Lance Mannion

Oatmeal as an aphrodisiac

The fact that this alleged madam was born in Scotland is not the most interesting thing about her---the guard pig at her country home who chased away a cop and her “friendship” with the Morgan Stanley investor broker helping her finance her new “dating” service and her animal rescue work and her third husband the realtor and once upon a time local football hero and her brother-in-law being a sheriff’s department detective and her bodyguard Sly being a former New York City cop and her four school-aged children and the pro athletes coming in from out of town who knew that for a good time visit Anna’s and her assuring nervous clients that she had sympathetic connections high up in the police department all trump her ethnic heritage in the colorful character department.   But I can’t help it.

I hear she’s a Scot and all I can think is “A Scottish brothel?” and I picture tartan wallpaper and tartan curtains and the girls in kilts and a blindfolded bagpiper in the parlor instead of a piano player and Mike Meyers greeting the customers with “If it’s not Scottish, it’s crrrrrrap!”

Och!

And hoot mon!

Here’s an overview of the story from the Times Herald-Record.

Here’s a jailhouse interview she did with the New York Post in which she insists she’s getting a bum rap.

And here’s a localization from the local paper by Steve Israel and Victor Whitman, Remembered fondly, alleged madam’s husband grew up in Livingston Manor.

This might have been a funny story…

This might have been a funny story if it weren’t for the fact that people need a little loving and, God, sometimes it’s sad all the shit they have to go through to find some.

---from "The Betrayed Kingdom" by Richard Brautigan.

Just a sad story

TOWN OF NEWBURGH — Lorraine Kerr selected few possessions to take with her on Wednesday morning.

She gathered two triangular cases that held United States flags, and she carried them to a retaining wall along her driveway. She piled an old FDNY sweatshirt between them and placed a blue fireman's parade hat on top of it.

She brought out three bags, a stuffed panda and an old Christmas stocking stuffed with a Disney Sparkling Princess doll. She leaned a dated portrait of four children against one of the bags and sat down on the retaining wall.

A neighbor saw her there at about 8:30 a.m. He heard the wail of firetruck sirens 30 minutes later. Smoke clouded the upper windows of Kerr's split-level house and hung under the eaves. The house at 8 Marian Drive was burning from a back bedroom.

When Kerr's husband was alive, he had crawled all over the house. He painted the walls and worked on the lawn. But that was a long time ago.

Read all of Doyle Murphys’ story, After firefighter husband died, widow's life unraveled, neighbor says, at the Times-Herald Record.

Registration not required but recommended.

Racy Tracy’s unnatural act

I think most of what was said here is ridiculous. There was nothing in the episode to indicate anything about Rattigan being gay. Gay men don't womanize. The fact that he was flirting with Laura like that right in front of Rob proved what he said later...that it was simply a performance. Quite an unwise thing to do, but still, a performance. (And what a hilarious performance...Richard Dawson was excellent in the role!) Personally, I loved this episode!.---a comment on a post of mine from 2005, Racy Tracy Rattigan has a secret.

Couldn’t work it into my review, but the title of the play Unnatural Acts has layers of meaning that end up applying to an episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show.

I’m not kidding.

Obviously, the title takes off from the accusations against the young men who were hauled before Harvard’s Secret Court in 1920 and “tried” for the crime of committing unnatural acts with other men---that is, for being gay.  But the phrase is turned back on the Court by the audience’s knowledge that it is the Court that is engaging in unnatural acts, prosecuting and persecuting the students for the “crime” of being themselves and then terrifying and bullying them into turning on themselves and their friends and actually committing unnatural acts of cowardice, betrayal, and self-recrimination and self-loathing.

But here’s how we get to that episode of Dick Van Dyke.

The repressive attitudes of the time towards homosexuality and homosexuals forced gay people to live a lie.  To avoid condemnation, censure, ostracization, violence, gays had to pretend not to be who and what they were.  They had to put on an act.  Since that act required them to reject their true selves, the act was---and is---against nature.  It was an unnatural act.

