Special treatment
for the Material Girl

Looks like Madonna’s new spirituality includes a certain "don’t look at me" aspect.

The Material Girl, when attending services at the Los Angeles Kabbalah Centre, sits behind a screen, according to a source. "The men and the women sit separately, following Orthodox tradition," reports the insider. "But Madonna sits in front, behind a screen so that people can’t look at her. The place where she sits happens to be on the men’s side."

The source also claims that Rabbi Philip Berg, who heads up the Kabbalah Centre, personally blesses the stage before Madonna gives concerts. "He goes out there and chants and does his routine," says the insider. "He blessed Madison Square Garden. He blesses them all."

"If those stories are true, what they reveal is that Madonna’s Kabbalah kick isn’t about spirituality at all," says Rick Ross, a cult expert who has closely followed the controversial offshoot of Judaism. "It’s not about a quest for her soul, but rather it’s about Madonna getting special treatment and attention and it’s her latest form of divahood."

Seeing red
In other Kabbalah news, the group is stepping up its campaign to make its trademark red string bracelet all the rage in Hollywood.

An insider says that the Kabbalah Centre is bringing out a new book, "that is basically a user’s guide to the red string: why people wear it, what powers it has."

The Kabbalah Centre will go to rather extraordinary — and expensive — measures promoting the book with a massive billboard on Los Angeles’s Sunset Boulevard, which is scheduled to be unveiled in October. The 48-by-18 foot sign will read, "For protection in a world of confusion and chaos," according to the source. The billboard itself, says the source, will be wrapped in a massive red string.

"Kabbalah is really hot in Hollywood, for both stars and hangers-on," says the source, who adds that Faye Resnick, a figure from the O.J. Simpson case,  has been visiting the Centre lately.

Notes from all over
Serena Williams would love to visit the Ivory Coast. If she could only figure out where it is. When in Wimbledon, the tennis star was asked if she’d like to visit Africa. "You know, actually I would love to go to the East Coast. Is that the Ivory Coast?" No, the interviewer explained, it’s the West Coast.  . . . Beatles fans are petitioning the British National Trust to stop the demolition of the Liverpool home where Ringo Starr grew up and urge them to "look into saving the house as they have preserved the childhood homes of John Lennon and Paul McCartney."  . . . Letters written by Richard Burton, including some to his then-wife Liz Taylor, are going on the auction block in London next month, reports the London Express. "I sit here vulgarised by the idea that my wife is doing — violently against my ‘taste’ — a f------ lousy nothing bloody film," he wrote in a 1973 letter to two employees, referring to the film "Ash Wednesday." He continued "[Taylor’s] singular acceptance of this film is because she wants to remain a famous film star. What the stupid (occasionally) maniac doesn’t realise is that she is already immortalised (as a film person) for ever."

Jeannette Walls Delivers the Scoop Mondays through Thursdays on MSNBC.com

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