Coyne - Im Your Biggest Fan

LETS CUT TO THE CHASE: TOM CRUISE IS INSANELY charismatic, so much so that you do feel as though you could maybe, kind of, possibly, convert to Scientology for him. Charlize Theron is so stunningly beautiful its hard not to reach out and touch her face just to make sure shes real and not carved out of some sort of highly rare and expensive marble thats lit from within. Kelly Ripa is hilarious and warm and bawdy and she makes you want to be her best friend or her babysitter or anything that would involve getting to call her whenever you wanted and hearing her latest outrageous story (the ones youre hearing on morning television are beyond sanitized). Cindy Crawford has no cellulitebelieve me, I stared long enough to make sure. And yes, there are stars who are so cold and aloof and rude that you want to slap them, and others who are so incredibly kind and gracious that you want to write their parents a thank-you note for raising them right.

When I tell people what I do for a living, that Im a celebrity magazine editor, these are the things that everyone wants to know. Yes, Ive met a lot of stars, from Reese Witherspoon to George Clooney, from Jennifer Lopez to Jennifer Garner (and yet not Ben Affleck, surprisingly). When it comes to the mega-famous, Ive watched them get their hair cut, change their clothes, and barely eat their meals (and Ive almost always picked up the check). None of them will remember me. Which is probably for the best. Because if they did, they would likely remember someone who, at least momentarily, acted completely thunderstruck.

I come by it honestly. Before I was a magazine editor, before I was a journalist, before I was a gossip columnist or a reporter or an intern, I was a fan. And not just any kind of fan. A super-fan. Which, if were going to be completely honest, also means I was a huge nerd.

I am an only child, and both of my parents worked full-time. After fourth grade, when I was no longer small enough to need a full-time babysitter, my nanny was the Zenith television that sat in the dining area of our apartment. The local syndicated channel showed reruns of Little House on the Prairie, followed by Facts of Life and Diffrent Strokes. You know that scene in Rain Man, where Tom Cruise is throwing the playing cards down onto the hood of the car and Dustin Hoffman can recite every single one that has fallen, and which cards should still be left? I can do that. Only not with cards. I can tell you the name of nearly every actor who was on a sitcom from the mid-eighties until today. Im not talking about Gary Coleman. Im talking about Shavar Ross, who played Dudley on Diffrent Strokes. The twins who played Carrie Ingalls? Lindsay and Sidney Greenbush. And its not as though the TV was shut off the minute my parents arrived home; throughout the 1980s, NBCs primetime lineup blared from multiple sets in our apartment. Gimme a Break!, Family Ties, The Cosby ShowI knew these people as if they were my actual friends, neighbors, and siblings. I fully believed that if I lived in a house in the suburbs Id be able to convert a space in either the attic or the garage into a full-blown apartment with skylights and a massive bathroom. I was completely prepared for an adorable cousin/suddenly orphaned tween/street urchin moppet Id never known existed to suddenly come to live with us. I mean, if these things could happen on Full House, Gimme a Break!, Growing Pains, Happy Days, and Whos the Boss?, why not in my life? Solving a problem with an elaborately choreographed lip-sync routine seemed like a fine idea: hey, it worked for the Huxtables! I could spot a Very Special Episode within the first two minutesand knew which ones to watch with rapt attention (Alex Keaton gets hooked on speed! Alex Keatons friend dies suddenly and he has to go to a shrink! Alexs uncle, aka Tom Hanks, comes to town and is a drunk! Basically, all the Family Ties VSEs were keepers) and which ones to avoid (Albert Ingallss girlfriend gets raped by a masked psychopath; poor Dudley is molested by a creepy old manwho, of course I remember, was played by Gordon Jump, best known for his work on WKRP in Cincinnati).

Years later, I carried my commitment to pop culture all the way to a new continent when, as an undergraduate at Oxford, I got my mother to ship me FedEx boxes filled with tapes of the NBC Thursday-night lineup, which at that point included Friends, Seinfeld, and ER, none of which were airing in the UK yet. Other students became popular at Oxford by being the best source of weed or pharmaceuticals; I was the sole hookup for the comedic antics of Matthew Perry. I still take credit for introducing George Clooney to an entire subset of young British women (that subset being former boarding school students who generally had two first names and two last names, like Sarah Claire Boyd-Flanders and Mary Helen Barbour-Jacket). I was obsessed with most things TV-related. My love extended, albeit with somewhat less fervor, to movies and music, yet in the same semi-psychotic way: I really liked Wham! but I worshipped George Michael. I enjoyed Dead Poets Society but Ethan Hawke was clearly meant to be my future husband. The play wasnt the thing: the star was.

The first time I actually saw a living, breathing celebrity, I was thirteen years old. It was an Off-Broadway production of a play called The Heidi Chronicles. My mother owned an advertising agency that handled the majority of the shows on Broadway, which is why I was at a feminist Wendy Wasserstein dramedy, not because I was particularly evolved for my age. (Although, thanks to my mothers job, I had perhaps been the only eight-year-old to know the lyrics to every song from