The character in the play who acts most unnaturally in that way, that is, the student who lives the most egregious lie is an athlete, a track star named Kenneth Day.

To contemporary eyes he is an obvious closet case, probably a lot of people back then would have had him figured out quickly too.  He tries way too hard to play the part of heterosexual stud, bragging about all the girls he has, not slept with, but turned down or escaped.  His sexual conquests are all in the future.  At the same time he is not as subtly as he thinks seductive towards a straight male friend, getting too close, touching him---in manly and playful fashion---too often, and showing off his naked chest, and in one scene, naked everything else, and making sure he’s noticed.

But he’s not gay!  Not him!  How could he be?  He would never do that with a man!

What he would do is let a man do that to him.

See, the stress builds up before a meet or an exam and if he’s going to be in shape, mentally and physically, he’s going to need some relief.  Which gay friends are willing to provide by giving him blow jobs whenever he comes begging them to help him relax.

Unnatural Acts is based on a true story and all the characters in the play had real life counterparts.  They’re all long dead now.  Kenneth Day, we learn, was married.

Three times.

When his daughter found out that her father was one of the students brought before the secret court and that the play would depict him as it does, she objected that he wasn’t gay.  He couldn’t have been, she argued, because he was a notorious womanizer.

In a post I wrote last week that I’d hope would spark more of a discussion, Nude with Sitcom, I mentioned that reading Dick Van Dyke’s memoirs had inspired me to watch many episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show.  That’s not exactly how I put it.  I tried to claim blogging virtue points, but that’s what happened.  But I also re-read some old posts of mine about the show.  I’ve written more than a few over the years, it turns out.  One of those posts is called Racy Tracy Rattigan has a secret.  That secret, I’d decided, was that he was gay.

I didn’t say that flat out.  I wanted to see if any of my readers came to the same conclusion without my prompting.

Here’s a quick summary of the episode:  Alan Brady’s going away for a couple of weeks so he’s invited a British movie star to guest host his show while he’s gone.  The movie star, Tracy Rattigan, known as Racy Tracy, turns out to be a total jerk, the height of his jerkiness being when he hits on Laura right in front of Rob in the Petries’ living room.  Rob comes close to beating him up, but settles for throwing him bodily out the door.  The next day, Tracy shows up at the office and tells the gang what a great time he had at Rob’s.  It turns out that this is one of his favorite ways of getting his kicks, making a play for other men’s wives and then laughing at them when they get jealous and lose their tempers.  Often, he’s laughing through a fat lip.  Some of those husbands weren’t content with throwing him out the door.

So, here we have a movie star with a reputation as ladies man who has made a point of chasing women he knows he probably won’t have a chance to sleep with and that’s fine with him because it gets him into fights that he’s as happy to lose as win.

And after he leaves the office, proclaiming that he’s off to flirt with a pretty receptionist he spotted down the hall, Rob, Sally, and Buddy very soberly decide together that they’re going to write Rattigan the best show they’ve ever written.

When Mel asks why they’d want to do that for such a creep, Rob says, “Mel, what else has he got?”

Now, it’s true that Rattigan doesn’t appear to have much of a life, except that he’s a movie star, which would seem make up for a lot but also mean he doesn’t need a boffo appearance on The Alan Brady Show to keep going.  But he’s still a supreme jerk and there’s no good reason to the gang to feel the least bit sorry for him, let alone sorry enough to go through the trouble.

Unless there’s something else going on, something that couldn’t be talked about openly on television in 1963.

He has to be gay, I concluded when I re-watched the episode that time.

Or does he?

I tried to think who Racy Tracy might have been based on.  Alan Brady wouldn’t have asked any movie star to guest host his show.  It would have had to be someone known for being funny.  My first candidate then was Peter Sellers.  Sellers was a well-known asshole.  And like Racy Tracy, he drank.   But Rattigan is meant to be something of a matinee idol.  He makes even a tough cookie like Sally swoon and when she meets him, Laura melts.  I can’t see many women melting over Sellers, although Brit Ekland must have seen something in him.

