At an airport a few months ago, as my plane was boarding, I rushed to purchase a fashion magazine. Once up in the clouds, with the children drugged by Pixar, I reached for my own glossy narcotic only to find I had accidentally bought a publication with Leighton Meester on the cover. Who? you may ask. In which case, read no further.
But here you are, which means you may know that Meester is a co-star of Gossip Girl, a TV series whose title is a roadside sign that says you have missed the turn for Masterpiece Theatre. In its three-season run, I’ve encountered GG a few times, just often enough to know that Meester plays Blair, a mostly meanie teen whose appearance suggests a kind of rich-kid variation of sexy schoolgirl, mixing hair bands with neck-high Ungaro heels. It’s a look well-suited to wreaking psychological havoc within the Park Avenue bubble of fame and fortune where she and her friends dwell.
The show, fast and frothy and occasionally smart, is a very expensive game of teen paper dolls, with young characters placed into adult situations by adult writers, where they weep over text messages and sip champagne cocktails. Gossip Girl is one link in a chain that includes MTV’s The Hills and The City, the new Melrose Place and any of the slew featuring unblemished, non-working trust-fund babies re-enacting high-school dramas straight into their 20s.
What this has to do with my life is pretty much nothing, unless you replace champagne with tea, and iPhone intrigue with a lengthy scene wherein I yell at my cellphone provider about nefarious billing practices.
And yet, I visit this fluff occasionally, and it floats over to me in between the bills and deadlines of adultland. And sometimes the fluff takes up residence nearby, not on the cover of Seventeen but on my copy of Harper’s Bazaar, formerly known as a woman’s magazine.
