What’s In A Name? Plenty.

Spent the first weekend of the new year with family — the kids and my sister and her family. We did karaoke for hours Saturday night.

My sister performed Grease Lightening from Grease (which was wildly funny, prompting one of the kids to suggest we video that & put it up on YouTube). When my sister finished, she said, “Was I totally like John Travolta?”

After the laughs, I mentioned that it was sad to hear his son just died. My sister was all, “Jett died?!”

I was shocked she knew his name. She probably knew you spelled it with two T’s too (I only knew that when I found the link for you, in case you hadn’t heard the news.)

Now you might say I started the celeb thing, but it was just on the news, so I knew of it — and it’s terrible when anyone dies so young — but I never would have known his son’s name unless it had just been said/read to me. So how the hell does she know John Travolta’s son’s name? (How the hell does my brother-in-law, the sports guy, know Travolta’s married to Kelly Preston?)

It makes me think too, how many times a day other people’s children die & no body cares. I’m not diminishing Travolta & Preston’s loss; it’s horrible. But why do people take the time to know the marital status of celebs, know their children’s names, pedigrees and ailments, but don’t know, for example, the name of, let alone how to pronounce, the conditions of their own nieces and nephews? (By the way, Asperger’s sounds like “Asparagus.”)

This celeb-lovin’ is why Austim in general only became “important” when some celebs started having children on the spectrum; the cause de celebrity when it home for them, becoming popular fodder for talk in American homes. Ugh.

I expected better from my sister at least.

Incidentally, neither my sister nor her husband can name a single blog I have or site I write at. So even if had told them my secret identity and the blog name, they’d never find this post in which I sigh & shake my head at them in.