Other possibilities were Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole, but although they could be funny they weren’t, not in their movies so far at the time, at any rate.  Same goes for Albert Finney.

It’s possible that the model is someone whose star faded long before I started watching movies.  But it’s also possible that the model wasn’t British.  Racy Tracy’s a Brit because he’s played by Richard Dawson but the real person---if there was a real person behind the character—could have been an American.

Dean Martin?

Rock Hudson?

But did Hudson drink?  And wasn’t he known as a nice guy?  And I didn’t think he pretended to be a womanizer.  He just pretended to want to get married to women he was very publically “romantically linked” to.

The more I thought about it, though, the more I came to realize that I was missing the point.

Who the real Tracy Rattigan might have been doesn’t matter.  It’s not Racy Tracy himself the episode is addressing, however obliquely.  It’s his situation.

His situation is the same as Rock Hudson’s and Montgomery Clift’s and who knows how many others in those days.  He’s a gay man whose career as a movie star would come to an abrupt end if the public learned he was gay.  Tracy, like all of the others, would have had to pretend he was straight.  He would have had to put on an act, an unnatural act.

Maybe no particular star adopted the same act, but Tracy’s would have been a good one, good enough to give the gossip columnists who would have gone along with the act to keep their access to the studios stories to feed the supposedly gullible and easily shocked public.  A compulsive womanizer who was quick with his fists and constantly mixing it up with jealous husbands?  How macho manly studly is that?

Who’d suspect that Racy Tracy wasn’t a macho manly stud?  After all, he was acting just like Burton and O’Toole and Finney!

At any rate, that post did spark discussion.  Lots of comments.  Some readers saw what I saw and agreed.  Others saw it or saw why I saw it but thought I was wrong, that I was reading too much into the show or missing something simpler and more likely.  Still others didn’t see it at all.  I really don’t know, but re-reading the comments I had the same question for those who disagreed with me as I had on the original go-round, Why do you think Rob, Sally, and Buddy feel so sorry for him then?

But there was something else interesting this time.  A comment I hadn’t read before.  It was added four years later, in 2009, probably someone googling their way around the net during a period when I wasn’t moderating comments, I guess, or I’d have seen it then and remembered it. 

I quoted the whole comment at the top of this post, but I’m going to quote the key passage again here:

I think most of what was said here is ridiculous. There was nothing in the episode to indicate anything about Rattigan being gay. Gay men don't womanize.

Ok.

______________________

I hope you’ll read or (if you’ve been hanging around Mannionville that long) re-read the original post.  And if you have time, that other post Nude With Sitcom: A study in mores, also known to art historians as Laura Petrie Naked.

Also, here’s my review of Unnatural Acts.  Note Classic Stage has extended the show’s run through Sunday, July 31.

And as if I haven’t thrown enough at you to read:  Another unnatural act?  Meet the Bachmanns’ “Ex-Lesbian” Friend.

One more thing.  Now I can do something I couldn’t do back then.  Give you the episode itself to watch.  See what you think.

Photo from Unnatural Acts: From left, Jess Burkle, Roe Hartrampf (as Kenneth Day), and Will Rogers.  By Joan Marcus, courtesy of Classic Stage Company.

Unnatural acts, natural acting

Will Rogers as student Joe Lumbard, Harvard Class of 1922, is called before a secret court convened by the college president to investigate the spread of “homosexualism” at Harvard, in a scene from Unnatural Acts, a new play based on real events, now playing at the Classic Stage Company.

In the spring of 1920, a Harvard undergraduate named Cyril Wilcox left school and returned to his family’s home in Fall River, Massachusetts, where after dinner he went up to his room, sealed the windows and the door, turned on the gas, and lay down on his bed in his suit and tie and went to sleep, never to wake up.

Going through his effects later, his older brother found among other letters one from a friend back at school that suggested that Wilcox and his friend, Ernest Roberts, had engaged in unnatural acts.  The letter also hinted that several of their friends had, like them, engaged in similar unnatural acts.

They were gay and they’d had sex with men.

