November 04, 2008

Tori's Stories

I love TV. I like dramas, I like cooking shows, I like reality TV… but most of all I like shows about teenagers/young adults. My friends know how much I loved 90210 (the original), and my boyfriend definitely knows that we will not be watching Monday Night Football when it conflicts with Gossip Girl.

So let’s talk about 90210. That show was on the air for 10 years, and the kids on it were (hypothetically) around my age. I loved it. So did my roommates. I lived with three other girls in a house in Washington, D.C., during the 90210/Melrose Place years, and Wednesdays were dubbed Family Night, where we’d all stay home, cook dinner for the group, and watch the shows. Friends and boyfriends were usually, but not always, allowed to join us. It was a great privilege to be invited to Family Night (we thought).

Anyway, suffice it to say, we knew a bit about the characters, the actors… we yelled at the TV a lot, screamed (Kimberly and the wig! Ayieeeeeeeeee!), copied their makeup (maybe that was just me)... Once during this period I saw Jason Priestley and Luke Perry in the flesh in a restaurant in Santa Barbara and just about had a heart attack. And hello, the main reason I TiVo the new 90210 is because Jennie Garth and Shannen Doherty are on it. Brenda and Kelly! Yes!

This is a rambling way of getting to my point. I just finished reading sTori Telling, Tori Spelling’s recent autobiography. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Obviously, if you’re not a fan of Tori Spelling, you’re not going to read this book. So it’s reasonable to assume that people who have read the book are generally going to react positively. But I wouldn’t say I was a “fan,” exactly, despite my love for 90210. I’m not big on the whole sleeping with married men issue. But I do like a good (and by “good” I mean “bad”) movie on Lifetime now and then, and a lot of these seem to star Tori. And there's the 90210 love that I have. Overall, I felt pretty neutral about her. Then this summer I saw a few episodes of “Tori and Dean: Inn Love,” and found her to be pretty funny, and real, and often self-deprecating - a characteristic which always endears celebrities to me. If you make fun of yourself, I always like you more. So I bought the book.

She says: “Some of what you may have read about me is accurate… and some exaggerated. My life has been funnier and sadder and richer and poorer than any of the magazines know. Public opinion dies hard. Still, everyone else has been telling stories about me for decades now. It’s about time I told a few of my own.”

Her stories are really pretty engrossing. She tells a good tale. There are some good celebrity tidbits in there, and some really horrifying stories about her mother, good heavens. I know there are two sides to every story, but wow. For example, Candy decided that Tori’s wedding was costing too much, so she made Tori tell her friends that they could not bring guests to the wedding. (Keep in mind these is a mother who has $800 million dollars and one daughter.) And then
she went and hired Michael Feinstein to sing for the party. That was her “gift” to Tori and her husband Charlie. How much do we think it costs to have someone of Michael Feinstein’s calibre come perform for a private party? Probably $100,000?


“As it turned out, Charlie’s dad was a real Michael Feinstein fan… He was so blown away that during the performance he came up to my mother to say thank you. She said, ‘Well, if you love him so much, why don’t you go listen to him.’ Charlie’s poor, harmless dad.”
She just sounds horrible. I know there are two sides to every story, but still. This poor child was destined to have some issues (which she did). But back to the fun stuff. She makes fun of her boob job, her nose job. She admits that people neigh at her on the street (referencing her allegedly horsey face). She is open about her quirks:


“…you might call me a little OCD. Like how if I’m eating potatoes, I won’t leave one potato alone on the plate. I’ll cut it in half so it has a friend… I know it’s weird and crazy, but I feel sorry for the food. I don’t like things to be alone.”
Anyway, I don’t need to go into what happens or whatever. You probably already know the gist of it from the tabloids. I was just pleasantly surprised. I read the whole thing in one night. When I finished, I wanted to give Tori Spelling a hug.

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