BY STEVE JANOSKI
One of the unintended consequences of the internet's rise is its power to turn regular, everyday citizens into super celebrities nearly overnight through the use of video hosting and social networking sites.
Do something stupid within range of an astute observer with a camera phone, and it could be your pleasant face plastered all over everyone's news feed on Facebook or the front page of YouTube.
It's kind of cool in a sick way, like you're constantly playing Russian roulette with your future- one wrong move could lead you to either internet fame or internet infamy.
I look at it the same way I look at the odds of a comet hitting the Earth- it's possible, I guess, but I'm not all that worried about it.
Of course, sometimes, we might deserve the infamy. Such is the case of Cathy Cruz Marrero.
Marrero, 49, is now nationally known as the “Fountain Lady” after being caught on a mall's security cameras doing a somersault into a decorative fountain after tripping over the ledge because she was texting while walking.
The clip features unseen people watching the video on a screen and laughing at the scene from two different angles. Marrero believes they are security guards.
An ABC News article said that Marrero's fall has attracted over a million and a half views on YouTube and has been shared frequently on both Facebook and Twitter as it skyrocketed to the top of the viral video rack, and of course, that's complicated things.
On a recent interview on “Good Morning America,” the troubled walker dropped hints that she may sue the mall, and the ABC article said that she's hired a lawyer to “explore whether someone should have come to her aid rather than posting her image on the Internet.”
That lawyer's name is James Polyak, and ABC quotes him as saying that they “intend to hold the responsible parties accountable; whether requesting or demanding an apology and requesting an explanation on why this happened and how it happened.”
I might be able to help him out with that because I'm pretty sure I know how this happened, but maybe I'll leave it to him. Maybe he'll get lucky and the answer will fall out of the back of an ambulance.
"I didn't get an apology, what I got was, 'At least nobody knows it was you,' " Marrero said. "But I knew it was me." Well, at least she's got one thing straight.
Unfortunately, she hasn't figured out that no security guard in any mall in any country has the responsibility to apologize to her for her own blatant stupidity.
If the case is ever brought in front of a judge, it would rival that of the lady that sued McDonald's for spilling hot coffee on herself in terms of someone being allowed to prosper due to their own unbridled idiocy.
Marrero should really just be happy the mall didn't completely put the screws to her and drain the fountain before she fell in it.
What makes this story even better is that the fall might have been some kind of karmatic retribution the universe is pushing on Marrero- as it turns out, she's got her own legal troubles.
ABC reported that she's been out on $7,500 bail for alleged theft stemming from some indiscretions with a former coworker's credit card. They also reported that court records show Marrero to have been convicted of retail theft four times, and had previously received 12 months of probation after being convicted of a hit-and-run charge in Berks County in 2009.
But at the end of Marrero's Good Morning America interview, she whines that no security guards came over to help her and that, “nobody took my feelings into consideration.”
As Don King might say, “Only in America.”
E-mail: janoski@northjersey.com
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