Few people at the time would have used the word gay to mean, well, gay.  They’d have said homosexual with not quite as much horror and disgust as contemporary Right Wing Christians but more than that it’s easy for us to accept was routine among intelligent and educated and otherwise sophisticated people.  The degree that their horror and disgust was mitigated and tinged with sympathy depended on how enlightened they were.

The enlightened view in 1920 was that homosexuality was a disease.

It could be caught, and Wilcox’s brother knew Cyril could not have caught it at home.  Cyril must have been infected at Harvard.  He took the letter to President and an investigation was launched to find the source of the infection and root it out.

A secret court was convened and Roberts and his and Cyril’s other friends mentioned in the letter were called before it.  They were bullied and terrified into naming other friends who were homosexuals and they were called to testify, their testimony mainly being self-incriminatory.  One way or another they were manipulated into “confessing” and then accusing their friends and lovers.

Ultimately, the court convicted fourteen men of “homosexualism” and told them to leave Harvard.

This is a true story and Unnatural Acts, now enjoying its premiere production at the Classic Stage Company, focuses on the proceedings of the secret court and the ways it ruined the lives and prospects of these students and drove at least one of them to his death---a second suicide.

The script, a collaborative effort by members of Plastic Theater under the supervision of director Tony Speciale, is based on an investigative report by a team of reporters for the Harvard Crimson whose editor had accidentally come across the court’s sealed records while doing research in the University’s archives back in 2002. The problem for the playwrights trying to tell this true story truthfully is that the court didn’t keep detailed records.

There’s no transcript only sets of notes taken separately by members of the tribunal and the students themselves, for reasons its easy to imagine, apparently didn’t keep their own records or tell anybody about what happened to them, at least not anybody who wrote it all down, ever.  So nobody knows all that was asked or answered.  And while a few of the students managed to rebound to the point of leading professionally and personally successful lives---one of them went on to become a federal judge who when he died in 1999 rated an obituary in the New York Times and is the subject of a fairly good-sized entry in Wikipedia, (Warning: Links contain possible spoilers.) and another became a Broadway producer---the rest lived and died in nearly complete obscurity and left behind no real record of who they were in 1920 and what their lives at Harvard were like.

In interviews, Speciale has made the point that Unnatural Acts isn’t a docudrama.  It’s “our imaginative retelling of the story.”  Almost everything said and done on stage is the result of speculation and much of what is speculated isn’t persuasive.

It isn’t that we can’t believe that this couldn’t have happened or that if it didn’t happen the way it does on stage that something like very like it did.  It’s that what we see and hear is too much like what we would imagine happened. It’s too pat.  The characters are types and as types they are a little too familiar.

Being a type doesn’t automatically make a character uninteresting.  In fact, several of the characters are interesting mainly because of how they not only conform to type but how they are types trapped within stereotypes.

But none of the characters are aware of themselves as types in a way that would allow them to step back and comment on their predicament or take charge of who they are and shape their own lives, even before their troubles begin and events overwhelm them.  This makes them all reactive.  They can’t get outside the moment and as a result what they do and say are decided for them by what’s happening to them---they become spokesmen for the plot more than advocates for themselves.  Basically, despite Speciale and his co-authors’ intentions, they are stuck in a docudrama, limited by the facts, a real problem, considering that there are very few facts on hand.

Another way of saying this is that they are generally amplifiers for exposition.  The characters tend to report instead of dramatizing themselves.  It’s all plausible as good reporting can be, but it doesn’t carry us away.  We remain detached, observant but not involved, and so skeptical.

This isn’t to say that Unnatural Acts is an emotional letdown or dull.

Speciale and company have employed a variety of clever theatrical effects borrowed from the bags of tricks of other playwrights from Brecht to Welles to Miller to Thornton Wilder that add drama where there would otherwise be only journalism and keep things lively, entertaining, visually dynamic, and, often, viscerally gripping.

They’re more than helped out by Justin Townsend’s haunting lighting design that brings Scenic designer Walt Spengler’s handsome set to life, almost literally---at one point the giant bookcase that looms over the set starts to glow malevolently from within as if infused with the angry spirit of the University about to come crashing down upon the men.

