What Is A MAT Girl?

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When I am writing, I will often enter a kind of zone where I'm not actually thinking about what I'm writing. I'm able to produce a stream of conscious that goes directly from the abstract idea in my head to letters on the keyboard without the usual translation step I have to perform. It is almost a meditative state and much of my best writing happens this way.

There is a phenomenon that I have noticed when I am in this space. As a matter of routine when I am writing something for publication, every sentence that I finish, I read it back before I go on to write the next one. Sometimes, when I am in that stream of consciousness mode, I will read back the sentence I've just written and what I said will shock me, and I'll think, “Wait a minute, is that true?!?”.  Usually, not only are these things I find myself shocked that I said true, but they are very important revelations.

One of the major themes of the book that I am working on is that we don't respect entertainers enough, and in particular that we don't respect beautiful young women in entertainment enough. Years ago, a person that I thought of then as good friend did something that impacted me profoundly. Though I eventually had to come to grips with the fact that this person had too many inexcusable character failings for me to continue to be friends with him, what he did nonetheless was a good thing and made a tremendous difference in my life.

It was during the period after the failure of my movie project, a failure for which he was in part responsible.  I was feeling very down on myself, and I had talked about some of my struggles and frustrations to him in an email. He responded with a message where he listed many of the extraordinary things that I had done in the decade that we had known each other, including some things that I'd forgotten about, or never gave myself credit for. At the time, it was the exact medicine that I needed.

In the book that I am working on about the actress that I saw in Las Vegas, I was writing a similar impassioned declaration of her accomplishments, and I wrote, “She was a millionaire when she was twelve!”. I read it back, and thought, “Wait a minute, that's amazing!” In the case of this particular actress, it may not be literally true, but that isn't the point. There are a great many girls in entertainment who literally were millionaires when they were twelve years old, not because they inherited it, or were given it, or won it in a lawsuit. They worked for it. 

I've always known there were a lot of child stars and that entertainment work pays well, but I'd never really thought about the significance of that accomplishment--to be a millionaire, by virtue of your own professional labor, at twelve years old.  That was the revelation. I started to think about all these young entertainers as a group, the actresses especially, I began to realize that they had a lot in common with each other and with me. So I wrote a chapter in the book entitled “Millionaires At Twelve” (M.A.T.) and I created from that a name for this group, The MAT Girls.

Once I realized that this represented a distinct special group in society, I started to think more and more about what this meant, and I recognized that, unlike a lot of the child stars of the past who were being almost forced into entertainment work by stage parents, today's crop of young stars were mostly the masters of their own destiny. They directed their own careers and lives, and I think this is a big reason why so many of them went on to build wildly successful careers as adults, unlike child stars of the past who so often burnt out and left entertainment. This train of thought led to some profound changes in how I see myself and the world...

For years, the person that I most admired and wanted to meet was Mark Zuckerberg. As someone who was a smart and ambitious kid, I'd dreamt of being in a position like Mark. As a kid, I expected to be doing big and important things as soon as I entered adulthood if not before. I dreamed of doing it. Mark did it.

While I think we all agree that in recent years, Facebook has gone on the rails, when I first started using it in 2009, it was a revelation. I thought, and I still believe, that it is one of the most important pieces of technology ever created, one that has already impacted human society in important positive ways, and has the potential to have an even much greater impact if it can get back on track. I still believe this, but Facebook needs to make changes. When I saw The Social Network, I came away from it believing that Mark and I would have a lot to talk about, and a lot of projects that we might be interested in working on together. Beyond that, the fact that he is Jewish and I relate to Jewish people makes me think it is even more likely that we would be on the same wavelength.

But as I began to think more about that Jewish actress I saw in Vegas, and the other MAT Girls, I said to myself, "Wait a minute, I admire Mark so much because he accomplished something so important at such a young age, but why do I overlook the MAT Girls?" These Jewish MAT Girls in Hollywood were millionaires and global brands when Mark was still in junior high school and, as far as I know, hadn't really done anything.

