Besides having a very bad hair day, it looks like she is also turning into a man. Is she taking steroids or something? Maybe she has been going to the same freak doctor that Michael Jackson goes to. I feel sorry for Guy Rich!

-- (Like@Virgin.NOT!), November 02, 2001

Answers

Didn't she have breasts before? Mefears that if one were to lift that skirt they might find a new organ growing!

-- (don't@go.there), November 02, 2001.

Let me explain this to you. She's getting older. She's had a couple of kids at a rather advanced age. She's been showing her entire body off live and in pics for decades. (I've seen some of the first published ones...I mean DECADES). There's this place in a woman's brain that looks in the mirror and screams "ACK! Must bodybuild!" This place is between the end of child bearing and the beginning of inevitable butt sag. Madonna not only has reached this place in her life, she's got tons of money riding on keeping her butt as high off the ground as she can manage for as long as she can manage. I mean, there's Brittney waiting in the wings, and she's not even into the child bearing phase yet.

I hope this helps.

-- helen -- ask me how I know (I@know.I.know), November 02, 2001.

The make-up and hairstyle are unflattering for her. And I have noticed her looking rather old lately but hey, we're all gettin up there.

-- (cin@cin.cin), November 02, 2001.

I hear what you're saying Helen, but I think there is more to it than just bodybuilding. Looks like she has hair on her chest, showing through the open zipper. Look at her neck and face. There is something very weird going on here.

-- (too@much.testosterone), November 03, 2001.

That pic is morphed. I don't think that's her set of hands or lower arms. It actually looks like a guy pretending to be Madonna at a Halloween party.

-- helen (one@two.one.two), November 03, 2001.

"It actually looks like a guy pretending to be Madonna at a Halloween party."

LOL! That's the best explanation I've heard yet Helen!

Maybe they use doubles at her concerts when she is too doped up to perform. Lip-synching is hard to detect when they dance around a lot and hold that big mic right in front of their mouth.

-- (male@transexual.double?), November 03, 2001.

Give that impersonator a cigar.

-- (anyone_got @ light. ?), November 03, 2001.

Drat, guess that pic can't be copied.

-- (sorry move @long.now), November 03, 2001.

doped up???

Madonna is a health nut/body buff. She is tiny, but she has a sort of masculine jawline and facial features. That is her, just in a bad phase. Remember the flapper phase with the gold tooth? eww

-- (cin@cin.cin), November 03, 2001.

That's a spoof of Madonna's concert in Italy.

-- (she does h@ve big biceps. though), November 03, 2001.

Hmmm, the original picture at the top came from Reuters on Yahoo. They claim it is really her.

Caption: A new unauthorized biography of superstar Madonna, to be published next week, portrays her as a woman desperately seeking love, often with men who were either too scared, too straight-laced or simply not aroused by the diva whose raunchy 1992 book 'Sex' was a 'cause celebre.' Madonna shown here as she performs during her Drowned World Tour, September 9, 2001 at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. (Adrees Latif/Reuters) - Nov 01 8:11 PM ET

-- (looks@like.man), November 03, 2001.

When Will the Real Madonna Speak Up? By Jill Serjeant

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Madonna (news - web sites) may be the bitchiest and bossiest woman in pop music or the most beloved. She may be an emotionally insecure manipulator -- who (shock! horror!) uses men and throws them away. Or she may be just an old-fashioned girl looking for the traditional twosome: love and marriage.

But one thing she doesn't do is kiss and tell -- that's left for the biographer.

Two unauthorized biographies published this month both tout supposed fresh new insights into the life and love life of the pop and cultural phenomenon who has reinvented herself with almost every one of her 14 hit albums.

Yet Madonna, 43, mother of two, twice married and the most successful female recording artist of the 20th century, is neither ready nor willing to set the record straight by writing her own autobiography.

``She said she wasn't interested in doing any kind of biography or anything ever, which is a bit of a stern statement from someone who has been so out there. It doesn't matter whether it's me, Norman Mailer, whoever,'' said Andrew Morton, the British author of one of the latest offerings ``Madonna'' (St Martin's Press).