But what really makes Unnatural Acts a satisfying theatrical experience is the acting.

The production features eleven fine individual efforts that blend to make one very fine group performance.  Unnatural Acts is a true ensemble piece.

The ensemble is led by Nick Westrate who as Ernest Roberts, the leader of the group, is full of charismatic bravado and marked by an engaging recklessness.  Roberts is a rebel and a trail-blazer, a hero in the eyes of his friends and in his own mind until he’s called before the court where his courage and confidence fail him completely.

Jess Burkle plays Edward Say, a delicate and natty elfin queen, and Will Rogers plays his gangling roommate Joe Lumbard, both of them pointedly ignoring the obvious about Say until they’re called to testify when they both turn on Say.  Up to this point, Rogers plays Lumbard, who is presented as more bi-curious than actively gay, possibly drawn more by the group’s bohemian, intellectual, and subversive qualities than by physical attraction, as the resident good guy, and it’s a shock to watch him turn hysterically vicious in his desperation to separate himself from his friend in the eyes of his persecutors.  Burkle makes Say’s pitiable attempts to explain away his “sissy-ness” by blaming it all on a childhood operation as heartbreaking as watching a child take out his heartbreak on a favorite toy.

Jerry Marsini is appealingly understated as Donald Clark, a Ph.D. candidate, poet, and instructor of philosophy who believes he has made a separate peace with his sexuality until a sexually manipulative student corners him after class and under the pretense of having a literary discussion breaks down Clark’s carefully constructed intellectual defenses against his own feelings.  Marsini delivers one of my favorite lines from the play when the student impertinently quizzing him on his reading and he replies wry self-assurance, “In the interest of brevity, assume I’ve read every book ever written.”

It’s a line that would put most students in their place, but this particular student, Stanley Gilkey, lives to put others in their place.  He’s a conniving weasel and an emotional and intellectual bully and he’s played with verve and wit and villainous charm by Max Jenkins who makes the most of Gilkey’s creepy and cringing attempts to talk his way out of trouble before the court by explaining that the reason he spent so much time among the “homosexualists” is that he’s planning to go into law enforcement after college and as part of his preparation for his future career he needs to study the criminal mind.

By the way, he is not the one who goes on to be a judge.

The rest of the cast includes Brad Koed as the soulful narrator, Devin Norik as a maternal tutor, Joe Curnette as a princely and charming medical student, Frank De Julio as an aspiring actor with far more heart than talent, Roe Hartrampf as a star athlete who knows he can’t be homosexual because of all the girls who are crazy about him, and Roderick Hill as Cyril Wilcox’s avenging brother..

While the plotting and dialog are disappointingly journalistic, thematically the play does very little special pleading on behalf of its characters.  It’s taken for granted that the attitudes of the period were wrong and psychologically and emotionally destructive and that we’ll understand that these young men were victims of both the prejudices of society and the institutional arrogance of the University and sympathize with them on that account, and therefore it’s safe to show that none of them were saints or heroes.

Lumbard isn’t the only one we see called before the court who behaves badly.  Most of the others also betray their friends and themselves quickly and eagerly.  They are young and callow and defenseless in the face of an implacable authority that has already decided their fates.  One of the horrors of their situation is that at some level they agree with the powers-that-be:  They see their own gayness as a source of shame.  They turn out to be as thoroughly conventional in their thinking as any other products of the times.  Even the few who like Roberts have assumed an attitude of defiance, sexual rebellion, and pride give way to self-loathing, disgust, and a sudden, desperate need to prove to themselves as well as to the old men on the court that they are not who they are.

A big part of the evil of the attitudes back then---which we know are shared and promulgated and enforced by an awful lot of people now---is how they made---and make---individuals hate themselves.

It’s heartbreaking to listen to these promising young men committing what is in effect a form of suicide by rhetoric.

But it’s not left at that.  After all, there were almost certainly more than fourteen gay men at Harvard in 1920,  and it’s likely that many of them, including members of the faculty, were known to be gay by colleagues, students, and deans.  But while there’s nothing in the record to answer why the court stopped with these fourteen, there’s enough there to tell us why the members of this group were among the ones who were “caught.”

