If this little girl had known then what she knows now, she may have become an accountant instead of an actor.
Big news today out of New Salisbury, Ind.! Erin Moran, who played Joanie Cunningham on the hit TV series “Happy Days” in the 1970s is broke and living in a trailer park! And here are some more exclamation points, just for effect: !!!!!
Yes, apparently this is “news” worthy of passing along. I heard of it by way of a Facebook post, but my curiosity prompted me to start looking around on the great big ol’ InterWeb, where apparently there isn’t enough information posted that we really don’t need to know about. I found dozens of links reporting essentially the same story — that Moran and her husband, apparently having been evicted from their California home, are now really pathetic and living in an Indiana trailer park.
I found it especially humorous that the New York Post actually cited the National Enquirer as the source. Since when is the National-goddamned-Enquirer a source of anything we can really use?
Now, apart from having had a brief celebrity crush on Moran when I was 10 years old, I have no allegiance either way here. But c’mon, how is this news? We’ve been in a shaky economy for several years now — people all over the country have been losing their jobs and their homes. Are Moran and her husband somehow exempt from this because she was on a hit TV series nearly four decades ago?
And after digging around, it also appears that part of why they moved to a trailer park in Indiana is to care for Moran’s aging mother-in-law. Um, a little credit here? Sure, maybe they’ve had some bad breaks, but at least they’re turning it into something positive. Their reward? Being splashed across the news as if they’ve failed society somehow.
I blame The Justin Bateman Principle, which states, “If you were famous in the ’80s, you will never, never be un-famous again.” Best I can discern, this term was coined by Rolling Stone writer Rob Sheffield in reference to bands like Duran Duran and Motley Crue, who never seem to go away, no matter what. The thing is, he meant it to be at least somewhat complimentary.
But I”m guessing there are lot of stars from the 1980s who wish people would just let it go already. Moran must be one of them right about now. I mean, she had a lot of fun as a kid/teen-ager making a TV show (of course, she was also on “Joanie Loves Chachi” as a teen in the ’80s), built a surrogate family out of the friends she met, and now she’s a regular person again. Well, unless you’re the media. Or a pathetic loser who still lives vicariously through celebrities rather than living your own life.
Sadly, that’s why these “news” “organizations” report this stuff as if it’s somehow scandalous or, god forbid, important to the rest of us. It isn’t, and it isn’t. If you ask me, our time would be far better spent doing something constructive, like turning a dead cat into a helicopter.
Brain Farts Online 