" Cruise is the country's mystery patient"

[Posted by reader_iam]

Ain't that the truth--even if the meaning of "mystery" requires stretching. Read this one about Tom Cruise's nuptials for its turns of phrase and the the sheer wickedness of it.

That left just the question of whether the vows included the traditional Scientology promise to the bride of clothing, food and for reasons that you would need an expert to explain, a pan, a comb and a cat? Was the bride referred to as a "girl," as is customary, and was there the suggestion that men deserve a little room to, you know, stray?

We'll know soon enough. But who other than Cruise could orchestrate this totally public but totally private wedding and leave commentators to wonder aloud whether he was actually married?

Well, miaow.

By the way, I sure wish I'd extracted a promise related to being provided with feline companions as part of my own nuptials. Genius, that is, for a feline-free, cat-person-at-heart such as I.

And yet we watched the wedding, as we watch everything Cruise-related, with a curiosity that borders on the forensic. Because, first and foremost, he is one of the most successful movie stars ever, with a lifetime box office gross of more than $2.6 billion, according to boxofficemojo.com. Also because we sense that despite all of his strenuous grinning, despite all the talk-show nattering about how everything is great and I do my own stunts and this is love, baby, love-- despite all this we know that there is something else going on here. We just don't know what. Cruise is the country's mystery patient and he has turned us all into befuddled doctors.

Coincidentally, I was catching up today on some magazine-reading and finally saw the gushing, generous, and preciously presented photo spread in Vanity Fair devoted to Cruise's image the debut of Suri (beautiful child, with an alertness to her eyes which I hope serves her well), complete with the most sycophantic prose imaginable. Now, I usually have either a) a high tolerance for celebrity stories/homages such as this or b) the ability to utterly shrug them off/shut them out of mind in seconds flat. In this case, though, I have to say that the message was iced on so thick, I was tempted to root through the first-aid kit for a stray tablet or two of Dramamine.

Never had that reaction to Annie Leibowitz's work before (I'm a fan). Figures it'd be Tom who would cruise-control me to such a place.

As I already said: Miaow.