Apart from their sexual orientation, they were typical Harvard men of the time, meaning they were the sons of rank, wealth, and privilege and they took it for granted that as such they were entitled.

It isn’t their sex lives that brings on disaster as much as the rules they’ve broken along the way, rules about parties in one’s room, rules about when and under what circumstances it was permitted to leave campus, rules against inviting strangers in, rules against fraternizing with locals, not to mention the law they broke routinely and blithely as well, the Volstead Act.

They didn’t bother to cover their tracks because they didn’t think they really needed to.

In their indifference to abiding by the rules and their assumption that their status as Harvard men would protect them if they got into any trouble, they were no different from countless other classmates, straight and gay.  And they weren’t completely foolish for thinking this.  But, as one of their number---one of the few who in real life came through pretty much unscathed---warns them, Harvard will take care of you, until…the choice is between taking care of Harvard and taking care of you. Then Harvard will take care of Harvard.

In trusting the audience to see how the men’s youthful arrogance, weaknesses, and self-indulgence contributed to their prosecution and persecution, Speciale and his co-writers and cast do a good job at overcoming the script’s journalistic earnestness and predictability, and if they don’t convince us that this is what happened or that something very like it happened, they make us feel that whatever the men involved were actually like what happened to them was more than wrong, it was tragic.

Unnatural Acts, created by members of the Plastic Theatre, conceived and directed by Tony Speciale, ongoing through July 31 (run extended), at Classic Stage Company, 136 E. 13th St., New York, NY 10003.  Click here for tickets or call (866) 811-4111 or (212) 352-3101.

Photos by Joan Marcus, courtesy of Classic Stage Company.

The story behind the story: The Boston Globe reports on the Harvard Crimson’s investigation into the Secret Court in Crimson Letter.

The story behind the play:  In an interview with Gerard Raymond of Slant Magazine’s The House Next Door, director Tony Speciale describes how Unnatural Acts was put together as a play.

Goonies in love

Not the Goonies but an incredible simulation:  Super 8’s gang of young hero-filmmakers featuring Elle Fanning not playing the Smurfette.

Father’s Day next weekend, and the debate here in Mannionville is what movie the guys are taking dear old dad to see.

Mother’s Day was easy.  Thor.  Really.  The blonde wanted to go.  Just like she wanted to go see Iron Man 2 last year, Star Trek the year before, and Iron Man the year before that.

Our Father’s Day choices are between X-Men: First Class and Super 8, with Green Lantern held in reserve as a compromise.  The boys are pushing for X-Men, the blonde’s pushing for Super 8.  I’m pushing for Midnight in Paris, but nobody seems to be listening.  Excuse me?  Father’s Day?

Really, though, I don’t care which we end up at. It’ll be fun no matter which, just because of the company.  I was opposed to Super 8.  The trailer made it look like a cheap knock-off of a cheap knock-off of good knock-off of a Spielberg movie.

But Salon’s Matt Zoller Seitz says that it’s not a cheap knock-off of a cheap knock-off of a good knock-off.  It’s not a cheap knock-off of a good knock-off.  It is the good knock-off.

Movies. Plural.  Watch out, spoilers galore.

But Matt doesn’t mention one of the things that bothered me in the trailer, probably because it’s a way Super 8 differs from a Spielberg movie.  The presence of Elle Fanning.

At first glance it looks as though Fanning’s character is the Smurfette in the movie’s little gang of 13 year old heroes.  But it turns out, she’s the love interest!

Think about this.  What Spielberg movies have a love interest?

Unh unh unh!  The Indiana Jones movies are George Lucas movies that Spielberg happened to direct.