Mark went to Harvard. Natalie Portman was a millionaire at twelve, or not long after, and still Natalie went to Harvard...and she graduated. Mark had the 1600 SAT score. I don't know what Natalie scored. Very curious. I wonder if she beat me. If I had to bet right now, yes. Just to give a little insight on what a nerd I am, if you put two boxes in front of me, and you told me one contained naked pictures of every actress in Hollywood, and one contained a list of all their SAT scores, and I could have whichever one I wanted, I'd take the SAT score box. Well, actually, perhaps I'd take the nudie picture box and destroy it for them without opening it. But if they were the ones running the little game, and didn't care which one I took, I'd still rather know their SAT scores than what they look like naked.

But I started to think, all the reasons I had for admiring Mark Zuckerberg applied even more to girls like Natalie Portman and a lot of her professional colleagues. And Natalie did all of this while being a voice for her people and her (other) country, which Mark is not as far as I know. Before anyone starts speculating, it wasn't Natalie I saw in Vegas.  But a lot of my book is about her because she is one of the people in the world that I respect the most.  Possibly THE one.  But I've never met her or seen her anywhere and I'm pretty sure she's married, and I would guess that the chance of Natalie Portman marrying anybody who is not Jewish in every way, religiously, culturally and ethnically, is absolute zero. 

I say that not knowing who Natalie Portman's husband is, but if I had a million dollars, and only a million dollars, I'd go all-in he's Jewish without thinking about it.  Even if it was Natalie Portman offering the bet, I still take it!  That would be a fun Stanford vs. Harvard IQ challenge.  Natalie Portman is offering to bet me a million dollars that her husband is not Jewish.  I'd take the bet assuming it is like the conman saying "Hey, don't you want to count the money?" and assuming you won't because he offered.  If Natalie's married to a Gentile by birth, I owe her a million dollars and when I make some money, I'll pay her.

On paper, it looks like Mark Zuckerberg has a much greater social and economic value than Natalie Portman as everybody's on Facebook (except not me anymore--I'm not coming back til Mark fixes it) and he's listed as being worth tens of billions and Natalie's worth, I'd guess about $500 million. But there is a chapter in my book where I argue that if you really examine the careers of, say, Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson, they actually have a greater positive economic impact than Mark has had. How?

As is the case with the heads of the other tech giants, Mark's net worth is based mostly on the value of Facebook stock, which is speculative given that Facebook hasn't yet made enough money to justify its market cap. Facebook is not like Microsoft or Amazon that have real products that they sell. It is a service company, essentially. So there are a million things that could practically happen where the value of Facebook stock could plummet overnight, and Mark might be in the same economic zone as Natalie Portman in the morning.

Plus, you have to subtract all the economic drain caused by Farmville and all of Facebook's other time-wasting applications from an analysis of Mark Zuckerberg's economic impact. And what the bigger number: the number of people on Facebook, or the number of people who have been influenced by a Natalie Portman movie? Before you think that's an easy calculation, remember she was in the Star Wars franchise.

So I started to reevaluate the fact that the founders of the tech giants were the people I thought were my contemporary heroes. I still admire Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Sergey Brin and Larry Page who were Stanford contemporaries of mine and its really cool to think that twenty-five years after we were walking around the same college campus together, I'm posting this on the platform that they created. I still have ideas for all of their companies that I think they would be very interested in. But I realized, the group that I relate to even more, the group with whom I feel I have even more in common, are not the Tech Boys, but the MAT Girls. My book explains all the reasons why.

I had the idea that I would like to create a Millionaires At Twelve clothing line centered around t-shirts bearing images of iconic MAT Girls with the caption, “If Boys Are So Smart, How Come We Were...MILLIONAIRES AT TWELVE”.  I saw a store called Justice which sells clothes for young girls, a store that at least their sign looks like it is a company that I might want to support.  Justice and Love.  If you like the idea and you're in a position to make it happen, get in touch with me.  I'm just like Mark Zuckerberg: I don't really care about money except as a resource to make good things happen.  He always used to say that.  I don't know if that is still his position.

The licensing fees from use of the images of the MAT Girls would be a little gift to some of the earlier generation child actresses whose adult careers didn't pan out or who got screwed out of their money by unscrupulous parents and didn't get to pile up hundreds of millions like a lot of the 21^st century MAT Girls. I think this would be a superior alternative to the “I Make Boys Cry” shirts I always used to see young girls wearing, which always disturbed me. But they weren't lying—a lot of girls have made me cry.

