Advice is never solid and whether you like it or not your own stable of friends knows you better than any celebrities, who will tell you to eat dirt by the handful if they think you'll pay $12.95 for their book, "How to Eat Dirt by the Handful."
People buy celebrity advice, though, mostly in the form of fitness books by people like Oprah Winfrey. I do love Oprah, but she could hire the original Greek Olympians to come back from the dead and be her personal trainers. That's how rich she is. But my personal favorite is the Cher fitness videos, especially since one of her secrets to thinness is that she had ribs removed to get that way. And how did she get famous? She married Sonny Bono. Shouldn't we be seeking advice from all the people smart enough not to marry Sonny Bono?
Celebs want to help on a spiritual level as well. They will occasionally be seen directing traffic on the newest routes to Enlightenment, most of which go in and out as fast as the celebs themselves. LaToya Jackson did ads for the Psychic Friends Network until she got abused by her rotten boyfriend. (Either no psychic warned her about this or she didn't believe any that did.) Actress Leigh Taylor Young is a proponent of feng shui, the ancient Chinese art of home decorating. How you have your home arranged, or how you practice feng shui, either frees up or blocks chi, or energy. It's largely common sense. For example, to make a cramped space feel more inviting, put something there that will make it feel livelier. For many of you this might be a mirror. If there's an object that simply makes you feel negative, get rid of it. For many of you this might be a mirror.
Look at yourself
Then again, if you're moving furniture around in a $100,000 condo, how bad could your life be? Whether feng shui works is, like most things, up to the imagination of the individual and Taylor-Young says as much. In a book called, "It Works for Me! Celebrity Stories of Alternative Healing," she says, "Instant cures are about as useful as instant fame."
But "It Works for Me!" is a useful book with remarkable curative powers. Not just because we get to hear Dianne Ladd talk about the wonders of Juicing ("I was no longer allergic to the puppy -- that dog ended up living with us until it died eight years later!") and Olympia Dukakis talking about Massage ("By the time I got up off the table I felt less defensive"). The remedies are interesting. But none blew air up my spiritual skirt until I got to Kenny Loggins.
Of course you first have to ask, is Kenny Loggins a guy I want to emulate? Yes, he's rich, but he's also best remembered for "Footloose." But it's not copying Kenny's method of self-actualization that will help you. Since laughter is the best medicine, specifically when it is directed at someone else, it's Kenny story, the fact that he's willing to tell it and does so sincerely, that will make you feel great.
You see, Kenny's spiritual quest begins and ends with his butt. Colon hydrotherapy is what he calls it, but we all know that's just a fancy-pants term for enema (actually it's stronger and as Kenny's therapist puts it, "uses a small amount of pressure," so it's got a little more pizzazz and it comes with a therapist).
Going deep
Going deep
"I used colonics to help bring emotional clarity and get in touch with me," Kenny says. If you're trying to get in touch with yourself and you find yourself in your bowels, it might take more than a little water to help you, but anyway.
Kenny goes on to describe the position, the procedure, how enemas cured the headaches he was getting during a vegetable juice fast, and his relationship with his "hydrotherapist" Julia, with whom he felt a sense of trust "enough to pull me back to try more colonics." You had better trust you enemologist. After all, you wouldn't want to think she was sticking gladiolas in there and taking Polaroids.
Anyhoo, Kenny reports a cleansing sensation (eewww), an overall glow and says, "I began to feel on a very deep level." (I bet.) "I had lost touch with my feelings, so I had to take the factor out of the way that might be blocking them." What a load of crap.
Kenny eventually married his little enema girl, dumping his wife of 15 years to do so. Maybe it was deeply spiritual, or maybe he just took some brochures home to his wife with a hopeful gleam in his eye and she responded, "If you make another suggestion like that, it's not a hose I'm going to put in there." But it could be a learning, growing, enriching experience for all of us. If we know that Kenny Loggins found his inner being up his ass, who knows what we may find there, if only we would be willing to look deep within.
