Celebrity Welfare

Yep, I've been spending my lunch hours watching Pauly Shore and Kathy Griffin. As much as I say I don't care for reality television, I get sucked in by one or two things every summer. Last year it was the poor Amish In The City kids. This year's theme seems to be watching people who were marginally famous a decade or so ago trade on their names for freebies.

I used to work in marketing and licensing for a local company. Our dream was to have Oprah use one of our journals or photo albums in her giveaway show. Since I don't have the best track record with Oprah, the job of placing our product fell to someone else. The closest we ever got was having Barry Zuckerkorn put in an appearance at our Scrapbooking booth. The right celebrity endorsement can mean millions in sales. In our low-margin, Wal-Mart appeasing world it's possible for those sales to be the single thing keeping the doors open.

Something tells me, though, that if I were a furniture craftsman I would not be cajoled into giving Kathy Griffin a custom leather sofa at cost on the off chance that it will appear in a future issue of Bored Supermarket Shopper Weekly. I also wouldn't replace the carpet Sam Kinison vomited and crapped on, no matter how much love I felt from Mitzi Shore.