It's been a tough week for Katy Perry. First off, there's the upcoming release of her mother's memoir, which her father told Star magazine last week "has caused quite a bit of tension." That would be because Katy Perry's mom is an evangelical Christian who would not let Katy Perry watch the Smurfs when she was a child because Smurfette was a slut, and Katy Perry is a person who has whipped cream spraying out of her tits.
For her part, Katy Perry's mother (who is famous exclusively for being Katy Perry's mother) has insisted the book is not "some tell-all book about my daughter," even though the book's text includes such spicy tidbits as "no mother wants to see the top of her daughter's boobs." There's also the fact that, out of the thousands who may read the book, less than four will read it for anything other than the parts about Katy Perry.
Ah, well, at least she'll have her rooms piped in cream or soft pink and her arrangements of fresh pink flowers to comfort her, along with an array of seasonal organic fruits and two egg chairs, one with footstool.
Those are just a few of the weirdly specific mandates laid out in Katy Perry's current tour rider — released last week by the Smoking Gun, which doesn't do her any favors by casting her as a preening horror show of demands and her management as cigar-chomping fat cats skimming off the top. (For its part, management reserves the right to hold as many tickets to whatever of her shows it wants to scalp on resale sites like StubHub; basically, it's a ploy to cut out the middleman and inflate prices on the best seats. Nice!)
Meanwhile, Katy Perry has some extremely discriminating tastes, and she will require they be met both in the dressing room and in the car: Her drivers, for example, are expressly prohibited from touching any of her stuff and speaking to her unless spoken to. My personal favorite directive, though, is this one: "DO NOT STAIR AT THE BACKSEAT THRU THE REARVIEUW MIRROW," the myriad spelling errors of which suggest that this particular item was inserted either by Katy Perry personally or by a five-year-old. Katy Perry will do enough stairing at herself, thank you, as her dressing rooms must be stocked with full-length mirrows. And when she is done stairing at them, she will perhaps enjoy the aforementioned flowers, as long as there are no carnations. For God's sake, ABSOLUTELY NO CARNATIONS.
That's stipulated in the tour rider, with an extra underline just for emphasis.
Which can't help but lead one to wonder: Why does Katy Perry hate carnations so much? One possible explanation? The carnation's symbolic weight: In Christian mythology, carnations first grew from the tears of the Virgin Mary as Jesus carried the cross to Calvary — no, seriously — and thus the carnation symbolizes a mother's undying love. Freud would have a fucking field day.
Plus, add that to the ejaculatory symbolism suggested by the whipped cream spraying out of her tits, and you've got the hottest pop-culture Electra complex possibly ever — hot enough, anyway, to melt your missing popsicle.
