"There is darkness in 'Child Star,' of course. The passage that I clung to as a child, like a favored, glamorous nightmare..."

"... was about a woman whose daughter died the hour Shirley [Temple] was born. In 1939, the woman tried to assassinate Shirley while she was singing 'Silent Night' on a live radio show, under the logic that the star had swiped her daughter’s soul and shooting her would unleash it. 'The tale seemed understandable to me,' Temple writes. When I first read 'Child Star,' perched by the cold cuts at one of my sister’s swim meets, I loved the idea that Shirley Temple’s soul was endlessly transferrable, and as sought-after as the Maltese Falcon. I remember eating a slice of ham so ribbony and translucent that you could bird-watch through it, and wondering whether couples across America were timing their childbirths to synch with Temple’s death.... So my sister and I joined the legions of Shirley mimics—like Andy Warhol, who became obsessed with her after seeing 'Poor Little Rich Girl' and... aped her mannerisms 'for the rest of his life…folding his hands in prayer and placing them next to his cheek, or twisting them together and holding them out to the right just below his waist.' This remains Temple’s peculiar feat: she makes children want to be adorable and sickly sweet and dull, to flatten their emotions out. It’s hard to imagine any subsequent child star surviving an assassination attempt and thinking simply, 'The tale seemed understandable to me.' (In 1981, Jodie Foster would respond to the Hinckley incident by sinking into depression, demanding to read all her hate mail, and ironically hanging an enormous photo of Reagan getting shot in her kitchen.)"

From "Shirley Temple's Strange Loot" by Matt Weinstock, which appeared in The New Yorker in April 2013.

There's so much going on in that paragraph. I love the way Andy Warhol shows up... and then Jody Foster. And ham.

That makes me want to quote this one sentence from a David Foster Wallace story I've been reading, because of the way it goes on and on from one thing to another, yet all connected, making sense:

The lone time that Atwater had believed he was seeing his own father smile, it turned out to have been a grimace which presaged the massive infarction that had sent the man forward to lie prone in the sand of the horseshoe pit as the shoe itself sailed over the stake, the half finished apiary, a section of the simulation combat target range, a tire swing’s supporting limb, and the backyard’s pineboard fence, never to be recovered or even ever seen again, while Virgil and his twin brother had stood there wide eyed and red eared, looking back and forth from the sprawled form to the kitchen window’s screen, their inability to move or cry out feeling, in later recall, much like the paralysis of bad dreams.

That's from the story "The Suffering Channel" (which you can find in the collection "Oblivion").