It started in May, when the erstwhile pop queen marked her tentative return to public performance after a long hiatus with a string of haphazard club gigs that lasted for as little as 15 minutes, during which she lip-synched old hits like "... Baby One More Time".
Obviously, that's still a fairly self-serving agenda, since she desperately wants to reforge a relationship with her adopted son, but I wonder if working to help someone else will have a positive effect on our erstwhile Evil Queen?
Molly Ringwald, erstwhile 1980s teen queen, has returned with a new jazz album called "Except Sometimes".
In February, the satirist Jason Headley released a web short called "It Doesn't Get Better" — a spoof of the "It Gets Better" campaign against bullying — in which erstwhile football captains and homecoming queens warn that life goes swiftly downhill after graduation.
However, both men were speaking in the wake of suggestions on Hollywood trade websites that the erstwhile Ali G star walked away because Queen wanted a sanitised take on Mercury's life.
We were sorry for her because not only had her mother given her away, but her adoptive parents were the legendary Dirty Den and the feckless Angie, erstwhile landlord and lady of the Queen Vic, who were always too busy being dirty and feckless, in our opinion, to take proper care of their little girl.
And with those anodyne words, in such contrast to the fiery rhetoric of the past, rapprochement seemed to have been reached between the erstwhile commander of the Irish Republican Army, and the Queen, head of the British armed services.
Despite having been vice-president of the Campaign For Homosexual Equality, for instance, he isn't shy of referring to "disgusting old opera queens", a remark that would lead his erstwhile Fringe colleague Alan Bennett to call him "the Enoch Powell of the sexual world".
The service, which is open to the public, will invoke a pantheon of deities with names like the Morrigan (the corpse-picking queen of the battlefield) and the Dagda (her erstwhile mate, the all-father).
