AN INTERESTING DILEMMA

Because of my work in the entertainment industry, I mingle with a lot of celebrities. Actors, writers, producers and musicians. Some are complete dick-heads that I just want to shoot in the head and bury in a shallow grave, while others are just the nicest, sweetest, most sensitive and intellectually stimulating people I've ever known. Ralph Fiennes is in the latter category. I've had the hots for Ralph ever since 1993's The Cormorant, about a man's twisted obsession with a bird. I thought he was drop dead gorgeous back then — those laser-beam blue eyes! — and, despite the quickly receding hairline, has managed to maintain his movie star good looks, I think.

So, anyway, after watching him in Strange Days a while ago, I did a little poking around on the internet to find out what Ralph's been up to since his stint as Voldemort in the Harry Potter movies, and up popped an old news story about a very brief fling he had with an airline stewardess while flying at 30,000 feet, and later that night, again, in his hotel room in Mumbai. The scandal came and went in a matter of weeks, but if you read the details of her side of the story you start to get a picture of a woman in a terrible mental state, spiritually, morally and financially bankrupt. She wasn't dealing with a full deck before she and Ralph did the quick and nasty in the jet's lavatory, and afterward, when the scandal broke and she lost her job, things got much, much worse for her.

It got me thinking about relationships, that spark of attraction and sexual tension that a man and woman feel when they first meet and get to know each other. It can be intoxicating, exciting...the thrill of a new romance. But what if you were Lisa Robertson? What if you were there on that plane with an absolutely ravishing, intellectually stimulating and hilariously funny man. A passenger, who made it quite clear with his words and actions that he was really enjoying your company — and was hoping to get to know you better, preferably while the two of you were naked? Would you risk it all...your job, your financial stability, your home and car, would you be willing to ruin your reputation and put yourself up to humiliation and ridicule on an international scale just to have a 20-hour sex romp with this man?

I wouldn't. Not a chance in Hell. I adore Ralph and, from time to time, fantasize about he and I doing it in the coat check room at a Vanity Fair after party, or in the boiler room in the basement of a hotel in Monte Carlo — BUT there is not a man on this Earth that is worth that kind of risk. I have a great life. I have dignity, self-respect and a strong spiritual centre — and I'll be damned if I'm going to throw that all away on a seedy little celebrity fling.

KJC