Down and Out in Denver

Clearly this has nothing to do with Denver, but Denver does have me watching more TV than I would like, so there’s the connection.  Add to that the fact that I’ve been sick and still more TV has been consumed.

Let’s begin with Brooke, back in the day.  I don’t know that I actually remember her Calvin Klein ads, but they were so iconic that people who never saw them at the time “remember” them.  A 15-year-old Brooke told us that nothing came between her and her Calvins:

Nothing came between Brooke and her Calvins

Shields had already acted in the controversial “Pretty Baby,” in which, at the age of 12, she played a child prostitute, and then came “Blue Lagoon.”  Shields and Christopher Atkins as shipwrecked children (and cousins) who frolic naked and fall in love.  After that the infamous Calvin Klein commercials.  According to her imdb biography, Shields never stopped working,though looking at the list of credits, it’s clear that much of that work was in bad movies and as a guest star on TV programs.  That changed in the mid-90s when she starred in her own sitcom, “Suddenly Susan,” and reviews were not half bad.  When “Suddenly Susan” came to an end, Shields had demonstrated that, as an adult, she could actually act and she could be funny.  Then she returned to guest appearances and bad movies, until 2008-9, when she starred as Wendy Healy, in “Lipstick Jungle,” based on the book by Candace Bushnell (author of Sex and the City).

Shields used her popularity to secure a number of commercial contracts, and that is the subject of my post today.  Shields was seriously funny and clever in the commercials for Volkswagen, where she claimed that couples were only having children so that they could justify the purchase of a Volkswagen mini-van, called a Routan.  She explained that the current baby boom, or “Routan Boom,” could be blamed on German engineering. She makes fun of herself.  Check out this extended commercial:

She followed that up with a series of forgettable ads for Colgate Total, which are still running.  But where she lost me, and you know, dear reader, where I am going (if you don’t have Tivo), is the following:

Here Shields advertises a drug called Latisse, which has been proven to lengthen, thicken, and darken eyelashes.  Latisse will cure your hypotrichosis, what the commercials tell us is the clinical term for “inadequate or not enough lashes.”  I kid you not.  The word itself normally applies to people who lack normal hair growth, sometimes leading to baldness by the age of 25.  It can also be used to describe those who lose their hair to chemotherapy.  In other words, not women who find that Cover Girl Lash Blast just doesn’t do the trick.

Brooke, has it come to this?  Were sales of your book, Down Came the Rain, not what you had anticipated?  Do you have debt?  And finally, after a successful career as a model and actress, do you expect us to believe that you actually suffer from hypotrichosis?