A Bird\’s Nest

Before I lived in Los Angeles, the world of celebrity did not impinge on mine. I went about my business, blissfully unaware of who was cheating on whom, who was pregnant, and who had dropped out of rehab for, like, the eighteenth time, oh my god. I tried to keep my blinders on after I moved here, but it became more and more difficult. First Carrie Ann Moss stood next to me in the grocery line, then Paris Hilton sashayed through my Farmer’s Market wearing enormous sunglasses and clutching a chihuahua. Dame Judi Dench and Courtney Love both went to the movie theater at the same time I did, and we saw Seal and Heidi Klum as we were leaving. George Clinton pops into my office, and Debi Mazar buys her baby clothes at the same cheap store I do.

So you see, it’s hard to avoid. And since I am of the can’t-beat-’em-join-’em school, and also like cute babies, I have even taken to reading the Celebrity Baby Blog. Mostly to snicker at all the people boasting about their twin pregnancies while denying loudly and fiercely any rumor of infertility treatment, because god knows that would be the end, just the end of their careers. But that is not, my chickadees, the reason for the title of this post. No, the post title has its origin in two small stories, which I shall now relate.

1. A couple of months ago, Husband and babies and I were waltzing under the electric faux-moonlight on the thirty-foot-square lawn of our local outdoor mall, as the band played their last song of the evening. A bald man with a bevy of giggling blonds stopped to coo over the babies. He asked the usual questions, and I answered them all, smiling politely around gritted teeth. Can’t you see we’re having a tender moment? I shouted inside my head. Fuck off, already! Eventually the group wandered away, and Husband said “Do you know who that was?”

“Um, no.”

“That was Howie Mandel!”

2. This very morning, while sitting at the Farmer’s Market, Husband was approached by Illeana Douglas, who cooed delightedly over the babies. She asked all the usual questions too, but he was not as grouchy about it as I had been. He didn’t even mind when she said “You certainly have your hands full!” Which clearly makes him a saint, because that really is the most annoying thing you can say to a parent of multiples.

Celebrities! They’re just like us!

As my mother and I were pushing the twin stroller out of Puzzletown the other day, we held the gate open for a tiny white-haired woman, perhaps eighty, eighty-five years old. She peered into the stroller and asked in a prim, upper-class English accent “Twins?”

“Yes.”

“I was married to a twin,” she smiled. “He and his brother were in the Air Force. They used to pull all sorts of tricks, taking each other’s places and so on.”

“That could make for some interesting stories.” I imagined two identical Englishmen in crisp RAF uniforms, twitching their noses mischievously.

“Well, they were Catholic, not Jewish, but for some reason one of them was circumcised, so I never had a problem.”