Madonna returns

"I saw him with his shirt off. ... That was a big plus."This is what Madonna said about meeting soon-to-be-ex-husband Guy Ritchie 10 years ago. This is also an obvious lie -- the man is pale and gelatinous; the sort of pretty lie that people in love tell.So when she was recently revealed to be spending a great deal of time with Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez, a young, lean and muscular type, it seemed her marriage was over.Reverting to form, Madonna is falling back on the kind of dumb, sculpturally perfect men she enjoys between attempts to engage a serious, far homelier partner. (Madonna, however, issued a statement on Sunday publicly denying any romantic involvement with Rodriguez or that she is getting a divorce -- claims that are apparently meaningless to A-Rod's wife, Cynthia, who filed for divorce Monday, citing emotional abandonment.)The British tabs have been all over the Ritchie-Madonna marital problems for some time, which is unsurprising as they have only approximately 10 stars to stalk, and six of them are members of the royal ramily. Catching, say, Rhys Ifans or Emily Mortimer walking out of a bar obviously drunk is barely a story at all. America's lowest-level stars have more power than England's brightest: Would you rather see a video of Rupert Everett or David Hasselhoff eating a hamburger in an alcoholic stupor? Madonna was the best thing that ever happened to the country that made Victoria Beckham, a talentless stick figure, famous. For her to return to America and fall into Yankee Stadium is a wonderful nose-thumbing to the whole island.One wonders why she went there in the first place.Other aging female celebrities, most notably Cher, have tried the Europe ploy, soaked in the belief that the continent's men appreciate "women of a certain age." Yet they tend to come back, fast and screaming. While everything about Madonna is, almost frighteningly, pop pastiche, it is safe to assume she has human emotions.I say this only because of the new episode of "The Two Coreys" in which Corey Haim reads about himself on Defamer.com and cries: "Why, why do they write? Why can't they leave it alone?"The footage is a revelation, and most likely, Madonna, almost 50 and in a seemingly troubled marriage, as her brother prepares to publish a tell-all about her, is probably a little low. Possibly the worst gossip to emerge from the breakup stories is the idea that Ritchie's brilliant film career suffered because of his marriage -- were he free, he could amaze us once again.Guy Ritchie is a terrible filmmaker! So loathsome and inept that "Swept Away" is, in my opinion, a personal best.Even as her life falls apart, Madonna is taking care of business: She publicly "prayed" with Ritchie; asked Britney Spears to make an appearance on her upcoming Sticky and Sweet Tour and, allegedly, spent several evenings with a perfect American male specimen.Her recent return to New York is good news, as she is quintessentially American and the country has suffered without her patented attacks on everything not epicene, far left and sexually inhibited. Worse, her development of a British accent and adoption of a frumpy nickname, "Madge," made her, ultimately, as American as blood pudding.Then there was Kabbalah, a spiritual practice she never would have adopted had she been free to roam the States, luring street youths into her limo.Some speculation has called Madonna "whipped" in the marriage, which is hard to believe, on one hand (plausible only in a sexual act orchestrated by her), yet her children, her cloying children's books, her conversion and her dowdy clothes seemed part of an attempt to age like a true English matron.Her sudden rebirth, then, as a married-man-poaching baseball fan and Manhattanite makes her seem a little more sticky, more dirty and sweet, as Marc Bolan might say of the lady built like a sleek car.I am just glad she's back, as I have missed her atrocious and infantile assaults on what she believes that I, all of us, hold sacred.She is a beautiful woman, wasted in the swamp that is England.(E-mail Lynn Crosbie at lcrosbie(at)globeandmail.com.)(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)