Just as my admiration for Jewish women is not to the exclusion of Jewish men, my admiration for the MAT Girls is not to the exclusion of the MAT Boys. Macaulay Culkin and Haley Joel Osment are like the Michael Jordan and LeBron James of child acting. Hell, LeBron James is a MAT Boy himself, and one of the people in public life I respect the most.  Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Wahlberg are two of my favorite actors, and Justin Timberlake may be my favorite guy working in entertainment today.  I think both Joseph Mazzello and Elijah Wood deserved Best Supporting Actor nominations for Radio Flyer over Jaye Davidson for The Crying Game. I've never seen Mr. Saturday Night, but perhaps I would say they both should have been nominated. There are no other slots given the iconic Hackman, Nicholson and Pacino performances that filled the other three nominations that year. 

But I've always been more feminine than masculine in many ways, and so I've actually found myself relating more to female characters in movies and to women in life. And interestingly, there are a lot more MAT Girls than MAT Boys and the girls have a much better success rate at establishing good careers as adults. My book explores some of the reasons why this is true.

It is generally accepted in this society that girls mature faster than boys, which would partially explain why there are more wildly successful young girls in entertainment than young boys. But there is a follow-up question that nobody ever asks, because the answer is a devastating indictment of our society...

If girls mature faster than boys, but yet we are living in a male-led society, at what point does the maturing rate of women slow down or the maturing rate of men accelerate, to where men catch up? The answer is, it never happens! As a rule, women are smarter and more mature than men from the cradle to the grave, and should be the ones in the leadership position in our society. I realize that this is a controversial blowtorch of an opinion that even a lot of women would disagree with, certainly if the 2016 election returns are any indication. But that is what I believe, not as a product of any abstract theory or philosophical dogma, but as a product of my own life experience and observation of the world.

I am a movie person and movies have had a profound impact on my life. But more than that, I realized within the last year that there is a specific, relatively small group of actors and filmmakers who have influenced me greatly.  This group of people have a tight network of professional and social interrelationships, and interestingly, I have crossed paths with many of them at different points in my life even though most of them I did not meet.  This too is one of the main themes of my book. As I started to examine the MAT Girls as a group, I realized that the list included many of the actresses that had impacted me not just through roles that they had played, but the way they had lived their lives. And I also realized that a great many of those girls were Jewish.

There is a reason why so many of the MAT Girls in the movie industry are Jewish and it is attributable to more than just the fact that there are a lot of Jewish people working in entertainment. There are particular skills that Jewish kids have that are important in acting and in navigating a career in Hollywood.

When I moved to San Diego, which I think has the third largest Jewish community in America after New York and LA, I noticed something. Jewish kids are awesome. They are like little adults. Their behavior patterns are completely different from those of Gentile kids. I love children generally, but we know they can occasionally be a pain in the ass, especially at certain ages.  Jewish children are different, and I believe this is because Jewish parents actually educate their children instead of intellectually crippling them in a misguided effort to try to protect them from the ugly realities of the world the way Gentile parents, especially middle class and affluent ones, so often do.

I often marvel and then chuckle when I pass young Jewish kids on the street or in a store.  It is not uncommon that I'll see a couple of Jewish kids as young as eight or ten walking along talking and I'll hear them, and it looks and sounds like an adult conversation.  The hilarious scene with the two kids in Airplane! is not that much of an exaggeration of how a lot of Jewish kids are.  You almost never see Jewish kids running around like chickens with their heads cut off bumping into people and things.

So Jewish children have the maturity to handle working in a adult world in a demanding high-stakes job much more often than Gentile children do. In addition, there is a particular skill to acting that just so happens to be a natural part of at least American Jewish culture...

There is a trick to film acting, and I don't understand why it is true, but in order for dialogue to sound natural, actors must enunciate more precisely than you would do in a normal conversation with a live person. It may be because a part of your brain is focused on watching the images and thus, the words have to be a little more emphasized or else you won't hear them clearly, because in a normal live conversation you don't have as much brain bandwidth going to image processing, as evidenced by the phenomenon that when you look away from someone who is talking to you to look at something eye-catching, you lose track of what they are saying. That's just a theory off the top of my head.

