Madonna attends the Macy's official Material Girl clothing line launch in NYC

As we pondered what to post this morning, while sipping on our morning espresso, we came on this tidbit by The Michigan Messenger (via DListed.)  The article, although set to tell the story of the down and trodden flocking to Traverse City, redirects and finds a celebrity angle, ending with a focuses on our queen of all self-promotion and UES resident – yeah, that’s right – Madonna, and her homeless older brother Anthony Ciccone. 

The older Ciccone, 55, speaks of how his family “turned their back on [him], basically, when [he] was having a hard time.”

Hmmmm.  Pretty hard statement, we’d say.

“You think I haven’t answered this kind of question a bazillion times — why my sister is a multibazillionarie, and I’m homeless on the street?”  Ciccone offers as a follow-up. 

We were thinking that as we read the sentence, we admit.

Interestingly enough, he offers very little in the way of providing the reporter an answer this time around.  Or perhaps she purposely omitted it…

“Ciccone said he’s been among the city’s homeless for a year and a half since losing a job at his father’s vineyard and winery in Suttons Bay. He said that it annoys him that some people are amused that a person from such a high-profile family would end up sleeping, as he does, under the Union St. bridge,” writes Eartha Jane Melzer.

These are a fairly well-rounded assessment of the facts – clearly supported by the fact that he is presently the focus of a homelessness article – but little in the form of the details contributing to the cause.

 So we are left to further digest DListed’s assesment of the circumstances. 

“We don’t know what’s really going on here,” Michael writes.  Pointing out that “Anthony was fired by his own dad. What kind of crazy fucked up do you have to be to get fired by the man who carried you in his nutsack once?”

This seems like a proper follow up question, we thinks…  (What?  Ain’t nothing we can add to that assesment.  We are still having our coffee, dammit!  We ain’t thinking of attempting wit this early.)  Although we are left wondering why the holes in the story were left unplugged.

Madonna with her older brother Anthony Ciccone