There are Spielberg movies in which the main character has a wife or a girlfriend (There’s only one Spielberg movie that has as the main character a woman, his first theatrical feature, The Sugarland Express.)  but she isn’t in the movie to provide romance, never mind sex.  Laura Dern’s character in Jurassic Park is the Sam Neill character’s former girlfriend and over the course of the movie they get back together, but that happens as a matter of course, almost off-screen, with a minimum of fuss and bother and almost no signs of affection or physical attraction on either character’s part.  Always is a love story but who remembers that one?  Spielberg’s next movie, The Adventures of Tintin, barely has any female characters at all.  That’s a feature of the comic books, but still.  The opera diva Bianca Castiafore is in it.  I don’t know how she’ll figure in the plot, which is based on The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham’s Treasure, but “The Milanese Nightingale” isn’t in either of those books.  In the books she is in, she’s not the love interest as much as she’s the threat of one.  She’s Captain Haddock’s nightmare of a married, which is to say, a sexualized life.  Tintin’s creator, Herge, had issues.  (Oddly, the cast list doesn’t include Professor Calculus.  This is odd because he’s a far more important character in the series than Castiafore and Red Rackham's Treasure is the book in which he makes his first appearance in the series.)  There’s only one movie Spielberg directed that I haven’t seen in whole or in part and that’s Minority Report.  Is there a love interest for Tom Cruise in that one?

Neither of the two Spielberg movies Super 8 most clearly and importantly pays homage to, E.T. and Close Encounters have anything like a love interest in them.  (Please, don’t bother with any Elliott and E.T. subtexts.  They are both little kids.)  As Richard Dreyfuss’ wife in Close Encounters, Teri Garr is the enemy, a sympathetic enemy, but still she needs to discarded.  It’s an anti-romance in that way.  And when he meets Melinda Dillon, Dreyfuss and she team up but they don’t couple up.  In E.T., the Smurfette role is taken by a very, very young Drew Barrymore and she plays Eliott sister.

I’m not going to speculate here about what this says about Spielberg, except to note that he’s always gravitated towards movie versions of boys’ adventure stories and one of the hallmarks of a boys’ adventure story is that the main character, no matter what age he appears to be, is a romanticized version of the ten year olds who read them, so of course those heroes are not really interested in mushy stuff.

What I’m wondering here is why Super 8, a Spielberg knock-off of the first kind, and therefore basically (and otherwise obviously) a boys’ adventure story, has any mushy stuff in it?

Why is there a love interest in a movie that’s mainly about and primarily aimed at 13 year old boys and girls?

Why is Elle Fanning the love interest and not just the Smurfette?  Why isn’t she more than a love interest or a Smurfette?

I have hazier memories of being 13 than I do of any other time of my life.  I’m not sure why.  I think it’s probably because I “remember” being thirteen as either part of being 11 or part of being 13, that is, I’ve sorted the memories into kidhood and teenagerness.  I know I was interested in girls.  I wrote and produced a play in which I deliberately gave me three main characters---boy detectives---girlfriends so that I could cast the three prettiest girls in seventh grade.  The prettiest was going to be “my” girlfriend too.  For the record, there was no mush involved.  Not even hand-holding.  It was all running away from ghosts and chasing after bad guys for all of us.  Those three girls refused to have anything to do with the play, however, and three other girls took the parts and it turned out, to my surprise and delight, they could act.  I am proud to say I learned several important lessons from this, the main one being that girls were like boys in having interests and talents and personalities in their own rights, apart from whatever roles we guys wanted to cast them in.  Another being that they could be interesting in their own rights, apart from how they looked and again apart from whatever role we guys wanted them to play.

I learned stuff about art and theater too, but I’ll save it for another day.

The point is, however, that even though I sort of wanted a girlfriend and managed to find a way to give myself a virtual one, I don’t remember love or even a thirteen year old’s idea of sex being something I watched movies for.  I would never have gone to a movie for the love story, of course, but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have come out of any movie I watched for other reasons thinking, “You know what would have made that better?  If the hero had a girlfriend.”

That was pretty much the way it was for my friends too.  None of us watched movies or TV shows hoping that the hero would find true love.  Or any sort of love.  And I think we were typical of boys of that time, which wasn’t too much before the year Super 8 is set, 1979.