But this has a delicate balance. It is a tightrope act. If the words are TOO precisely spoken, it comes off as mechanical and false, which is often the sole factor that causes an audience to perceive an acting performance as being a bad one. So it is a very slight and precise increase in enunciation, not a dramatic one. There are many movies that have failed for this reason alone, especially urban films. One such example is South Central, which I believe from a plot and character perspective is superior to the two highly acclaimed south central LA urban life movies of the same era, Boyz N the Hood and Menace II Society, and I think Glenn Plummer's performance is excellent in terms of tone and emotion. But all the actors overdid the always-necessary increase in speaking precision so that it comes off sounding to most Black people like "Shakespeare N the Hood".

But the reason that this necessary skill makes Jewish people particularly suited to acting is that, for some reason, a large percentage of American Jewish people enunciate much more clearly when they are speaking than most Gentiles do. It's funny because most of the time, I do it too. In my case, it is because of my mother, who is a Black woman from Houston, Texas who picked cotton as a little girl, finished high school at 15, and graduated college with a degree in medical technology...in 1959.  It's no surprise I love these MAT Girls. My mom's basically one of them.

My mother would always, and I mean always, correct any error in grammar or pronunciation she heard me make.  I mean, I've known how to speak perfectly proper English as long as I can remember, but even when I inadvertently left out a word or used commonplace but technically incorrect phrases, she would correct me and continued to do this until my early 30s when she finally loosened up...or perhaps I finally got to the point where I spoke to her standard all the time.

I don't know where it comes from with Jewish people. I've speculated that it may be something picked up in Hebrew school, because it isn't every Jewish person I know. Obviously, you have a large group of Jewish people from the northeast who talk with a heavy New York accent and sound relatively like New York Gentiles.  But the way a lot of Jewish people naturally talk is the way you need to talk to sound the right way on video. This is also a big part of the reason why there are so many Jewish television news reporters. It's not a Jewish conspiracy.  They have a skill that makes them more qualified for the job.

When girls talk that way, it’s so cute. I don't get my news from television, but I'll sometimes watch a cable news station for a while just to wait for a Jewish girl reporter to come on so I can listen to how cute she sounds. There is this possibly Jewish college radio DJ, Rynn Miller, who uses the the name DJ Zomb-E, which is odd given her apparently personality traits and the type of music she's plays.  She lost a leg to an illness and by her own (accurate) description looks like a Muppet, but she has literally the cutest voice I've ever heard and that makes her as smoking hot as Scarlett Johansson to me.  There are Gentiles girls that talk that way, but a lot of things she's said on her show, combined with the voice and the fact there are some Jewish Millers, I'd take the bet she is.

So this too is one of the major topics in my book, the fact that if you look at the fields where Jewish people tend to excel through non-antisemite eyes, you'll see that Jewish people excel in these fields not because of some dopey conspiracy theory, but because of specific skills and talents that Jewish people tend to have more often than Gentiles.  And irony of all ironies, a lot of these skills and talents that give Jews an advantage over Gentiles in certain fields arose out of the strengths Jewish people developed fighting against antisemites, and now the antisemites are mad at them for benefiting from the lessons that surviving antisemitism taught them.  It's like locking someone in a gym and then being mad that they come out stronger than you.

But that is what has been the primary thing on my mind these last several months, the Jewish MAT Girls I admire, and how they have influenced me. Who exactly is the group of girls that I'm talking about?  The term MAT Girl is not literal.  I'm not really educated on what star child actors and singers get paid.  So I established my official definition of a MAT Girl as a girl who had firmly established a career in the top levels of entertainment before she was eligible to get a driver's license.  I've got my favorites, but everyone who's in the club is in it.

Here is a list of some of the Jewish MAT Girls that have been the most important influences in my life. In the order that I became aware of their work...

