Reading a celebrity tabloid is like spraying an entire can of whipped cream directly into your mouth: It's great fun while it lasts, but you don't want anyone to catch you in the act.
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People with "enquiring minds" like me often try to hide our shameful reading habits. When company comes, we shove our collection of Us Weekly under the bed and display our single copy of The New Yorker in the rack. When we purchase People at the grocery store, we sneak it under a package of smoked Alaskan salmon. At cocktail parties, we pretend to be woefully ignorant of critical celebrity facts such as the name of Paris Hilton's dog.
"Tinkerbell?" we chuckle over our glass of merlot. "I'm afraid I don't keep up with that sort of nonsense."
It takes an event of seismic impact to drive the celebrity lovers out of their dark little spider holes and admit that, yes, we not only know who the Olsen twins are, but we are still worried sick about Mary Kate.
Such a defining event happened just recently.
"Can you believe it?" I said, calling the first person on my speed dial as soon as I heard.
"I know," said my girlfriend. "And to think the Star said it was 'baby time'."
"In Touch had them frolicking on the beach together."
"It's 10 times worse than Bennifer!"
This was huge! Gwyneth naming her baby Apple? Small potatoes. Janet's sneak peek at the Super Bowl? Who cares? No wardrobe malfunction - not even one involving Queen Latifah - could cause this kind of shock wave.
Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston had split, and almost everyone in Augusta was talking about it.
"It's all Angelina's fault!" declared an acquaintance, who only a few weeks earlier claimed to have no knowledge of either Simpson sister.
"It started going south after Jen was seen at the airport without her wedding ring," said another.
One by one, we all filed out of the celebrity closet. Not even Julia's twins caused this kind of stir. It took the split of Brad and Jen, Hollywood's golden couple, to "out" those of us who concealed our celebrity obsessions.
"I never would have guessed you read Star," I said to one friend.
"Not only do I read it," she said with uncharacteristic bravado. "I subscribe to it."
Wow! I thought. That's really hard core.
Immediately after I heard the news, I ran out and got an assortment of tabloids, brazenly displaying them in my grocery cart. This was a crisis situation, after all. No need to be coy. I wanted the dish!
These, of course, were the very magazines that only hours ago had Brad and Jen picking out baby booties. Now, they had rushed out issues offering in-depth analysis of the reasons for the breakup.
"This has been coming for a long time," said a source, who is second cousin of the couple's groundskeeper's mother. "They still want to remain friends."
Journalism doesn't get much more in-depth than that.
Soon the brouhaha will die down, and we'll go back to saying "Lindsay who?" and pretending we don't care how Rene Zellweger lost all that weight.
But for one brief shining moment, Jen and Brad's separation brought all of the underground gossip fans together.
Augusta resident Karin Gillespie is the author of Bet Your Bottom Dollar. She can be reached through her Web site at www.karingillespie.com.
