Things the Internet has Ruined (Celebrity)
There was a time when stars
were defined by something different than
their number of Instagram followers:
when actors loomed like glamorous galaxies,
remote,
rarely seen,
except for a perfectly-posed publicity-still
that floated down from the firmament
and landed on the cover of Life Magazine.
Decades before the Internet,
in the so-called Golden Age of Hollywood,
there were no mirror-reflected neon-green bikini shots,
no used-to-be-supermodel makeup-free selfies,
no thirst-trap pics,
no crass Toned “AF” Abs! headlines.
Even though we didn’t know her,
we all know that Greta Garbo
would never have been on social media:
The very notion itself
is as Absurd “AF”!
You see,
the myth, after all,
is always better for the celebrity
and the fan.
Take the time that I met
Mickey Rooney circa 2002
at a dinner theatre in La Salle County
after his One Man, One Wife show,
when I stood in a long line
with some octogenarians
just to meet the Mickey Rooney,
and to get his autograph.
When I reached him,
I said I thought he was great in “Killer McCoy,”
and that it was one of
my favorite boxing movies,
and that I had seen
“Boys Town” a half a dozen times, or more.
I thought, mistakenly so,
that he would be glad
to have a fan
who wasn’t born before WWII,
a relatively-young person who appreciated
the dancer’s footwork
of his boxing scenes;
but, instead,
he was rude,
and cocky, really,
and he didn’t even give me an autograph,
or a smile,
just a mug-faced air of disdain as if to say,
“Move along now!”
and I walked away thinking,
“I was just given the brush-off
by Mickey Rooney.”
And, later,
recounting the story to my brother,
he said:
“What did you expect?
He’s Mickey Rooney!
He’s Hollywood royalty!
He’s not like these actors today!
Mickey Rooney was a real star!”
My brother was right, of course.
The nature of fame has changed:
a lowering of the veneer of esteem,
a disintegration of the illusory barrier
between the celebrity and the fan—
because, in this century, anyone can be famous,
with a blog or a podcast or a YouTube channel.
And you add in a dash of reality TV,
or some CGI—
then, “Poof!”
memories of the real stars
are just illusory relics of a nostalgic past.
Frankly, it’s social media,
mostly, that’s to blame
for the loss of the value of celebrity;
the 21st-century bizarre exchange between the famous
and the anonymous public,
the revelation of entertainers’
mundane worries over stretch marks and aging,
and the cycling of PR-driven apologies
shows not that they are relatable,
but that they are irrelevant.
It wasn’t always so.
Before the Internet,
mystery could cling to the famous,
they could wear it like a magician’s cloak;
privacy was possible,
and image could be carefully-crafted,
guarded,
perpetuated,
such that minimal direct interaction with the public
was a good thing.
Ask yourself this:
If she were alive today,
would Katharine Hepburn
ever have taken a selfie
and posted it on Instagram?
Not likely.
Would Barbara Stanwyck
have posted a video of
herself doing planks at dawn?
Absolutely not.
(Enough of the yoga poses, 21st century celebs! Please!)
And, if Mickey Rooney were still around
it is unlikely that he would engage
with fans online,
and, this much is a certainty—
he definitely
wouldn’t respond to haters
who called him short or ugly or overrated.
He simply would not care.
The bravado is legendary:
a 5’2” leading man,
bold, brash, vaudevillian,
full of strut and brass,
eight marriages.
This was a man, after all,
who once upon a time was
married to Ava Gardner.
So what if it was only for a year?
Mickey Rooney was a real star,
just like my brother called him.
After all,
when I rattled off the names of his movies,
trying to impress that real star,
didn’t Mickey Rooney respond
with the performance
I had hoped for?
Unrepentant,
Unruly,
Unreformed.
Didn’t he brush me aside
with an arrogant wave
that seemed more like
an imaginary street jab?
Things the Internet has Ruined (Celebrity) Copyright © 2024 by Donna Kathryn Kelly
The Draughtsman
Image of Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Vega 5B, courtesy Smithsonian Open Access.
It started with propellers
in your absence, men.
I stepped into the role,
and imagination
came in precise torrents,
ideas like hail,
the beauty of propulsion.
Substitution led to invention,
a life given to hours at the table;
I was allowed room to create,
to rise and join ranks,
while men killed men
in fields, water, sky.
Steadily, my hand wedded paper,
designing, analyzing, building,
filled with locomotive energy,
my mathematical mind traversed
the span of two world wars.
See, girls of this new millennium,
you can do this:
lead, defy, excel.
So, while you were away, men,
I spent the hours focused on the forward.
The Draughtsman was written in honor of Verena Winifred Holmes (1889-1964), an English engineer who was a trailblazer in her field during World War I and World War II, and beyond. The poem was composed in response to a creative writing call for submissions by Medway Libraries, UK, for its Circle of Six Women Project, and was selected for inclusion in its anthology, "Inspired by Six Women who Shook the World" (2023), where the poem first appeared.
The Draughtsman, Copyright © 2022 by Donna Kathryn Kelly
The Governor
Did you shadowbox in your cell?
Upbeat—chipper, even—
perfect hair
like Warren’s werewolf:
When you were swinging at air
surrounded by Colorado concrete,
did you think,
How the f - - - did it come to this?
A winter dawn,
you’re readying for a run,
and instead,
under cover of darkness,
the FBI comes to your door,
apprehends you;
removes you
from your home,
your wife,
your children.
There’s an indignation
that comes to an
interrupted runner,
waylaid by external forces:
a pulled hamstring,
an intrusive text that leads to another,
an unanticipated storm,
a federal arrest warrant.
You may not have seen it coming—
probably didn’t.
After all,
it’s not as though
you took a bulldozer to Meigs Field
while Chicago was sleeping.
Handcuffs for you, Governor.
No polite turning-yourself-in.
No surrendering-on-the-warrant.
No cozy deals for you, Governor.
You pissed off both parties:
the one that controls the State,
and the one that doesn’t.
Not a good place to be.
But I’m a scrapper,
you thought,
a fighter,
you thought,
this is bullshit,
you thought,
I can beat this,
you thought.
You thought wrong.
If,
If,
If,
If only.
You ended up with pen time,
lots of it:
time to read Kipling,
time to run in small circles
through a western courtyard,
time to replay the trial
and your testimony
and the closing arguments
over and over again.
You acclimated to this life,
because the prison is the ring:
the smell of sweat and compressed flesh,
the desire of movement in a confined space,
the loneliness of an ancient sport of fury.
Did you bob and weave
against the wall,
pretending there was
a bony-faced phantom
from Springfield
facing you?
Long days,
you spent in the cell;
years passed by,
running in a slow circle,
time moving like
a courtroom clock,
a glacial appeal.
It’s the sport,
not the law,
that brought comfort,
the retreat into the imagination,
the mirage of youth,
reminiscence:
the scissoring of feet,
the jabbing of air,
the crushing of want,
the punching of worry,
the prosecution of time
in a liminal space.
The Governor, Copyright © 2023 by Donna Kathryn Kelly
One Year Out
Image of Untitled (Seascape) pencil drawing by patent attorney and artist Howard Russell Butler (1856-1934), courtesy Smithsonian Open Access.
This is how it ends for him:
no funeral, no battle hymn,
just water absorbed into the lungs,
dragging him into an ice-cold tomb,
limitless gallons of titanic weight,
crushing breath with fists of fate.
One year out
is met with doom.
Stern sinks in eight, but he goes longer,
combating the chill of terror-water.
He shoulders through a mass of waves,
through gulps of salty-death to save
as many hearts and hands, he sees-
as many cries as he perceives.
One year out
is all God gives.
Numb his lips, and all tread ceases;
his limbs immobile, his mind releases
the sounds of an Alabama summer:
songbirds, fishing lines, the voice of his mother.
He wills death away to save more men yet,
Temporary is the swim; infinite is the depth.
One year out
is all he gets.
One Year Out, a poem in remembrance of Lieutenant Stanton F. Kalk, United States Navy, was first published by Southern Arizona Press in its anthology, The Poppy: A Symbol of Remembrance, September 2022.
Stanton F. Kalk (1894-1917), Lieutenant (Junior Grade), United States Navy, graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1916. He was killed in action the following year, when a German submarine fired a torpedo that struck the USS Jacob Jones on which Kalk was on board, sinking the American destroyer. Kalk survived the blast and heroically swam from raft to raft moving survivors in an effort to save them by equalizing the weight of the life rafts. In doing so, Kalk died of exhaustion and exposure. Kalk was posthumously awarded the Distinguished Service Medal. [Historical Source: Naval History and Heritage Command site, www.history.navy.mil.]
