538: the media gave Trump a big assist with $2 billion worth of free advertising.

[politicaljunkie41910]

7. Having grown up in Los Angeles, I was never impressed with celebrity.

Having grown up poor and black in LA, I had the benefit of a Catholic school education. The studios were always filming episodes of their TV shows at their Hollywood studios and needed the benefit of a live studio audience. They would send a bus to pick up our students because they could count on us to behave. They almost always rewarded us prior to the taking with a pizza party, and they always gave away a small prize (but a prize nonetheless) to the studio audience. So I always signed up to go. So you get to meet a lot of celebrities over the four years of high school, and you watch them during their performance and between breaks and their luster seems to fade easily over time. Not that they were bad people or anything, they just came across during filming as normal people. I grew up thinking, they are just like me. How naive of me, to think that there was no difference between their lives and mine based on what I saw in that small sound studio, but not knowing any better, and having no personal knowledge of their off camera activities, it was only much later that I learned how poor we actually were and how rich they were. But by then, it was too late. I had grown accustomed to seeing celebs on a frequent basis, and I just assumed we had more in common than we had differences. Also, in spite of our 'poorness' our mother made sure that we were introduced to culture which LA had plenty of (museums and shows at the Music Center) and much of it was free and she put us into programs like dance, girls scout, and volunteer work, that kept us busy and exposed to many different things.

To this day I cannot bring myself to get excited over seeing a celebrity in person.