There's this new phone service that launched last week in which you can pay a very expensive per-minute rate to speak directly to moderately famous people. Naturally, we chose to chat with infamous moms Dina Lohan and Nadya Suleman, and share the entire insane experience with you.
Dial-A-Star promises "completely discreet one-on-one" conversations. Kinda sounds like phone sex, right? Well, it's not, but it's similarly seedy in its structure and billing process. The celebs are each assigned a rate—for example, Jersey Shore's Angelina Pivarnick costs $15 a minute while Real Housewives of New Jersey star Danielle Staub costs $18 a minute. (I should point out that none of the people on the call list of "operators" are currently on a TV show.) The most expensive "celebrity" is Kris Herzog who brings in $27 a minute. I've ever heard of him before, but this is what it says:
Celebrity Bodyguard who has protected;
Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Kim Kardashian, Jessica Alba, Princess Diana
Jon Voight & Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, John Travolta, Jack Nicholson & many more
Life in the Oksana / Mel Gibson inner circle, Making Love to a Famous Client and more
I really like the idea of him sitting on the phone all day and just straight-up gossiping about his former bosses. But I was more interested in speaking with the second-highest paid celebrity: Dina Lohan. It's totally bizarre to me that she's on this thing, not because she seems "above it" or whatever, but her criminal ex-husband (Michael Lohan, $18) and his criminal ex-girlfriend (Kate Major, $10) are both on it, and you'd think she wouldn't want to be associated with them. I wanted to ask her about that, but I could barely get a word in edgewise. She's good. She kept me on the line until I'd run out of my prepaid minutes. But as she told me—in the clip above—she is using this service to personally negate falsehoods printed about her and her family in the press and to give people advice on how to get their children in to showbiz. I tried to ask her if she felt flattered by being the second-highest paid celeb on this thing, but she was modest and told me that they are in the process of getting A-listers to sign up. Since getting off the phone with her, Corinne Alphen joined the service. She was the Penthouse Pet of the Year in 1982, so there's that.
I also spoke to Nadya Suleman. Her bio on the site is:
Nadya Suleman aka Octomom
She only gets $12 a minute, which I found insulting, because that's not even a dollar a kid. I asked her if she felt slighted by the fact that Kim G.—who wasn't even a real cast member on Real Housewives of New Jersey—gets $18 a minute, but she wasn't familiar with Kim G. because she hasn't really watched TV since Friends was on the air. She has 14 kids, so I expected things to sound a little chaotic and it was—because she was with them at the zoo.