One Year Out, Copyright © 2022 by Donna Kathryn Kelly
Things the Internet has Ruined (Gift-Giving)
Things the Internet has Ruined (Gift-Giving), a poem by Donna Kathryn Kelly
Image of Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931), by artist Alfred S. Seer, Engraver, Copy after Mathew B. Brady, courtesy Smithsonian Open Access.
The giving was once as
magical as the receiving,
such that I was thrilled to find
that gold and black floor-to-ceiling satin wall shroud of The Lizard King
before The Material Girl had become immaterial—
(Oh, how I had loved the musky moon-scent
of her irreverent cassette tape back in her Brunette Age!)
Objects had meaning then:
they were desired, displayed,
perhaps, even respected in some way
such that when my mom’s friend’s husband
proudly showed us his basement collection
of Marion Morrison commemorative treasures
a few months before he was sentenced to the federal penitentiary
for a paper crime of some sort,
I was not able to search online and find out
that there were hundreds,
or even thousands, of these so-called limited-edition prints,
faux bronze-busts, and oil paintings available,
and that these precious pieces were really
worthless, to everyone, but the pre-trial releasee,
(who probably ended up selling these images of a late-middle-aged man
in a cowboy hat and a pink bandana
at a garage sale in the south suburbs
for under a hundred dollars—cumulatively!)
But now, we have Bezos, Facebook, and eBay,
and we can all check on the price of things—
instantaneously—
so pretty much nothing has value.
We can search for the worth of a gift in a second:
swap it,
sell it,
return it,
or throw it away.
There is nothing mysterious about any object anymore.
Before I had my driver’s license
my mother would drop L. and me off
at the Crystal Point Mall;
we would flip through the album covers at the music store,
LP after LP at our fingertips.
Sometimes I couldn’t find the new release—
the one I had seen on MTV at L.’s house—
and when I would ask about it, the store clerk would look bored.
He would say it was “Sold Out,”
and that it would be days,
maybe even a whole week,
until the store would get a new shipment,
from New York or California,
or some other place that sounded really far away,
and really was.
In truth, there was something magical
about that want of a material thing,
being followed by deprivation:
the desire to possess an object that was unattainable—
not because of its price—but because of its inaccessibility.
In the present, everything is available on-demand,
such that when I go to buy elk sausage in downtown Sioux Falls,
to ship to an Illinoisan for Christmas,
and learn that it is out of stock,
I simply go online and order it from another store.
The gift is supposed to be true.
South Dakota:
prairie-pure,
unbroken.
Instead, for all I know the gift may be shipped
from Elk Grove Village to Palatine,
so that there is nothing unique about this computerized order.
We have become
an isolated, robotic, world market.
The glow of gift-giving has been diminished in some way.
The connecting of human face,
human hand,
human soul,
is forgotten:
just as the days when there were full-service gas stations,
and men in jumpsuits with names like “Lou” or “Rick”
would come out to your car to pump your gas,
squeegee your windows,
and put air in your tires,
and there are things like this
that you only miss
when you randomly
come across
something that once brought you minor joy,
but is now obsolete,
though it was once commonplace,
before the Internet destroyed humanity;
kind of like last summer when I pulled
into the Sinclair in Pierre
and I discovered that full-service is not extinct
and I took out my stupid cell phone
to film the guy cleaning my windshield
as though I had found the remains of some
great prehistoric shark fossilized beneath the gas pumps,
and I kept repeating,
“I didn’t know they still had these.”
I was simply ecstatic.
It was like the moment I saw the bald eagles
flying outside of La Crosse above the bluffs,
or when a bobcat jogged across my path
at dusk along Bull Valley Road
or the time I spotted Joan Jett
stepping into a limo at the Des Plaines Oasis
and I wasn’t quite sure it was her,
because it was drizzling and dark
and I was a hundred feet away,
and all I could see was a slim body
and black leather
and hair the color of the night.
So, I called out, “Hey, are you someone famous?”
and her voice globe-saluted at me,
strong and distinct
like a double-axed cherry bomb,
taunting the tollway traffic, “Don’t you know who I am?”
And when I shouted, “Joan Jett!”
she pointed a finger,
fired, and said,
“You’ve got it.”
Then, she just disappeared:
this shapeshifting raven,
deliquesced into the dark vehicle,
down the exit ramp,
onto I-90,
into the wet night.
I didn’t take a video of this to post onto Facebook
because there weren’t cell phones back then,
and this was years before some politician invented the Internet,
such that I did not sprint over to Joan Jett to pose alongside her,
to take some awkward photo to impress all of my not-really friends.
