Visualizing a Better World
Good morning, Los Angelenos! Feeling pert ‘n’ perky? Ready for ‘98? All set for the next fast 12-month jog up to 1999, when we hope the individual formerly known as Prince will join us in partying like he formerly did? Or, like me, are you suffering from a touch of the holiday blues?
To cheer myself up, I got to thinking, albeit a tad wistfully, about the things I hope might happen in the brand-new, spanking-clean year that we’re all about to take a bite out of.
My actress friend Rosalie is always telling me to visualize the things I want in my life, like a hunky guy who can speak English and has his own car. And she recently visualized herself into a national TV commercial, so I’m taking her advice a whole lot more seriously.
Don’t worry, you don’t have to lift a finger (or an eyebrow). I’ll do the visualizing for all of us. Here, then, on the cusp of a fresh century, is my personal wish list for 1998.
In the future of my dreams:
1. People won’t say “have a nice day” unless they really mean it and are willing to devote the rest of their day to making sure you have a nice day.
2. If you rear-end a vehicle in which someone is talking on a cell phone and you yourself are not talking on a cell phone, you will not be at fault.
3. Twelve-step meetings will go back to being anonymous and no children of celebrities will be able to make book deals as a result of their participation in them.
4. There will be a quota for Starbucks: no more than two in any given block.
5. Anyone who uses the phrase “let me play devil’s advocate” will be asked to sign an actual pact with the devil. In his or her own blood.
6. Martin Scorsese will stop making uplifting travelogues about the Dalai Lama and go back to material drawn from the mean streets.
7. Anyone caught wearing underwear visible outside his or her clothing will be compelled to take off the offending item and wear it on his or her head for a week.
8. Anne Heche will leave Ellen for David Geffen.
9. It will be revealed that she only did it to help new fan President Clinton by distracting the media’s attention from campaign finance scandals, Paula Jones and Whitewater.
10. Those celebrities who pose on magazine covers puffing cigars will be required to donate sizable chunks of their incomes to lip cancer research.
11. Jenny McCarthy’s 15 minutes of fame will be up.
12. There will be no new late-night talk shows.
13. Instead of messing with the wetlands, Dreamworks will decide to turn South-Central into a model community and let the people who already live there go on living there--rent-free.
14. They will not be forced to become exhibits.
15. In an internationally televised ceremony, Elton John, about to be knighted, will get confused about which of them is the queen and mistakenly address Her Royal Highness as “Sir Elizabeth.”
16. Saddam Hussein will be revealed to be Peter Sellers.
17. Anyone who bites anyone else won’t have to go to jail, into rehab, or be suspended from professional boxing for a year, but will have to wear a muzzle in public for the rest of his life.
18. Soon Yi will leave Woody Allen for a younger man.
19. The casts of “Friends,” “Seinfeld” and “ER” will offer to pool their salaries and turn them over to grade-school teachers. In return, they each will earn per episode what the average grade-school teacher gets paid per week.
20. I myself will receive a $90-million severance package from Disney.
21. We will all just get along.
* Anne Beatts is a writer who lives in Hollywood.
