KEY POINTS:
When I grow up I want to be just like Anna Nicole Smith. Think of the possibilities. Spend your last days in a US$1600 ($2307)-a-night hotel room reportedly featuring an orange corduroy couch, a leopard-print ironing board, and a mini-bar stocked with lubricant and glow-in-the-dark condoms.
Have people
so excited to see you in any state of consciousness, the footage of your attempted resuscitation has already sold for US$500,000, according to ABC News.
What's more, you trumped the first woman ever to become president of Harvard for headlines in American papers.
Pound for pound, implant for implant, if we weigh you up against any other story this week, Anna Nicole, you are not just a "train wreck", "famous for being famous" as the regurgitated cliches kept swirling - you are a winner.
The San Francisco Chronicle's front-page read, "It's like losing a girlfriend". The Washington Post compared you to the condemned courtesans of Caravaggio and Proust. Salon called you not so much a candle in the wind but "a bonfire in a hailstorm".
Admittedly, most often heard were phrases like "she was a mess" and "totally out of it" but isn't that a tribute, too, in some circles?
Makes a girl want to wear nipple tape on one's sleeve in memorial. Okay, I may not opt for the two additional breast procedures already undertaken since giving birth just five months ago, or the nasty methadone collection in the fridge, or the bad nuclear nuptials that keep mushroom-clouding into litigation.
But being my own woman, I've decided to ditch this paltry journalism grind. Instead, I can just have breast augmentation annually, reassuringly, like a never-ending balloon mortgage. Okay, maybe my breasts might look like one huge dirigible pasted to my chest, but as long as I don't lean over an open flame I'd never disappoint my adoring fans.
No, I'm not in it for the money, sex, and infamy that awaits me just out of reach in the worldwide party capital of Devonport. Instead, I'm opting for Anna Nicole Smith-hood because she does us all a great service.
Anna Nicole's tele-trash life and death shows the rest of us something that women seldom admit but secretly need - a defining moment to measure who we are not.
Her strobe flash exposes a cultural barometer of what sexual choices we didn't make - and that makes us happy to go back to wiping up the entire bag of rice that just spilled under the fridge.
You didn't marry an old, sick millionaire for profit. You didn't spend your life mainlining Slimfast, methadone and silicone. You didn't sell your sexuality as a commodity in the arenas most of us choose for love and achievement.
To understate it kindly, Anna Nicole's idea of personal development was slightly different from yours - and darling, your fine Lynn of Tawa self-reflection never looked so complimentary in contrast.
Isn't that the rub? We thrive on winning that comparison just once in a bloody while.
Admit it, you plodded unsuspectingly into this column for two reasons, you thought I might enlighten you on her cause of death, or you figured I'd give you more details on her sink-hole life.
Either way, we all win. She gets what she wanted: fame, money and a tragic Marilyn Monroe death.
And we get to rejoice in having to use sunscreen instead of botox for our rugby ball complexions because we made the right choices.
Reading about Anna Nicole is better than hearing that Angelina Jolie has a flaky scalp or Scarlett Johansson doesn't floss, because she fell.
She didn't fall from some film star's lofty heights of talent or achievement; she tripped in mud, fell off her Lucite stilettos, and died the death we secretly thought was due her.
It was due because she didn't play by our rules. Marriage isn't supposed to be an exchange of sex for security. Money isn't supposed to be for those who don't earn it. Fame shouldn't be accessible to the talentless.
You can blame the press for feeding our hunger all you want but Anna Nicole has done us a favour.
She helped define our dirty little rules by breaking them. The rest of us mere mortals get to sit back in the safety of our very different choices and merely dream of liposuction.
So the way I figure it, I can start small and work my way up. Buy a chihuahua and start cruising nursing homes.
I don't have aspirations to be an astronaut in a nappy with pepper spray on a road-rage trip. I've got bigger plans for the next generation. I'm saving that dream for my daughter.
