I have to admit that in my new life without a magazine to run, I feel a teensy bit of this luxury myself. I've been discovering how seductive it is to own your own life rather than rent it.

One small perk of my new existence, for instance, is not having to go to Hollywood for the Golden Globe Awards. I used to go every year to host a party and troll for movie star covers.

I am told that once upon a time the Golden Globes, sponsored by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, used to be a slightly corrupt and cockeyed little fiesta where Sophia Loren could make a risqui joke from the stage without giving Middle America a heart attack. Now the presence of TV cameras has turned a hokey Hollywood affair into a pre-Oscar trash-fest almost entirely hijacked by commerce. There are so many sponsors and freebies it's like spending the evening trapped in a gift bag with two press agents and a hairdresser, unable to get to the bathroom.

Attendance at the show requires climbing into a preposterous designer dress and a lot of rocks borrowed from Cartier at 3 o'clock in the afternoon (to fool East Coast viewers in another time zone into thinking it's a glittering evening). You are then squeezed into a table with a morosely silent nominee and his entourage (How pissed was Leo, by the way?) in intense overlit heat with a plate of asparagus and chicken congealing before you. It stays uneaten for three hours A) because it's teatime not dinnertime and B) because nobody looks good on TV shoveling food in their mouth. The cameras also demand for some reason that there is a bottle of champagne but no water. "I don't know about you," Hugh Grant commented to me one year, "but underneath this tux I am sweating like a wolf."

Waiting for valet parking to surface, you then stand in line with the stars of a thousand TV sitcoms you have never watched and wait for very small talents to climb into very big cars.

There has to be a better way and there is. I have never felt more a member of the media elite than I did last Sunday -- watching the Globes on TV in my own home with a bowl of soup and the all-knowing commentary of my 12-year-old daughter.

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