When all the significant activity in life seems to be taking place on the other side of a screen, people who have never appeared on a screen themselves receive powerful negative messages about their significance in the world.

Ordinary people will therefore paint themselves up and wear odd clothing to a football game, in hopes of tricking a camera into giving them one fleeting appearance before their fellows;  or they may wait on long lines for the chance to wave a sign that might possibly catch Al Roker's attention outside the Today show studios. Whatever they do,   they know their odds are slim, and the effort required will probably be significant.

To people scurrying so determinedly after such small crumbs of notice, the way in which genuine celebrities simply appear, without  apparent effort, and have the whole world fascinated with them,  can make them seem to be almost a different order of being.

It is thus, in an odd way, almost natural, given some of the proclivities of the human mind, for people to look to celebrities for a good deal more than a hot fastball, a slick guitar lick, or whatever else is their ostensible stock-in-trade.