it again

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Search Salon


  
Advanced Search  |  Help

 
Illustration by Zach Trenholm


 

Salon | Search | Archives | Contact Us | Table Talk | Ad Info

Arts & Entertainment | Books | Comics | Life | News | People
Politics | Sex | Tech & Business | Audio
The Free Software Project | The Movie Page
Letters | Columnists | Salon Plus

Copyright © 2000 Salon.com All rights reserved.