Jennifer Connelly, Christina Applegate, Winona Ryder, Mayim Bialik, Natalie Portman, Thora Birch, Alicia Silverstone, Gwyneth Paltrow though she's on the borderline of qualification as far as the age when she started working and since only her father is Jewish she isn’t regarded as Jewish by a lot of Jews (I don’t know how she identifies), but I can't leave her out because she has been in too many of the movies that have been the most influential in my life...Sarah Michelle Gellar, Scarlett Johansson, Evan Rachel Wood, Ariel Winter, and my nominee for the cutest girl who has ever existed on earth, Amanda Seyfried.

There are a bunch of girls that maybe should be on that list, most notably Jennifer Lawrence, and Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, but I don't know for sure if they are Jewish or not. This is one of the great things about being Jewish.  To know if someone you see is Jewish or not, you actually have to talk to them.  This is part of what keeps the community together, and keeps Jewish values strong and intact.

There are others that would be near the top of it, and I know they are Jewish, but they were a little later starting their careers, most notably Rachel Weisz who played the movie character I would most like to marry in The Mummy movies. Jewish culture emphasizing education as it does, a lot of my favorite Jewish actresses went to college before embarking on their careers, which shrinks the Jewish MAT Girl club.

When I was at Stanford, we had heard Alicia Silverstone was coming, and I was SUPER excited about that.  I'd have definitely gone and knocked on her dorm room door, but I guess she decided against college.  Since it was only a few years later, it makes me wonder now if Natalie Portman was referring to Alicia Silverstone when she said, "I'd rather be smart than be an actress" when challenged about her decision to put her career on the back burner to go to Harvard.  Perhaps an instance of Jewish girl on Jewish girl crime?  Hmm...

I'd love to do a Jewish MAT Girl Jeopardy! Tournament where I host and write the questions...That'd be the most fun I've ever had in my life.  I wonder what odds they'd put up at the sports books in Vegas on that?  Natalie would have to be the favorite, yes? Oh wait, maybe Mayim Bialik.  Betting on those two to make the final show would be like betting on the Golden State Warriors to make the NBA Finals over the last several years. Maybe it would be more fun (certainly more politically correct) to let all the MAT Girls participate, but it would look kind of bad for Gentiles if its all Jewish girls by the quarterfinals.  Well, if Jodie Foster wanted in, I'm sure she could prevent that.  And if these rumors I keep hearing about Jessica Simpson are true...

I have a special admiration for Jewish girls, but I really love all the MAT Girls, and the first two that caught my attention back when we were all kids were not Jewish I don't think: Drew Barrymore and Brooke Shields.  Brooke Shields was definitely first because of one particular scene in The Blue Lagoon. Jennifer Connelly may have been before Drew as it was Firestarter not E.T. where Drew caught my attention.  I didn't see E.T. until I was an adult.  I can't say for sure if I saw Firestarter or Once Upon A Time In America first as they came out around the same time.

But there there is a similarly long list of presumably Gentile MAT Girls in entertainment that I admire, and who have had an impact on me through idea their work or their life or both: Drew Barrymore, Brooke Shields, Alanis Morissette, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Anna Paquin, Juliette Lewis, Dakota Fanning, Janet Jackson, Raven-Symone, Demi Lovato, Hilary Duff, Jessica Simpson, Ashlee Simpson, Beyonce Knowles Carter who I always forget is a MAT Girl too because she looked older than she was when she arrived on the scene, Lindsay Lohan, Angelina Jolie (borderline because she had that one child role with her dad which almost doesn't count but really didn't start working regularly until she was older but she gets a special exception for her humanitarian work and having been married to maybe my favorite actor...two of my favorite actors actually because I like Billy Bob Thornton a lot too), Kylie Jenner who I'd rather see her financial statements than see her in Playboy (I think all her sisters are too far past the age cutoff for when they started working but I like them too), Jodie Foster, borderline MAT Girl Heather Graham, Miley Cyrus, Elizabeth Berkley, Tiffani Thiessen, Lark Voorhies, Chloe Grace Moretz, would-be star of my movie All-Nighter Tatyana Ali, my fellow kidney failure survivor Selena Gomez...and that nuclear smoking hot insufferable little egomaniac genius Taylor Swift.

