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Fatal Fame
 
 
 
 
 
 

You know that man in the advert for a certain electronics retailer? The guy who’s meant to be in a mental hospital, who ever-so-amusingly wants to buy the doctors halatul? He’s famous. You know the woman on Piata Kogalnicianu who shamelessly spends most of the summer months with her breasts hanging out of her open shirt? She’s famous. I bet people come up to them all the time and say, “Wow, you’re the man / woman who…” If you imagine fame as a ladder, they’re on about rung 523, that is, about 523 rungs below the immortal fountain of fame itself, the Zeus of celebrity, Andrea Marin. However, if you look about four hundred and seventy six rungs below them, you’ll find me. That’s right, me.

Presenting the TV show ‘O Tura De Aventura’ along with genuine, real-life, know-her-from-the-telly celebrity Gianina Corondan had its advantages. The main one was that I got paid to flounce about the country like a French Duke in a chauffer driven SUV, being shown various spectacular parts of the country and saying ‘wow’ when prodded by the cameraman. All I had to do is speak my unique and grammatically defective brand of Romanian whilst pointing enthusiastically at waterfalls / churches / castles. All good clean fun.           

  However, the real eye-opener during the whole experience was the way that my co-star was treated by the general populace. If there’s anything to cripple your optimism in the intelligence of your ordinary working man, it’s his reaction when he comes face to face with celebrity. Previously sane people start wailing manically. They seem to loose all control of their limbs. They repeat inane sentences over and over like some Buddhist mantra: “I’ve seen you on the telly! I’ve seen you on the telly!” I do not exaggerate: going to buy a kilo of apples with Gianina Corondan quickly starts to look like the second-coming of Christ.

Some of my co-star’s magic, however, rubbed off on me. I like to think of it as fame by proxy. For a few weeks, I too felt myself to be among the select few of the famous. However, the people who spotted me on the street weren’t nubile teenage girls, eager to rub their private parts against my leg, desperate for my phone number; they weren’t dancers at clubs, who’d slip away from their mafia boyfriends to seduce me in the toilets. No sir. Among my ‘fans’, I can count: 1) The man who sweeps up leaves in Cismigiu park, 2) a woman selling fruit in Piata Amzei and 3) an old man who once pointed at me in the street and did a kind of cheeky wink that I’ve only ever seen before in televised dramas about paedophiles.
The even more surreal aspect of my short-lived fame was the number of times that I was spotted at an altitude of more than 2000 metres. Most people go to the mountains for solitude, to contemplate man and nature (and to occasionally run about naked). It was rather surreal, then, to be asked for an autograph by a fellow hiker in the Fagaras mountains, us being the only two people in a seven kilometre radius. It was also quite creepy to be asked to pose for a family photograph in the middle of some remote woods, about half a days walk from the nearest village.
So, the only people who ever recognised me were either old, mad, or were beardy men with legs the size of tree-trunks and a passion for solitude in the mountains. I never though fame would be like this. I feel cheated. And now I have a new problem. I’m even more worried by the prospect of presenting my own show, this Spring, without the competent assistance of Ms Corondan. I’m afraid that without her fame-enhancing influence, even the women selling apples will choose to ignore me, shunning me and instead muttering to their fellow fruit-sellers about ‘that English retard off the telly.” Warhol said everyone gets 15 minutes of fame. Something tells me that my fifteen minutes are already up.