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'Never, ever, get famous.  Not even if your 13-year-old self wants it MORE THAN ANYTHING in the whole wide world and would never ever ask for anything in the world ever ever again if she could just be one-name famous, like Cher or Twiggy.  That I not the kind of famous you want to be, ever (EVER!).

That kind of famous is a presence that cannot be escaped until such time as you realize it’s going, and then you want it back.  That sort of fame is the puppy at your heels, or the cat in your face, always wanting something but it’s hard to tell what so you are by turns playful and engaging (for the puppy fame) then aloof and reserved (cat-like fame behavior).  You don’t know whether to court it or kick it, and either way whatever you decide will be wrong as the day is long, especially when the puppy keeps getting kicked and the cat keeps getting petted.  You will be wrong about fame, no matter what.

You think that have the flash of cameras in your face at big events would be great, and it is, but then you’re blinded and everyone is covered in tiny white bulb-burst dots for the time it takes you to recognize the really GOOD gossip columnists from the tacky ones, and by then someone else has taken your arm and is dragging you around down the red carpet while fans try to grab a strand of hair (ouch!) or a picture or get an autograph or stick their slimy hands on your body in places for which they’d be arrested if it lasted longer than the time it takes for the big moolah guards to whisk you away from the bright lights.  You can’t get to enjoy that kind of fame, really, ever.

REAL fame is a sad state; having the world at your fingertips but almost always out of grasp, you know.  If you’re really really good you can balance it for a moment or a season, but it never is fully within your power to control.  Being really famous lasts only as long as it takes for some ‘new you’ to come along and flutter their cheap little eyelashes at some producer who puts them in a show for a tenth of what it costs for you and if they’re any good at all, then BOOM!  There goes fame, bouncing down the hall toward that cheap floozy like a puppy after a kitten.  Then you’re left with nothing before anyone else knows that fame isn’t in your reach anymore.

That’s the kind of fame that’s both a blessing and a curse.  Shining and bright and irritating as all hell when you have it twisting and flipping around you, the best thing ever for a girl for that instant when’s worth it to the crowds; darkly ominous and melancholic when receding into someone else’s future, a mirror no longer reflecting your once-brilliance.

Nope – fame isn’t worth chasing.  Not that kind.  Better to be infamous and live on and on than be famous and be forgotten one the lenses are on someone else.

Guess what I’m saying is, give up the stage and take up the pen, kiddo.  You might not make the front page of the Life style section of the local rag, but you will be able to make all those pretty little birds who do, crow your lines in whatever way you want.   That’s infamy.  That’s fame.  That’s where the real power lies.  Fame can't hold a candle to that.'

So sayeth I, Tiff.