These lists are far from exhaustive, and there are so many actresses and entertainers who are amongst my favorites and have influenced me with their work, but finished high school before they started their careers. And there are so many of these girls that have done great work, that I just flat out forget about them sometimes, but then I'll see something and I'll remember, and that's why that list keeps growing.  There are probably some actresses who I love that had child careers that I'm just not aware of, for example, I didn't know until recently Amanda Seyfried started her modeling career when she was 11.  I only became aware of her when Red Riding Hood came out, and thought she was a newcomer then because I didn't think I could have seen her anywhere before and not noticed.

The list of all the women in entertainment who have had such an impact on me is very very long. The reason the MAT Girls are special is that I've realized over the last year that there are many unusual things that have been a part of my life experience that would have likely been a part of theirs as well, and many of them, I watched them on the screen when we were kids, and have found that I've crossed paths with them again and again later in life. Some where I didn't even realize it.  For example, I had been listening to Alanis Morissette for a long time before I found out she was on You Can't Do That On Television, which was one of my favorite shows as a kid.  Or watching Jennifer Connelly in Once Upon a Time in America when I was a little kid, and then I get to Stanford and end up living with a guy who was on the track team with her.

There may be some people who would look at this list and think that my motivation in writing this is has some connection to the fact that I am a single man looking to get married, and right at the moment a poor one, and these are all beautiful rich girls. First of all, most of these girls are married with children.

And the interesting thing is that most of them are married to men who I greatly respect and admire, which further reassures me that there is something real that I have identified that bonds this particular group together and that connects with me.  Angeline Jolie was married to Brad Pitt and he's perhaps my favorite actor.  Alanis Morissette and Scarlett Johansson were both with Ryan Reynolds and I greatly enjoy his work.  Beyonce is married to Jay-Z and he's one of my favorite artists and someone I respect.  Jennifer Lawrence and Rachel Weisz were both with Darren Aronofsky who is one of my favorite directors. 

So I like a lot of these girls' husbands as much as I like them.  When I say Thomas Sadoski's wife is the cutest girl on earth, I would hope and expect he would say, "I know, right?".   He should be giving the Lou Gehrig retirement speech every day!  If these guys couldn't handle people talking about how beautiful and awesome their wives are, they wouldn't be able to handle the pressure of being married to them.

Plus, most of these Jewish actresses are married to Jewish guys, and I like Jewish guys almost as much as I like Jewish girls.  I try to avoid allowing myself to have romantic or sexual thoughts about married or attached women period, so I certainly respect the marital bonds of people like these.  So I hope none of them does my career like Robert De Niro did that kid in Casino.  But I've got the good sense and etiquette not to do what he did.

I type “married with children” and I realize I need to go back and add Christina Applegate to the list.  And I just have to stop here because, I went to check to make sure Christina Applegate was Jewish before I put her on the list, and I google and find an IMDB page, “The 150 Most Beautiful Jewish Actresses”, and I started scrolling through the list, and its almost like a list of all my favorite actresses, and so many of the girls who are on it, I actually thought I knew were NOT Jewish. I do some checking and find there are some girls who are actually not Jewish on the list, so IMDB needs to get on that...The wheels have really fallen off IMDB.  Jeff Bezos, will you hire me as a consultant to fix this?

But yet and still, if even half the girls on this list who I thought were not Jewish actually are, its like buying a box of six cupcakes and you open it to find eight cupcakes and a chocolate bar. I find myself laughing out loud as I scroll down and see name after name of actresses I felt bad about leaving out of my selection of my favorite group of people in society because she wasn't Jewish, and I know that the belief I've arrived at is right because I know that there has to be something to the fact that the percentage of my favorite actresses that are Jewish is higher even than the percentage of actresses who are Jewish anyway.

But I'm not doing this to try to get dates with actresses. One of the things about Jewish girls is that they get married, so most of these Jewish girls are married already and at this point in my life I feel I would like to marry a Jewish girl. Now, I would be very interested in working for any of these girls.  If any of them (Jewish or Gentile) had an idea for a movie they wanted to do, I'd be happy to write a spec script for them for free (obviously, I want at least my Screenwriter's Guild minimum if it gets made).  Maybe there are already established screenwriters in Hollywood who will do that for them, though.

