A 'detoxified' Demi Moore. Photograph: Charles Sykes/Rex Features
Hasn't cinema's Demi Moore always been a force for good? Certainly she has, ever since that time in the mid-Triassic period when she posed pregnant on the front of Vanity Fair, providing the inspiration for a thousand copycat celebrations of entertainment industry fecundity, which will never - never! - grow stale as an editorial idea, no matter how many reality TV sublebrities haul their distended bellies into the photographer's studio of a third-tier celebrity magazine, then meet the camera's gaze with a defiant jut of the chin, in the adorable belief that they're engaged in something to do with empowerment.
Anyways, when Lost in Showbiz heard this week that Demi Moore's blood was being sucked by Austrian leeches, it assumed the reference was to a movie plotline. At some point, Demi was always going to have to accept that the call from Inside the Actors' Studio was unlikely to come, and a move into cod-European schlock horror would represent a realistic choice for a woman previously outacted by a pottery phallus.
But set your faces to stunned - because it emerges that this is happening in actual real life. Yes, Demi has been all the way to some Alpine spa to have "leech therapy", and upon her return took to David Letterman's sofa to proclaim herself phlebotomy's newest devotee.
"These aren't just swamp leeches," she explained to the host. "We are talking about highly trained medical leeches."
Oh my God! I think one sucked out her brain! Though any leech permitted to latch on to Demi's silicone exoskeleton would ideally have spent seven years in leech medical school, it appears one unlicensed bloodsucker slipped through the spa's screening procedure - and the result is a pseudoscientific discourse that contrives to make Gillian McKeith look like Christian Barnard.
"They have a little enzyme," explains Demi, "and when they are biting down on you it gets released in your blood and generally you bleed for quite a bit - and your health is optimised." Mm. But how? "It detoxifies your blood - I'm feeling very detoxified right now. We did a little sampler first, which is in the belly button. It crawls in and you feel it bite down on you and you want to go, 'You bastard.' " Yes, love. Then what? "Then you relax and work on your breathing. You watch it swell up on your blood, getting fatter and fatter - then when it's super-drunk on your blood it just kind of rolls over like it's stumbling out of the bar."
Then it's on to the full procedure. "You have to do a turpentine bath first," Demi explains, which must have been something of a risk for someone largely fashioned from injection-moulded plastic. "The other thing I found out," she goes on, "is that leeches don't like hair, so if you are hairy, be prepared to do some shaving or waxing - they much prefer a Brazilian."
Don't you love how even annelids are body fascists now? Apparently, these days you need to be no more than a crawling digestive tract to consider yourself too superior to suck anyone who hasn't had a full Hollywood.
But it is Demi's verdict on the treatment that leaves Lost in Showbiz too drained to go on. "I feel," she muses, "that I've always been someone looking for the cutting edge of things that optimise your health and healing."
Cutting edge! When do you reckon leeches stopped being cutting edge? 1159?
