Celebrity Detox: (the fame game) by Rosie O'Donnell Page A

into yellow, into violet—some shadows—and in a snap the world was alive. It was Oz, and, thus inspired, he went on to make Roy G. Biv, the acronym every child learns in school, but they don’t teach you it is much more. The spectrum is the original miracle, the pulse of our planet; it is fractal, fractured, illuminating. It is an utter refusal of flatness.
    The Twin Towers had been flattened and the air smelled of smoke. I went to my craft room and squeezed some cadmium yellow onto my canvas. I remember that I was using Winton acrylic paint, pure pigment, devoid of the fillers that cheaper brands use. The paint glopped on and settled. It was thick, almost gelatinous. For a second I was scared. I had not painted in forty years, and as a kid I’d done it mostly out of art class obligation, the stick figures and square houses topped with a triangle.
    I lowered the brush and then plunged in. I stroked outward, sudden swimmer, and I could feel the creaminess come right up to my wrists, and the sensation, it is difficult to describe what it feels like to push paint around, how it glides despite the roughness of the canvas, glides but does not melt, as water would, how a stroke starts in a puddle of color and radiates outward to end in a faint spray.
    And so it was I started to paint. I had no knowledge, and no fear. All around me there was fear, and just seconds ago there had been fear inside me as well, but as soon as I started to push the paint fear left me and I was Roy G. Biv. I was not Rosie, not Ro, not Roseann, I was the brush plump with madder rose; and each shape I made became, in mere minutes, an object recognizable to me, a flower, a tree, a face, a frown. Hello, world. I can control you. I can create you. Color is definite. It does not die.

    The sky can look like a painting. I was on the plane coming back from the last Streisand concert, and when I looked out the window I thought of that first time, the smell of smoke that saturated the air for days after the attack, the Twin Towers falling, how quickly they crumpled. I looked at the sky, its tinges and the Rorschach shapes of the clouds, and I was in my craft room all over again, 9/12/01, making my canvases. And at the same time, in my mind, the sound of Streisand kept coming at me, and it felt as though sound could be chromatic, the red screech of someone’s scream, or the yellow droplets of light laughter. For a moment sound and color merged, and I was overwhelmed. I was exhausted, exhilarated. I started to cry.
    Streisand is an artist of unusual caliber, but there’s more to it than that. The
more
is that she has also controlled her career in a way I want to emulate. Streisand has never allowed anyone to tell her what to do, how to proceed, when to stop, or start. She stopped singing for years and years, despite the pressure from the public and God knows whoever else. She directed movies she was advised not to; she played roles that were “wrong” for her. She heard what she needed to hear, and disregarded the rest. Above all, she has never ceded creative control to anybody else. The result. Her career has been orchestrated by her.
    A life lived with integrity.

    I had come to understand that the show was not produced in the spirit of art, or even adventure. It lacked a heartbeat. A pulse. Humanity—truth. It lacked a mother’s touch. Perhaps that was because it is run by a man. A man who had a different idea about what made good TV. Could I do
The View
—without being in charge—could I do just enough to get by—to not be embarrassed?

    Not now though. I was on fire, in color. And there, on the plane, I thought of something Streisand had told me. Early in her career, she had explained to me, she’d had a hard time accepting her talent and the tremendous power it had over people. Sometimes her talent had even felt like a curse. But now, at sixty-four, now for the first time she said she was starting to feel some acceptance of what she could do, and