But if dating a woman in entertainment was my goal, I would have pursued that when I was in my twenties on hiatus from Stanford working for entertainment tax lawyers at ground zero of the TMZ in Century City and didn't have any real personal baggage yet.  And I probably wouldn't have dropped out of my own movie production company over a matter of principle. I'd have at least hung around long enough to ask Tatyana Ali if Karyn Parsons was single, or if she was still in touch with Rose McGowan and Rebecca Gayheart.

So this isn't about that, even though all of these girls are sooooo cute! The outcome I would hope for would be to be friends and professional colleagues with them and their husbands, and tutor their kids so they don't have to share the misfortune of Lori Laughlin.  This is much more a job application than a personal ad.  I've got a personal to that actress from Vegas coming up, but this is not that.  It's just me finally having the courage and the insight to tell it like it is about myself.

The average person has no idea of all the challenges that come along with a relationship with a woman with a successful entertainment career. There is a reason why entertainers usually date each other. There are unique pressures that exist in their lives that most people don't relate to. If you notice, even when women in entertainment date successful businessmen, who are also rich and have a lot of responsibility and are in public positions, it usually doesn't work out, because while they are rich and famous, its not the same. Nobody knows or cares what Mark Zuckerberg does in his personal life, but when you are an entertainer, your life is a part of your brand, and so every single thing you do publicly is scrutinized and can impact your career.

I relate to some of the pressures entertainers face because my father was somewhat famous, and he was a preacher so that meant that people cared what he did in every aspect of his life, and it even spilled over to me, because in the church, people judge pastors based on the conduct of their children. But obviously, my father's fame, certainly during my lifetime, was nothing like what entertainment stars of today must deal with. It's not my goal to date a celebrity (if not that one girl), though I don't go for reverse-discrimination.

What is reverse-discrimination in this instance? If I meet a girl that I really like, but she, say, has a disability, I'd be foolish to refuse to explore it for that reason, unless it was a disability that led to some insurmountable practical incompatibility with me.  Hell, if that college radio DJ I mentioned wasn't a lesbian, she might be the next girl I'd like to talk to about dating if this actress I saw in Vegas isn't interested. I wouldn't discriminate against a working class girl because she had a disability if I liked her. It would be reverse-discrimination if I meet one of these MAT Girls and she wants to go out and I refuse to even consider it because she has the disability of fame.

And fame is exactly that, a disability. You can't go to the store. You can't go to the beach. You can't go to the park. Some of these people can't even take a commercial flight. Their kids can't go to regular schools. That's what a disability is, when you can't do things the average person can do. I heard a horrifying story about Brad Pitt and one of his former wives, I'm not sure if it was Jennifer or Angelina. But reportedly, they went to shop for furniture and so many people crowded around the store that the manager had to call the police to safely escort them out. Think about that. It's like living in a horror movie. We all know how Princess Diana died, and the crazy things people were doing to try to get pictures of Suri Cruise. This is a big part of why so many of the hugest celebrities are moving to Europe because Europeans don't do stupid shit of this kind as much, the Princess Diana situation notwithstanding.

I'd prefer to have a girl I can go out to dinner with and not see pictures of that dinner in Us Magazine. I'd prefer to be with a girl who can go to Target and the mall with me. I'd prefer to be with a girl that I'm never going to read about the challenges in my relationship in the checkout line at the grocery store. And I think about some of the stuff I see on those magazines and I think of Hank Azaria in The Contender ("I'm a husband FIRST and I don't tolerate that kind of talk!"). I mean, I saw a cover on one of these rags saying the royal family was plotting to murder Meghan Markle.  Man, if I was Prince Harry, his mother having died a tragic death and people saying the same stupid shit, I'd have been on a plane to America to fuck somebody up.  And from my perception of Harry, whoever did that did not get away with it.  I was half-tempted to try to end someone's career over that myself.  It's a hard hard life to have to put up with this kind of thing.  It doesn't matter how much money and privilege you have.

But with all that said, there is one Jewish MAT Girl who I believe is single at the moment, the actress I saw in Las Vegas, who I'd love to marry...if she'll have me. She's a special case, so for her, I'd accept being forced into a life in the spotlight. It's fine. But failing that, my second option isn't another woman in entertainment. There are so many adorable Jewish girls in San Diego...

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