Britney Spears, who has bipolar, is making progress, reports the New York Times:

• [She] was awarded extended visits with her sons after a child custody hearing in Los Angeles Superior County Court on Tuesday...


• Mark Vincent Kaplan, a lawyer for Kevin Federline, her former husband, said the extended visits with the children, Sean Preston, 2, and Jayden James, 1, were "recognition of the progress that has been made, a progress of structure and stability."

Who ever thought you'd read about Britney in the Times? You really never know how it's going to turn out with celebrities. I think that's why we like them so much--not that they're beautiful (so many of them have thin lips and Picasso faces), not that they're rich, but that we are suckers for narrative: the star-crossed lovers, the tragically-fallen-heroes-who-left-us-something-indelible, the everymen. And Britney? Her narrative is getting more and more unique:

1. 1999-2002 -- standard sexy shell--is she a bad influence on America's young women?


2. 2003-2006 -- standard celebrity train wreck -- what happened to her? is she washed up forever? her true colors are shining through, she's trash, etc....


3. 2007 -- almost unprecedented public meltdown (at least I never saw anything like it in my life)


4. 2008 -- first person I've seen to put mental health on the cover of People magazine:
   
   
   
   

In between numbers 3 and 4, sometime last year, I wondered if she would be a suicide--a decidedly 00ze, post-talent suicide. That it would be fitting, wouldn't it? We are a generation that celebrates bad things, like Britney's music, and so we'd see her go instead of Kurt Cobain. ("You're the first generation that just loves CRAP," my dad used to say. And he's right: Thundercats was crap. Having a low-paying job is crap.) If she killed herself... wow. Even our celebrity suicides are campy! Aren't we witty?

But then she got taken out of her house in January on that stretcher--



--and her placement into parental custody did her wonders, and her legal turnaround began. (And I show that picture above, with the crowd, to highlight something pretty savage I read about the event:

"Paparazzi came out in force, following the ambulance as it left. Another group of paparazzi met the vehicle at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, some banging on the ambulance doors..."
[CNN]

Wow, that's gotta be fucked up. Photographers banging at you as you go into the psych hospital. I don't know if I'd ever have made it to the psych hospital if I'd had a huge crowd of people trailing me giving me shit.)

It's to my great discredit that I had to wait until somebody went into the hospital and I saw it on the news, with comments from inane celebrity journalists ('Britney Spears Meltdown': the fallout and aftermath of the Britney Spears drama in a special report on "Showbiz Tonight") to think about the person as someone who needed help like me and didn't deserve to just get laughed at. There's no question in my mind that if Vincent Van Gogh were around today, his hilarious mental illness issues would be picked up by CNN et. al just as hungrily: