Q: Every month it appears that a celebrity has to be hospitalized for "exhaustion." Last year's "American Idol" winner, Ruben Studdard, actress/pop singer Lindsay Lohan and "Law and Order's" Vincent D'Onofrio are the latest victims. If celebrities are that tired, why don't they just go to a five-star resort and lie on the beach for a few days like the rest of us tired people would do if we could afford it?
-- Stephanie James, Accokeek
A: The glamorous and superimportant throughout history have been fainting and retreating to their beds as a matter of tradition. Apparently, celebrityhood has always been just a little too much to bear. Implosion and collapse are as much a part of being a star as $2,500 sunglasses. A few years ago, around the time her deliriously bad movie "Glitter" tanked, Mariah Carey pulled some pretty loopy stuff in public and was finally shut away by her handlers, who sent out the news: She was exhausted. Here, finally, was the great diagnosis of our era, with just a whiff of "Valley of the Dolls" enigma around it: It's all too much -- the jetting around, the boutique hotels, the sound checks, the lip-syncing, the modeling, the acting, the eponymous lines of beauty products, the reality cameras and press photographers and Internet gossipers that seem to be everywhere. Who wouldn't be exhausted?
As the most cynical celebritologists will tell you, "exhaustion" is rarely just exhaustion. It's the new code word for any number of dire developments. But even if a star is just tired, it's not enough to quietly go somewhere and rest. In the celebrity brain, the world will surely want to know where you've gone (and will surely miss you), and so you need a reason for your sudden absence. Exhaustion is the new way of letting the world know how important and busy you are.
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