Celebrities are just like you and me!

Not to steal from the section of US Weekly titled "Stars are just like US!", which I find kind of obnoxious (I generally find US's hyperuse of exclamation points impossibly irritating, but sometimes at the end of a long work trip it's all I want for the train or the plane), but I was sort of struck this week by how celebrities, sometimes, really are just like regular people, and it's for some reason hard for me to grasp.

I was catching up on my Ellens, and Jodie Foster was on Monday's episode. Yay! Love Jodie Foster, ever since Stealing Home, one of my favorite movies in high school -- and still, probably -- and she so rarely does press, and she just looked beautiful, and she was lovely and funny and it made me very happy, even if I'm not so sure about this new movie of hers (although, even sight unseen, I think the flight attendants' urge to boycott is absurd).

And then she was talking about her sons, so glowingly, and how much she loves Halloween, and how she and the kids had gone a couple of times to pick out costumes, but they always pick out ho-bag outfits for her to wear, so she gives up.

Okay, so if I lived in LA, and I didn't hate Halloween, and I wandered into Everything Halloween or whatever, I might just stumble upon Jodie Foster and her kids trying on costumes? That is just so weird to me. As much of a fuss as I kicked up over Oprah kicking up a fuss about the Hermes thing, I sort of do expect that famous people don't actually shop at regular stores while regular folks are around (although that sort of sounds like I'm going against my original thinking on Oprah, which...rats. I guess I have less of a problem of a store closing itself to regular folk while a celeb is in there than I have of a celeb expecting it to open just for her. Anyway).

That just, for some reason, was shocking to me. And then, later in the week, Fran Drescher was on, and she still continues to irritate the heck out of me, and she was going on and on about refusing to go out on a date with some guy who drives a yellow sportscar of some sort because she worried he was trying to overcompensate for some kind of physical shortcoming and/or having a midlife crisis, and she wanted no part of that. Okay; kind of like a normal person, I guess. And then she went on this long tangent about running into Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin at a restaurant, and Gwyneth coming up to her and saying how Chris loooooooves Fran Drescher, and how they had to meet. So, yeah, not like us, and honestly? I have to think that Gwyneth was playing some sort of prank, like in fifth grade when Billy Bryan went up to Kristen Smith on the playground and was like, "Do you want to go out with me?" and she said, "Yes" and he said, "Ha. Just kidding."

Ellen, bless her, hustled Fran off the show after that, because, Ick.

Also annoying on Ellen this week: Jared Padelecki, who would have been kind of funny if he didn't seem sincerely pretty dumb; Alyson Hannigan, who I really wanted to like but who just kept talking about this fan who bought her a horse; Jennifer Love Hewitt, who needs no explanation; and Jerry O'Connell, who is arrogant plus dumb, which made him my very least favorite, and I want to encourage Rebecca to run for the hills. I didn't hate Jennifer Garner, but she, too, seemed a little simpler than I'd expected (sorry Shari) -- maybe it's the pregnancy, but she seemed to be channeling her 13 Going on 30 character a little more than I'd have liked.

But overall, a most satisfying week of TV, all compressed into a couple of hours because of the beautiful thing that is DVR. A lovely escape from the realities of weekday stress and annoyances, but back to reality soon enough.