Instead, I have this:
the voice,
jagged and defiant,
the crow’s wing bangs,
the parking-lot lights,
kicking against a shock
of might and beauty.
You see, the memory holds
such things still,
and it will always be better than a cell phone.
Things the Internet has Ruined (Gift-Giving) first appeared in Oakwood, Volume 5, Issue 1, (2023).
Things the Internet has Ruined (Gift-Giving) Copyright © 2019 by Donna Kathryn Kelly
An ekphrastic poem inspired by the oil painting, PEACE IN UNION, by artist, Thomas Nast, 1895
Image of Winslow Homer’s The Surgeon at Work at the Rear during an Engagement, from Harper’s Weekly, July 12, 1862, courtesy Smithsonian Open Access.
The incivility,
the cleaving,
the grotesqueness of an electric-chair sky,
heads, necks, fingers,
falling to fury,
a nation of lost statues
and amnesiac stars,
tumbling into the forgetting,
sleeping beneath an overpass
in an overcrowded city.
Even with a resolution
we are still severed;
the media doctors divide
our flesh into blue and red,
use polls like weapons,
alter the history of the heart,
incite trauma, replicate pain
across sad centuries,
a gangrenous legacy,
a night weeping on fields.
Knees, wrists, throats,
intergenerational cellblocks,
the fatalities of grief,
ballads of discordant verse,
drifting as wounded clouds
above an anxious nation:
on edge
and wary,
like a compelled handshake
between enemy generals.
This poem was selected by a jury to be included in the 2022 Friendswood Library Ekphrastic Poetry Festival in Friendswood, Texas. The poem was inspired by Thomas Nast’s 1895 oil painting, Peace in Union, which depicts Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Union General Ulysses S. Grant at the Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865. The image on this page is that of the artwork of Winslow Homer which is displayed at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., and is made available via Smithsonian Open Access.
Thomas Nast’s original oil painting, Peace in Union, is displayed at the Galena & U.S. Grant Museum in the town of Galena, Illinois. The precision of detail and the range of facial expressions captured by Thomas Nast in his work, reflect the tension and emotion of that moment in the history of the Republic.
An ekphrastic poem, Copyright © 2022 Donna Kathryn Kelly
Things the Internet has Ruined (Hope)
Image of artwork “Hope” by Francesco Bartolozzi (1727–1815) After Johann Heinrich Ramberg (1763 – 1840), courtesy Smithsonian Open Access.
Before the Internet, people just died
and maybe you didn’t know they had died
because the last you heard they had moved somewhere
like Fort Myers or Punta Gorda
and they passed out of your life with ease,
so that sometimes you might pause
to think of something that they had said or did
which would cause you to smile
and then you would wonder what happened to them,
so that you would think that they were sitting on a beach somewhere
sipping a cocktail and watching waves
while you were stuck in Belle Fourche still working the same job
you’ve been working for twenty years,
and you might have felt some envy, but mostly, you were comforted
with the thought that someday you would also be on a beach somewhere
sipping a margarita and watching the waves.
Now, when you have the memory of a person,
you wonder whatever happened to them,
and where did they move to,
so, you search their name on your stupid phone or your laptop
and you find out that they are not sipping a Rum and Coke in Pensacola
but that they are dead
and have been dead for years.
The unknowing of a death is gone:
accessibility
has destroyed tranquility.
Which is what happened when I searched for my old secretary,
who had moved to Florida before the Millennium,
and saw that she had died seven years ago,
and all this time I had not thought of her often,
except to share the joke we had played on her stalker cop-ex-boyfriend
or to think of her chipmunk happiness, her adorable face,
her independence:
the reinvention of herself after forty, after divorce.
This time has passed, not seeming like years at all,
unless a year becomes a day or an hour at this age,
and all the while I have thought she was wearing a sarong,
shopping at Coldwater Creek, listening to Jimmy Buffett songs,
with a man of some wealth and more years, or no wealth and less years,
laughing alongside her,
and I wonder what she died from, and I hope she did not suffer,
but mostly, I want to hold her in the present,
the ocean-side, now-should-be-sixty-ish-imp,
that this awful screen has stolen from me.
Things the Internet has Ruined (Hope) first appeared in Oakwood, Vol. 4, Issue 9 (2019).
The poem subsequently appeared in Snapdragon: A Journal of Art & Healing, Winter 2021 Edition.
