Celebrities are People Too, and It Usually Makes Me Cry

My mild obsession with celebrity gossip and trivia is well-documented and well-known.

I can rattle off celebrity baby names at a disturbingly rapid pace. I know famous people's birth names. I can identify celebrity voiceovers on commercials and in cartoon movies.

(These are all things I mention I'm good at on my online dating profile, btw. Because obviously they make me a charming, fascinating, and highly irresistible woman...)

But I have a confession.

Celebrities make me cry.

I refuse to watch awards shows in a large group because I take the telecasts very seriously and want to be able to sob in peace.

Sometimes I tearfully watch music videos over and over because I'm struck by a single moment when the singer is suddenly acting.

And I've been watching this new NBC show, "Who Do You Think You Are?" in which "seven of America's best-loved celebrities" travel the world to discover secrets about ancestors they never knew.

I literally weep through every commercial break.

I sobbed through Sarah Jessica Parker's episode...and Lisa Kudrow's.

There's something about these exceedingly famous people sharing their actual family stories and their real-life discoveries with a television audience that I find ridiculously moving.

The show is about coming to terms with family and death and history.

The Parker episode took her back to the Salem Witch Trials, which her ancestor survived by the skin of her teeth. And the Kudrow episode highlighted her father reuniting with a long lost cousin who had delivered news of their family's plight in Holocaust Poland and then disappearing.

It's heavy, real, tragic, life-altering stuff for them.

Of course, reading about the OG Bachelorette Trista Sutter's (nee Rehn) daughter's first birthday also moves me, so...

Yeah.