A Star Is Born?

Nadya Suleman is like cigarette butts outside a strip bar: disgusting and everywhere. She’s on NBC’s Today Show in the morning, followed by Doctor Phil, and Entertainment Tonight later on. Taped portions of those appearances are then re-played ad nauseum on other syndicated shows and cable TV. If you’ve been in a coma, and don’t know who she is, you’re lucky. She is the “octomom,” the California woman who gave birth to octuplets by caesarean section in January.

At first blush, Suleman’s story seemed like it would have a miracle happy ending – her babies all survived, and we could have imagined her getting gifts from companies and individuals all over the country to help her with this unenviable challenge. But it quickly nose-dived, and the octomom was wrapped in the fat, dripping tentacles of scandal.It was discovered that the 33 year old already had six kids at home, and many people were outraged, believing the single woman’s in vitro fertilization treatments and the births they produced would only burden taxpayers funding Suleman’s public assistance. The fury even drew death threats, yet the octomom keeps up her rigorous schedule of television interviews.

Her demeanor is, not surprisingly, very strange in these interviews. She looks like a déclassé Angelina Jolie, but claims she’s not interested in being a celebrity. Yet Suleman makes herself a celebrity by appearing on entertainment show after entertainment show, presumably for money. Her constant mantra is that she needs a new home to raise her litter. She reportedly hasn’t responded to a pornographer’s offer of a $1 million payday to have sex on camera, though that would certainly go a long way towards buying a house and diapers times eight.

Since the octomom has become a (supposedly reluctant) pop culture fixture overnight, I think pop culture is where we can find solutions to some of her problems.

• Apu and Manjula Nahasapeemapetilon of The Simpsons are octoparents, too. Manjula was inadvertantly dosed with extra fertility drugs and produced eight kids. Our friends at Wikipedia tell me their names are Uma, Nabendu, Poonam, Priya, Sandeep, Sashi, Gheet, and Anoop. (Incidentally, the last of that list is my favorite, because American Idol had a contestant named Anoop this season whom I really liked.) But to care for this brood, Apu came up with a handy vest containing eight baby bottles to feed them all, as a mother pug would suckle her puppies. Perhaps Nadya Suleman could contact Springfield’s newsman extraordinaire Kent Brockman for her next interview, and meet Apu at his Kwik-E-Mart to pick up a bottle vest of her own.

• Otto Octavius, aka “Dr. Octopus” is one of Spiderman’s arch-nemeses. His four mind-controlled mechanical arms became fused to his body in a freak laboratory accident involving his radioactive research. The transformation spawned a turn towards criminality, with “Doc Oc” using his arms to pry open bank vaults and squash meddling police officers. I suggest Nadya Suleman contact The Daily Bugle, the newspaper edited by Peter Parker/Spiderman’s boss, J. Jonah Jameson. Perhaps an interview with them could attract the attention of Doc Oc, whose own arms, in concert with his metal pincers, could change one Suleman kid while feeding another a cookie.

• The Octodog is what you get when you use a “Frankfurter Converter,” a simple kitchen product available online. This $16.95 device slices the lower half of a hot dog, making it into an octopus (see above). The octodog clearly is meant to encourage kids to play with their food, and is just so silly, the plastic cutters have been featured in magazines and on TV, including Rachael Ray. Even though Nadya Suleman claims to not know much about the world of celebrities, I suspect she may be drawn to something that’s gotten so much press. The Frankfurter Converter would certainly be a help to an octomom, with so many mouths to feed.

I hope the octomom does okay for herself and her kids. After all, they didn’t ask to be born to such a person in such strange circumstances. I’m eager for her star to fade, I just hope it doesn’t happen because someone else becomes a duodecimom (12 kids). I don’t think there’s enough room on Apu’s vest for that many baby bottles.

- Jacktastic