What do you do for exhaustion?
I do one of two things. I either go to sleep, or, if I don’t make it that far, I simply fall asleep. And I’ve always found that a good night’s sleep cures exhaustion, well, overnight.
Yet TV and movie stars, when they’re exhausted — or at least it’s explained by their publicists that they’re exhausted — don’t go to bed or to sleep; they go to the hospital.
And that seems pretty odd in that I’ve never known a hospital to have an “Exhaustion Ward.” I’ve roamed hospitals, mostly in search of those half cans of Shasta soda they keep in refrigerators near the nurses’ stations, and I’ve never even seen a double door labeled, “Shhhh!” let alone “Exhaustion Wing.”
Yet in the last couple of weeks both Tracy Morgan and Demi Moore have become the latest stars to check into hospitals to have their exhaustion treated.
“How come,” asks reader Barry Mennen, “are celebrities the only ones diagnosed with exhaustion? How come none of my friends or relatives have ever been admitted for exhaustion?”
Well, Barry, it doesn’t quite work that way. After all, the bigger the star, the worse, or so it seems, the affliction, the suffering.
Thus, where lesser entertainment names may suffer from being tired or really tired, the biggest names are hospitalized with exhaustion, apparently in need of round-the-clock professional assistance to turn off the lights, draw the curtains, get in bed and go to sleep.
The folly of it all is that there’s a 90 percent effective home remedy — or go-home remedy — for exhaustion. Stars suffering from exhaustion, before checking into hospitals, should try the following:
Monday through Friday, for just one week, commute by bus to and from Manhattan. Exhaustion sufferers will quickly see that among roughly 45 passengers, about 40 are asleep. Better yet, these passengers aren’t even suffering from acute exhaustion; they’re merely travelling to and from work. They do it every day. Just ask their publicists.
* * *
Congratulations to CBS on its new sitcom “Rob,” starring Rob Schneider and Cheech Marin. In just two episodes, CBS has provided conclusive proof that as long as a network keeps scraping at the bottom of that barrel, it’ll come up with something.
“Rob,” ostensibly, is about an Anglo-American marrying into a Mexican-American family. But it’s so much less than that.
Here’s a sample of the hilarious dialogue, at 8:40 on a Thursday night, from the second episode:
Marin to Schneider: “Don’t take offense, but maybe you should grow a pair of balls.”
One can sense the smugness of CBS’s entertainment-side execs as they swap winks at their ability to take American prime-time audiences a notch lower through such an ambush on the good senses. The game plan is transparent: TV isn’t coarse enough, vulgar enough; let’s see what’s left.
And call it a prime-time comedy!
* * *
Today and tonight, local TV newscasts will dispatch reporters and audio/video crews to area bars and restaurants to provide this:
Men and women, preferably three and four deep, at the bar, holding their index fingers up, angling to be seen on camera while shouting, “Woo! Giants all the way! Woo! No. 1! Giants! Woo!”
But in this time of economic peril and cutbacks, we can save all the local stations a bundle simply by airing bar footage shot on the day of the Giants’ 1987, 1991, 2001 and 2008 Super Bowl appearances.
Aside from clothing and hairstyles — and unless it’s essential that we see people at bars hollering “Woo!” in high definition — the no-better-idea reports that newscasts will procure today will be the same as those already on file.