Morton, whose 1992 biography of Princess Diana exploded the myth of her fairy-tale marriage to Prince Charles, said his requests for an interview with the Material Girl were met only with a mailed copy of Kabbalah -- ``a mystical text of Judaism, which she tends to live by these days.''

``I was disappointed because I felt that we've only ever seen the caricature, the cartoon version of Madonna and I really wanted to show that she is a considerable artist and that she is more than anything that has been written about her in the past. I think for her it is an opportunity missed,'' Morton told Reuters.

MASTER MISTRESS OF DISGUISE

It's true. The woman who has been portrayed so often in her 20-year career as a control freak -- meticulously overseeing every aspect of her recording career, her concerts, and her multimedia company Maverick Entertainment -- has no plans to write her own story of her very controversial life.

``I think she probably feels that she has shown the world enough of herself over the years, and wants to keep the rest private,'' said Madonna's spokeswoman, Liz Rosenberg.

``People have been writing articles and unauthorized biographies about Madonna for years. They are rarely accurate or true. She feels most people don't believe them,'' I don't think she takes them very seriously,'' Rosenberg said.

Morton's book attempts to reveal the complex woman he describes as ``the consummate mistress of disguise.''

He portrays Madonna as someone craving love and adds pop superstar Michael Jackson to the eclectic list of men (and women) that Madonna is said to have tried to bed. (''Nothing happened because he (Jackson) was giggling so much,'' Morton says of one man Madonna apparently failed to conquer.)

Barbara Victor's book ``Goddess'' (HarperCollins), published in the same week as Morton's, includes the shock claim that Madonna has had 11 abortions in 25 years, and tricked British film director Guy Ritchie into marrying her by deliberately getting pregnant with her second child, Rocco.

Rosenberg dismissed the Morton book as ``a lovely work of fiction,'' rejected Victor's claims on the abortion as untrue and her described Victor's assertion about the Ritchie marriage as ``plainly ridiculous.''

DESPERATELY SEEKING MADONNA

J. Randy Taraborrelli's ``Madonna: An Intimate Biography,'' published in April, says Madonna dated pop star Prince, but complained he smelled of lavender; wrapped herself in plastic to await lover John F. Kennedy Jr.; and publicly tongue-kissed actress Gwyneth Paltrow at a millennium party.

Taraborrelli quotes Tommy Quinn, a New York studio musician who dated Madonna shortly before she met her first husband, Sean Penn. ``I found her to be very guarded,'' Quinn said. ``Of course she was brash and -- oh, man -- she could be a royal bitch. But beneath it, if you really got to know her, she was a different kind of person, a very insecure girl.''

Amid the acres of fascinating tittle-tattle devoted to Madonna's chaotic love life in all three books, Taraborrelli offers a detailed look at Madonna's artistry and how she writes the songs that have brought her more No. 1 singles than The Beatles or Elvis Presley.

Morton talks of her passion for art, her ``quiet'' charity work that involves private visits to sick and dying children in New York hospitals every Thanksgiving, and her checkered career as a movie actress.

Morton ended up admiring and respecting Madonna, even though his attempts to dismantle her carefully constructed facade ultimately left him facing a riddle.

``She can command a stage, she can write songs, she commands and controls a huge multimillion pound (dollar) business and you have to respect and admire that,'' Morton said.

``She is a mesh of contradictions. She is someone who seems absolutely confident, yet is very insecure. Someone who is desperate for control, but has very often been out of control. Someone who seems to be unemotional but can be quite vulnerable,'' he said.

Until the day the pop diva, now apparently more content and serene than ever before, decides to come out with her own version of events, all the so-called intimate biographies seem destined to remain an exercise in desperately seeking Madonna.

As her former lover, rap star Vanilla Ice told Morton: ``If she were a painting, she would be an abstract by Picasso. She has so many faces.''

-- (incase@anyone.cares to read it), November 09, 2001.