To LA, where the union between Britney Spears and Kevin Federline has been formally dissolved - a development which seems to have taken a lifetime to reach, and yet still leaves romantics everywhere howling the anguished inquiry: WHY?
More than any other trainwreck / backing dancer divorce in contemporary times, the parting recalls the final lines of Ernest Hemingway's classic novel The Sun Also Rises.
"Oh Jake," sighs our heroine, the doomed aristocrat Brett. "We could have had such a damned good time together."
"Yes," replies Jake. "Isn't it pretty to think so?"
That said, Kevin's apparent inability to look at a woman without knocking her up would suggest his affliction isn't quite the same as that which troubles Jake.
Anyways, it's all over now, and our eye is caught by a clause in Britney's final court settlement, in which her lawyer is granted a request that the custody documents pertaining to Little Sean Preston and Little Jayden James be sealed, for fear that their publication would "expos[e] the minor children to criminals who might target the minor children for financial gain".
It is a testament to this column's terminal lack of imagination that until reading these words, Lost in Showbiz had never considered the possibility that the Spears-Federline offspring would become pawns in some underworld struggle. But with every new second of contemplation, that possibility modulates further into a likelihood, until it now seems a positive inevitability that the two mites will soon be kidnapped by a pro-knicker guerilla group, before being the subject of insufficiently-met ransom demands, then blasting back into the public eye wearing combat kit and toting miniature assault rifles during the Great MTV Awards Siege of 2008, where they will demand Mommy wear undergarments from that day forth - a preposterous credo that will be dismissed as the ravings of Stockholm Syndrome when the brainwashed tots are finally brought to justice.
Will the secrecy order head off this future at the pass? Only time will show, but LSP and LJJ are advised to find flattering black berets in the interim.
