![]() “Somebody I used to hang out with would always get very frustrated with me,” she says, presumably referring to Bieber, whose name she will not utter. Her seemingly infinite patience with these intrusions is something between a habit and a principle. One by one they approach our table, shyness replaced by rapturous giggles as Gomez praises their pretty dresses and invites them to sit with her for a picture. In the tearoom at the Peninsula Beverly Hills hotel, little girls in pinafores and pink high-tops sit on heavily tasseled sofas and drink sparkling apple juice out of champagne flutes. And so maybe I thought everybody out there was thinking, This is a waste of time.” But I wasn’t figuring my own stuff out, so I felt I had no wisdom to share. What I wanted to say is that life is so stressful, and I get the desire to just escape it. I couldn’t say, ‘Everybody, let’s pinky-promise that you’re beautiful!’ It doesn’t work that way, and I know it because I’m dealing with the same shit they’re dealing with. Suddenly I have kids smoking and drinking at my shows, people in their 20s, 30s, and I’m looking into their eyes, and I don’t know what to say. At concerts I used to make the entire crowd raise up their pinkies and make a pinky promise never to allow anybody to make them feel that they weren’t good enough. ![]() I felt I wasn’t giving my fans anything, and they could see it-which, I think, was a complete distortion. Basically I felt I wasn’t good enough, wasn’t capable. I started to have panic attacks right before getting onstage, or right after leaving the stage. ![]() “Tours are a really lonely place for me,” she explains. (This was the second time Gomez had canceled a tour to enter into treatment in January 2014, shortly after being diagnosed with lupus, she spent two weeks at the Meadows, the Arizona center that has welcomed Tiger Woods, Rush Limbaugh, and Kate Moss.) The cause, she says, was not an addiction or an eating disorder or burnout, exactly. Last summer, after the North American and Asian legs of her “Revival” tour, with more than 30 concerts remaining, she abruptly shut things down and checked into a psychiatric facility in Tennessee. “I’ve cried onstage more times than I can count, and I’m not a cute crier,” she says. Even as she projects strength and self-assuredness, Gomez is not stingy with frailty. As I slip an apron over her mane of chocolate-brown hair, for which Pantene has paid her millions, and tie it around her tiny waist, I wonder whether her legions have felt for years the same sharp pang of protectiveness that I’m feeling at present. Gomez queues up a playlist-Dolly Parton, Kenny Rogers-and back in the kitchen, there is a chile relleno casserole to assemble, green enchiladas to roll, and her cheesy potatoes to mix together. “I bet you didn’t think we were going to get this real,” she says, and when I tell her that real isn’t the first word that springs to mind when faced with these ingredients, she responds with the booming battle-ax laugh that offers a foretaste of Gomez’s many enchanting incongruities. She sets down her Givenchy purse and brings up, in gaudy succession, a frozen package of Giant Eagle Potatoes O’Brien, a can of Campbell’s Cream of Chicken soup, a bag of shredded “Mexican cheese,” and a squat plastic canister of French’s Crispy Fried Onions. All we need are Gomez’s famous cheesy potatoes-so bad they’re good, she promises. I already have chicken simmering in green salsa, poblano peppers blackening on the flames of the stove, and red cabbage wilting in a puddle of lime juice. We’ve decided that tonight’s dinner will be a sort of tribute to the after-church Sunday barbecues she remembers from her Texan childhood. On an unusually wet and windy evening in Los Angeles, Selena Gomez shows up at my door with a heavy bag of groceries. Getting Real “People so badly wanted me to be authentic, and when that happened, finally, it was a huge release,” Gomez says.
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