KEY POINTS:
Shortly before noon today, a young couple will take a stroll through New York's Central Park. Sprinting from bush to tree trunk will be a man with a camera recording their every move.
Paparazzi attack? Not quite. The two lovers are not famous models or film stars. They are members of a fast-growing group of Americans willing to pay to be treated as if they were.
Entourage-envy may seem odd to the likes of Britney Spears and Lindsey Lohan, but exist it does. Why else would companies be popping up precisely to offer people the experience of being hounded by snappers?
Among the biggest is Celeb-4-A-Day, a Los Angeles-based company that also works in Austin, Texas, and San Francisco. Poised to expand to the East Coast, it offers a whole gamut of faux-red-carpet services.
It can provide one or more suitably invasive photographers as well as a limousine and burly bodyguards. The pictures you like best are then printed on the cover of a fake gossip magazine. Who would want such a thing? Plenty of folk, according to company's founder Tania Cowher.
"Everyone likes a little bit of attention and to feel special. Everyday people should get just as much attention, if not more, than celebrities."
Among her competition is The A-List, an outfit that promises to besiege its clients with four photographers constantly snapping shots and bombarding them with questions.
Izaz Rony has also been advertising the services of his own "MethodIzaz" for six months.
But Rony, 23, is not comfortable with the phoney-paparazzo moniker. His customers, he says, are not so concerned with pretending to be famous but are drawn to the idea of being photographed on the sly.
Often his clients don't want to know what he looks like. They give him a time and place to show up and tell him what they will be wearing. What they get for US$600 are a collection of pictures capturing moments that are real rather than posed.
Today's clients want the Central Park pictures for their wedding album.
"Some people find it difficult to have pictures taken when they are posing. This way, they forget what is happening and they really aren't self-conscious any more."
Ours, he adds, has become a culture of personal billboarding. "Everyone I know has a Facebook page or a MySpace profile and they are concerned about the image they project of themselves. This way they have something that is real - it's the window they open for others to look through. They want to create the lives they want to live."
Kaiama Glover, 35, a professor, was pregnant and wanted the experience of bearing the child recorded. For a few hours, Rony shadowed her as she went to the dry cleaners and ate with a friend. He kept his cover until the very end when passers-by began asking if Glover was famous.
"It could be a horrible, invasive thing, like a stalker," Glover told Newsday recently. "But instead he is capturing you as you are."
- INDEPENDENT
