Happy Birthday....Macauley Culkin!!??? Is that you??

In an attempt to figure out what to write about for this blog I figured I would look at the top headlines on Yahoos home page. Upon searching, I found a name that I hadn’t heard in a while; Macaulay Culkin. It seems that this Sunday is Culkin’s 32^nd birthday. It seems so crazy to me that the cute little blonde that warmed our hearts in so many times is almost twice as old as me.

  Other than watching the Home Alone movies and My Girl countless times over the years, I haven’t seen or heard much about him at all. This is the face we all remembered and adored while he made us laugh and he made us cry. Every household in the 90s knew his face and his name. In 1991 Culkin became the youngest person(11 years old) to ever host Saturday Night Live. He was one of the most famous Hollywood kids of all time. But what happens when children receive this much attention before they even hit puberty?

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“Look guys, Macauley Culkin just turned 32! Isn’t that crazy?” I said to the group of girls in my dorm room. As they all crowed around my laptop in awe, this image popped up. We all gasped in disbelief. Not only did this not look like him, it looked like a man that was 55 rather than a man that had just turned 32. I think this a direct result of a child ruined by fame and the media. He was given too much attention throughout his childhood and early teens, so when he got to the age that he wanted to start making his own decisions, the media wouldn’t back off long enough to let him think first. When he was 17 he got married to a girl he hadn’t been dating very long and who was also 17. After their very successful two year marriage, the couple divorced. That was only the best of what was yet to come for Culkin.

Not to say that celebrities should not take responsibility for their own actions but I strongly feel that having the media involved with so much of his life at such a young age affected this man enormously.  He was an extremely talented actor that is now hanging on to life by a thread. Over the years he has been hounded by the media for being caught under the possession of marijuana, and now eight years later is addicted to heroin. Twenty years ago, viewers never would have guessed that such a charming little boy could be transformed into such a troubled man consumed by his own personal demons. All we can hope for is that this man lives to celebrate another birthday next year.