Imagine you're a paparazzo: most of your days are spent looking in vain for someone to snap. It's very rare to know exactly where a celebrity will be for eight hours each day all week. So Boy George must seem like a godsend to them.
Today is Boy George's second day of community service in New York, and he'll spend it just like he spent yesterday – dressed in oversized overalls, a dustmask and wielding a broom as he attempts to clean up the city, like a sort of fat bald gay Travis Bickle. And, understandably, there's been a lot of media interest in Boy George's community service; so much so that poor old Boy George has already thrown his first big girly strop at the photographers present.
Way, way back at some point during the interminable Boy George drugs arrest kerfuffle, after he was caught in his house with 13 bags of cocaine and after he accepted whatever plea bargain could keep him out of jail, Boy George decided on exactly the community service that he wanted to give New York; a concert, fashion show and series of make-up tutorials for the city's children. However, the judge found several holes in Boy George's plan – for instance, the only Boy George concert that anyone really wants to see is two songs long, and a six-minute community service sort of takes the piss a bit. Also, nobody in their right mind would want to wear make-up like Boy George.
So a compromise was reached – instead of a concert, Boy George's community service would see him scrubbing the streets of New York for five days of eight hour shifts, and if he didn't like it he could flipping well go back to prison. Mumbling about a media circus, Boy George started his community service yesterday. And, like most people being publicly humiliated by having to fulfill a subservient role in front of the world's media, Boy George took it all in his stride, getting jazzed up to the nines and good-naturedly joshing with the reporters about what a mess he was in. Yeah, right – Boy George wigged out at everyone, screaming and wailing and trying to flick rubbish at the photographers. Here's what Boy George apparently screamed:
“Nothing is going to rehabilitate me. My mum was a cleaner. My dad was a builder. I do not give a fuck, you know. All I am doing is my community service. Let me do it. It’s supposed to be making me humble. Why don’t you let me do it?”
A little later on, Boy George apparently rounded on one American reporter in particular, telling him:
“You’re really pathetic. You’re the one following me sweeping the streets. Who needs to get a life better than you.”
What's more, all this relentless fairy-stropping seemed to work. A New York sanitation department spokesman quickly got freaked out by the media scrum and moved Boy George back inside away from the cameras. However, the good news is that there seems to have been a Boy George-sanctioned Channel 4 documentary recording the events, so we should all get to see Boy George's community service in eye-searing close-up, at least when Channel 4 can make time in their schedules between the 19 different Big Brother spin-offs and shows about dumpy women taking their clothes off and still looking rubbish.
Read more:
Do you really want to hurt me? Do you really want to make me cry? – Times
[story by Stuart Heritage]