There’s a diminutive young woman whose fashion sense is bad, but her conduct worse. Despite her funny-sounding nickname, she apparently isn’t always a barrel of laughs, resulting in her arrest in Seaside Heights, New Jersey. But don’t fret for poor Snooki, as 22 year old Nicole Polizzi is called. She’s cut a deal.
The pint-sized “Jersey Shore” star, sentenced to community service after pleading guilty to disturbing beachgoers this summer, has figured out how to finish fulfilling her punishment.
According to E! Online, she’ll sign autographs this weekend at the Seaside Heights Community Center and donate the proceeds.
“If people want an autograph, they will make a $10 contribution to Donations of Love,” Polizzi’s lawyer, Raymond Raya, told the site. “Nicole will also be making an additional contribution to the organization.”
Don’t jump to the obvious conclusion that Snooki, by dint of her celebrity, is getting off easy.
“It can be quite painful to sign autographs for three hours,” Raya told E!.
Tell me about it.
The Daily News article isn’t quite fair, however, in that Snooki was also required to spend the day cleaning the Seaside Heights police station and the animal cages at the Popcorn Park Zoo. Whether this is a better gig than picking of roadside trash is a matter for some debate, but it still falls within the parameters of a typical sentence, appropriate to the legitimate purposes of a conditional discharge of Snooki’s drunken boardwalk conduct.
The problem is that the hype was all about the autographs. It’s bad enough that reality television has found gold in the gutter, and offers enticing stars like Snooki, whose talents range from drinking alcohol to fighting with others. Shows like this are favored by those who spend their entire allowance to go see movies like Jackass 3D. Imagine the wonderful lessons learned about both the legal system and the consequences of behavior.
Ironically, the community service performed by poor Snooki might well have served to teach a relatively decent lesson, that even trashy reality TV stars are expected to behave themselves appropriately and play well with others, upon pain of performing such mundane and banal tasks as cleaning up animal poop and working at the Zoo. Instead, the media went for the sensational and misleading, turning what might have been a useful story into farce.
Regular people don’t get to sign autographs in satisfaction of their community service. No, you aren’t Snooki, and three hours of autograph signing isn’t in the cards for you. But then, it wasn’t in the cards for Snooki either. At least not without some real community service for two days. But why talk about that and ruin a really screwy story.
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As much as I’d love to hate Snooki and her ilk, I place the blame on the American people for buying into the idea that being on MTV makes you a celebrity in the first place.
Also, and this is completely tangential, while I don’t normally find myself wishing death upon people, I sometimes find myself wishing that one of the Jackass guys gets killed doing a Jackass-related stunt, so maybe MTV would shut it down for good and we don’t have to be subjected to it anymore. When I learned that Johnny Knoxville has a young daughter, that made me seethe with rage and how much more irresponsible that makes his shenanigans.
I know you don’t quite mean it, but I understand your outrage and concern about the impact that celebrating irresponsibility has on the mentality of fans. I truly have no idea what we’re breeding as a result of making these people and their shenanigans into celebrities.
That’s exactly what concerns me. It’s not that I think kids are going to go out and replicate these stunts, or that I actually wish one of the Jackass guys would die, it’s that raising kids in an environment where mindless self-inflicted violence is considered a valid form of entertainment can have nothing but detrimental consequences.
I think the worst possible punishment for her would be if no one showed up wanting an autograph.
That would have been the sign of a healthy society. Alas, it didn’t happen.