T'nsean columnist decides she's going to stop covering one celebrity's story

Vince was only 15 at the time, and Klemens was married with a kouple of kkids, so that's why nobody really wants to talk about it......

All these years later, though, Young still can't help but think of those times when he was violated by someone he knew only as "The Rocket," who came high and hard at 100 mph. "He's hurting inside and out," his mom told the Tennessean. Hmmmmm, d'ya think??

 

Like Michael Corleone, I keep trying to ignore Mindy McCready, but they keep pulling me back in!

 

There are many examples of how country music, having finally gaining some credibility in the late '80s and early '90s, quickly pissed away that goodwill.

Mindy McCready is by far the biggest. She's far from the only person in Nashville to have ever achieved fame based entirely on looks and karaoke-quality singing/stage persona, but her self-destructive tendencies and her utter lack of real-life coping skills have left her with an infamy that peers like Rhett Akins and Rick Trevino and Chely Wright should be glad to have avoided.

I can understand Mindy's dream of becoming a star to escape a truly hellish background, and she might actually have pulled it off if she had received/accepted the right kind of guidance at crucial points in her career. Hell, if she had only concentrated on what she did well, the tough give 'em hell redneck girl persona, the country marketplace would never have had a need for Gretchen Wilson.

But record companies aren't interested in providing any real guidance for your life or for your career. If you're not a star right out of the gate, and if you don't at least maintain that level of fame/sales, they're not interested. They cast you aside. As do "men" like Roger Clemens. It would be devastating for anyone to be used up and then spit out, either by the star-making machinery or by people you have trusted. For someone like Mindy, already with a fragile sense of self-worth and never having had any real stability in her life to start with, the results were certain to be disastrous.

You look at her now and the one thing she really had going for her - her beauty - is fast slipping away. She's 33 years old and she looks much, much older. Not to say she wouldn't be in the same boat anyway if she had never come to Nashville, but at least she'd have some much-deserved anonymity.

The moral of the story is, so you really want to be famous? Be careful what you wish for - you might just get it.

 

VY does it all the time, and you expect us to understand ...