Two of the hot topics trending on Twitter Tuesday were Angelina Jolie and the IRS.
Beauty and the Beast.
Jolie stunned the world with a New York Times op-ed article explaining why she had decided to have a preventive double mastectomy once she learned that she has the BRCA1 gene, which spikes the risk for breast and ovarian cancers.
"I started with the breasts, as my risk of breast cancer is higher than my risk of ovarian cancer, and the surgery is more complex," she wrote, adding that "I do not feel any less of a woman. I feel empowered that I made a strong choice that in no way diminishes my femininity."
I had to keep checking the byline to make sure the piece was really by Angelina Jolie. She has been the embodiment of physical perfection for so long — a fierce, tattooed warrior and seductress with a genuine wildness who made female action roles from Lara Croft to Mrs. Smith to Evelyn Salt absolutely believable.
So it was hard to read about the pain caused by the genetic imperfections lurking beneath that lush perfection.
Jolie, 37, is a famous crusader for refugees. She has also had other, more noirish shades to her image, from wearing Billy Bob Thornton's blood in a vial around her neck to drugs, cutting, knife-collecting and depression to shoplifting Brad Pitt from America's sweetheart to the "Saturday Night Live" parody that presents the serial adopter and mother of six as a stalker of babies.
Her courage in going public with the graphic details of her mutilation and reconstruction makes her a real-life action heroine.
Jolie's health revelation overshadowed another one in the same newspaper by the woman who would be the first female mayor of New York City.
Christine Quinn, the council speaker and early leader to succeed Michael Bloomberg, told The Times' Kate Taylor about her descent — as a teenager trying to manage her mother's fatal breast cancer — into bulimia and alcoholism.
In a classic Irish Catholic quid pro quo with the heavens, Quinn said she believed that if she could be the perfect daughter, thin and pretty, somehow her mother might be saved.
"For a brief moment," she said of the early sensation of throwing up, "you've kind of expelled from your being the things that are making you feel bad."
The shame was harder to expel. "Asking for help, going to the rehab, dealing with bulimia, cutting back on drinking, getting drinking out of my life altogether — all of that helped me put the pieces back together," she said, adding that the final piece was her marriage to her wife, Kim Catullo, a corporate lawyer from New Jersey.
Quinn clearly wanted to control the way the news got out rather than having it spread by her opponents in the mayor's race. She also wanted to sprinkle some humanity on an image that took hits when she appeared as "Mayor Dracula" on a winter cover of New York magazine and when she was skewered in an article in the Times in March about her screaming fits and volatile bursts of wrath and retaliation.
She certainly hopes her upcoming campaign-season memoir is helpful to one 46-year-old woman who feels stuck, castigated as an arrogant bully who moves this way and that, going as far to the left as she can.
With Chris Christie, his admission that he had lap-band surgery under an assumed name to curb his obesity is a second-tier story. The first-tier story is that he's a guy who takes no guff.
Christine Quinn needs a first-tier story.
Maureen Dowd writes for The New York Times.