One of my favorite channels is Biography. I've always enjoyed biographies because they usually reveal secrets and insights into a person's character that help you to better understand their fates. The other night I was watching the biography of the gigantically talented but physically diminutive Judy Garland. She was sitting on a couch with her three children (it must have been sometime in the 60's) and she was talking about how all her life she had been a "terrible eavesdropper", always fascinated by what was going on in the other room. The problem, she described, as her doe eyes looked directly at the camera, was that every time she looked through a keyhole there was an eye looking back at her.
As she seemed to accept this as part of the territory of fame I could not help but reflect that this was a piece of humanity that many of us share - this nosiness to know what's being said in the next booth, what's going on in our neighbor's house, what's happening down around the corner. Only today our voyeur abilities are enhanced (and complicated) by the Internet.

Eavesdrop is a funny word.

To eavesdrop is to surreptitiously overhear a private conversation. Ancient Anglo-Saxon law punished eavesdroppers, who skulked in the "Eavesdrip" of another's home, with a fine. The eavesdrop or eavesdrip is the width of ground around a house or building which receives the rain water dropping from the eaves. By an ancient Anglo-Saxon law, a landowner was forbidden to erect any building at less than 2 feet from the boundary of his land, and was thus prevented from injuring his neighbor's house or property by the dripping of water from his eaves.

No wonder celebrity watching is so irresistible, gossip columnists divining some of their magic with the lure of salacious insider knowledge. No wonder those of us who are given the ability to "eavesdrop" on others so naturally gravitate to the activity. Maybe it's the "need to know" all of us think we have.

Facebook
Google
MySpace
Online Forums
Discussion (Argue) Boards
Online Groups
Websites
Blogs

These are only part of the arsenal available today to those of us who are interested in what's goin' on next door. In many instances, all we have to do is point and click to have the barrier walls fall away, exposing the pink inner flesh of vulnerability. But how many of us get it that when we look through these keyholes there are eyes looking back at us? How many can stand the harsh glare some of those eyes possess?

I don't know what happened in Judy Garland's life that may have contributed to her early death at 47 in Chelsea, London, England on June 22, 1969. Maybe the fact that for forty-five of those years she had eyes looking in on her hastened her departure from this life. Maybe the fact that she was always looking out, only to have her vision blocked by others, hurried her demise. It is said that around the time Judy Garland died several tornadoes touched down in Kansas.

You just can't stop a force of nature.
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