Things the Internet has Ruined (Hope) Copyright © 2019 by Donna Kathryn Kelly
Three Lost Technicolor Seconds
A Shakespearean Sonnet to Louise Brooks (1906-1985)
Androgynous Kansas, taut earth stretching
toward pomegranate sky; grace goes the girl
from fields to stage; dust-bowl far fetching,
gossamer-laced sprite in summer-down swirl.
Seductive soil births dreams, twirling dance,
gamine ventriloquist-self without chords;
cool-draped wrists, softest flight, red-curtain chance,
winking gem, twister soul’s unspoken words.
Flapper stars falling, reckless nights hold her,
bare-midriff fields, fade takes the glimmer,
lost-cardigan world, soft goes the shoulder;
time, the sultry smile seizes dimmer.
American Venus, draped in velvet,
the world’s Pandora, girl in black helmet.
Three Lost Technicolor Seconds first appeared in “The Stars and Moon in the Evening Sky Anthology,” published by Southern Arizona Press (2022).
Three Lost Technicolor Seconds Copyright © 2022 by Donna Kathryn Kelly
November Four Seven Bravo Alpha
Two years before each of us
became an eyewitness to events
we could not foresee-
could not-
still cannot-
will never-
fully fathom,
there was another
unsettling blue sky,
another distance,
another autumnal flight of fate
to which we were riveted,
anchored by our united
powerlessness,
reminded of the subordinate
nature of our selves,
taught by the plane’s
unnavigated path
that just as clouds morph
and disappear:
So, go we.
The scope of our authority
is limited,
extremely, constantly;
and it rides on circumstances,
such as the sudden
loss of cabin pressure
at a high altitude.
See, our breaths
can be stolen
in a matter of seconds.
See, even we can drown
thousands of feet
above the oceans.
Golf is a game where the
slightest makes the difference:
the tweak of the lower back,
the placement of the thumb,
the spread of the feet
at a not-so-superstitious distance,
the clarity of image
of the end of an airborne flight.
The swing is more about grace,
than power.
Our hour is unknown to us
and it may come
after a time of redemption-
or not-
but this is common to all of us:
its arrival is never convenient.
We structure the entirety
of our days around numbers -
on the top right-hand corner
of a work computer,
or on the over-populated face
of a cell phone,
or on a VCR, or a microwave -
digits marking our arrival
or departure from a school,
our arrival or departure
from a workplace,
the arrival of
a certified nursing assistant
to wheel us
to the bathroom or to bingo.
In truth, it is time
that regulates us,
and our most important meeting
is unscheduled.
Four months before the Learjet
descended into the ground
at a hundred times the force of gravity
two miles southwest of Mina,
scarring the field with a
ten-foot deep crater,
Payne Stewart studied a slope,
calculated distance,
force,
grade.
It was an uphill putt,
and when he landed it
softly into the cup,
there was the celebratory
lunging of the body,
the throwing, sans javelin,
of fist to air,
the iconic mule-kick
of the right leg.
He stood,
in the drizzle,
his forearms bare,
calves-covered
to plus-fours’ edge
with white socks,
answering questions
into a microphone,
with a serene distraction,
that seemed like subdued joy,
and he said,
“Phil’s going to have
his opportunities again,
mine might be on the short list.”
At first,
when news of the
northwest-bound plane
was broadcast,
the occupants’ names
were not disclosed.
We were told that a Learjet
had taken off from Orlando,
that it was supposed
to be headed to Texas,
that its crew
was unresponsive
shortly after takeoff,
and that it was cruising
on autopilot,
a ghost plane,
over the heartland.
There was a professional
golfer onboard.
This news was as mysterious,
as it was horrific,
and then,
when his identity was reported,
it was inconceivable.
The flight time was
three hours and fifty-four minutes.
The jet cut across
Mississippi and Tennessee,
passed over Payne Stewart’s
birth state of Missouri,
pitched high above Iowa,
and spiraled downward
into a field in Edmunds County,
underneath a sheet of reeling
South Dakota sky.
See, we cannot think
of everything.
See, we do not even know
where our final resting place will be.
November Four Seven Bravo Alpha first appeared in the Spring 2020 Edition of Pasque Petals.
The poem was the Third Place entry in the 2020 South Dakota State Poetry Society’s Annual Poetry Contest (Landscape Category).
November Four Seven Bravo Alpha Copyright © 2019 by Donna Kathryn Kelly