LAUREN PIESTER
Gargoyle staff reporter
Posted Sunday, Oct. 7, 2007

HOW TO BE a celebrity in five easy steps:

1) Have a small amount of talent, or at least some sort of appeal, 10 years ago. Or, be really rich.

2) In order to draw attention to yourself, shave your head and assault a car with an umbrella.

3) Stop eating, start drinking heavily and doing crack, get arrested, and be sentenced to four days in jail that you serve in less than three hours. Illegitimate pregnancies are optional.

4) Get married. Get divorced. Make it messy, and make sure it involves children. Diss your ex to anyone with a video camera. Drink even more heavily.

5) Go to rehab. Leave rehab. Be in a failed movie or release a failed album or make a horrendous television appearance. Go back to rehab. Emerge a changed person. Problems solved.

Amy Winehouse released a song in late 2006 called "Rehab” in which she croons about how “they” tried to make her go to rehab, but she said, “No, no, no.” She would not go to rehab.

Less than a year later, where is Amy Winehouse?

Yep. Anorexia and alleged drug problems. Rehab.

This has become the official problem solver for all things Hollywood.

Druggie? Alcoholic? Anorexic? Bulimic? Obese? Divorced? “Fatigued?” Sick of your husband? Sick of your wife? Sick of your kids? Sick of being followed around everywhere by aggressive ugly guys with cameras? Rehab.

It’s like the magical answer for everything. It fixes anything, kind of like (and forgive me for being a total dork, here) the “Expelliarmus” of Hollywood. (In case you have been living under a rock, “Expelliarmus” is Harry Potter’s go-to spell for any situation because it disarms your opponent, though don’t use it around Death Eaters, because they will know it is you.)

In what is to me an extremely amusing coincidence, this actually makes sense in more than one way. By using that magical word “rehab,” a celebrity is, in a way, disarming his or her “opponents.” By going to rehab, they are, in theory, at least, admitting that they have a problem, and that they need to fix it. If they’re fixing their problems, what do people have to talk about? If the paparazzi no longer have drunk or high famous people to snap pictures of, then they kind of have no reason to live, just as Voldemort had no reason to live when Harry disarmed him, especially because he then, um, died.

Maybe that doesn’t make sense to you, but in my head, I swear it does.

So this should be all well and good, right? All the celebrities are flocking to these rehab centers to fix their problems. This should be a good thing then, shouldn’t it?

The thing is, the whole rehab thing has been used so many times, especially in the past couple years, by so many celebrities on whom it seemed to do no good whatsoever, that the word kind of has no meaning now. Not to mention that it almost seems like you have to go twice before it actually works, if it’s going to work at all. You have to go, then leave quickly, then do something ridiculously stupid, then come back. Then, it might actually have done something. Maybe.

If someone now says they’re going to rehab, or the host of some entertainment news show reports that so and so is going to rehab, it’s become this big joke. Rehab means nothing anymore. The person who is going to rehab also becomes a joke. They no longer are really taken very seriously.

So it is really unfortunate for the few who actually do want and need to go to rehab to really work on their issues, the people for whom it will actually work, because they will actually try. Either they go and then turn into this big entertainment-world joke, or they don’t go, and their problems escalate.

I bet there are a ton of famous people out there who desperately need to get some help for their drug or alcohol addiction, or their eating disorder, but they’re so afraid to ask for it for being ostracized, for being added to the list of superficial and naive Hollywood idiots.

It’s just more evidence that people like *cough*Britney Spears*cough* and *cough*Lindsay Lohan*cough* are ruining the world, and that my future career is now set: I will open a celebrity rehab facility, profit from famous people's pain, and become disgustingly rich. So rich that I might get addicted to money, and I might have to go to rehab to fix my disgusting problem.