I have no idea what’s typical for thirteen year olds today.  Neither Oliver nor Ken has ever been exactly “typical” in any way.  Neither one has had a girlfriend or even gone on a date.  Ken has had his own reasons for steering clear of romantic entanglements.  Oliver, who is fifteen, has observed that the kids his age who are parts of couples are generally not happy about it.  Too much drama.  And the drama has a way of enveloping other kids around the couples.  His conclusion is that dating is like driving or drinking, something better left till when you are old enough to handle it.

But this is true for him now and was even more the case for him when he was thirteen, the girls who were the most likely prospects for girlfriends, the girls he liked and got along with best, were already his friends, and they had been friends since they were little. They’re pals, and dating your pal is just something that doesn’t occur to you, unless you’re a character in a dumb Hollywood romantic comedy and you suffer for it at the hands of a clumsy screenwriter.  I don’t think the concept of friends with benefits would occur to the average thirteen year old or, for that matter, make any sense to the average twenty year old.  I think it’s the idle dream of commitment-phobic and romantically inept adults.  When you’re young and well-adjusted, friends are friends and lovers are something other and that’s what makes lovers and the possibility of meeting and finding someone to love exciting.

But to get back to Super 8.  I can’t see why there’s a love interest because I can’t see who a romantic subplot’s in the movie for.  I don’t think kids that age care.  And plenty of them, particularly the girls, are going to wonder why Elle Fanning’s character can’t be the leader of the gang or at least the budding filmmaker instead of essentially the damsel in distress.  And a love story involving thirteen year olds can’t be there to attract adults to the movie.  At least, I hope it’s not there for that.  Adults are likely to wonder why if there has to be a love story it can’t involve either of the two adult main characters and, for that matter, why there isn’t an adult woman as a main character?  They might also observe that the thirteen year old hero has just lost his mother in an accident and that if he was going to be searching for a female presence in his life, he’d be on the lookout for a mother-figure not a girlfriend.

Please don’t tell me that Elle Fanning fills both roles.

So I can only think of three reasons for including the love interest.

One is that the director J.J. Abrams was being true to the times.  He was thirteen in 1979 and maybe the only way a girl could enter his boys world was as girlfriend.

Another is that this aspect of Super 8, like all the rest of it, is part of Abrams’ wish-fulfillment fantasy.  His primary audience for Super 8 is his own thirteen year old self.

See, kid, I’ve made you a hero and given you the prettiest girl in town for a girlfriend.  Now will you stop bugging me while I’m on the analyst’s couch?

But the third is the one I have a feeling is the most likely.  Abrams felt obligated to include a female character but he couldn’t imagine any role for one except as a love interest for his boy hero.    In other words, as a fortysomething professional, he still hasn’t learned the lesson I learned as a thirteen year old writing knock-offs of Hardy Boy Mysteries and The Ghost and Mr Chicken.

This seems odd, considering he was the producer of Felicity.  I never watched Lost because I was afraid of being sucked into the cult, but I was under the impression that it included quite a few strong, independent female leads.

But then there’s Star Trek.

Among the changes Abrams made to the original series timeline was making Uhura and Spock secret lovers.

So he took a character who was a strong, independent woman, a person in her own right with important responsibilities---even if it looked like all she was was a glorified telephone operator---the second most important of the secondary characters, after Scotty, or the most important if you count Scotty as the fourth main character, and turned her into…a girlfriend.

Adding nothing to the plot or the movie except a couple of really awkward scenes between Zoe Saldana and Zachary Quinto who exhibit zip chemistry between them.

I have to point out that Saldana/Uhura had way more going on with Chris Pine/Kirk and that this seemed not only lucky for the actors but deliberate, as if what’s being set up for the sequel is a love triangle that further reduces Uhura to girlfriendness.

And then there’s what Abrams does to Kirk’s and Spock’s mothers.

He disappears both of them, one of them literally, right before our eyes.

Kirk’s father dies heroically at the beginning of the movie, and Kirk is naturally haunted by his old man’s legacy.  But his mother survives.  And Kirk never mentions her.  The movie doesn’t tell us what happened to her after she and baby Jim were rescued.  We don’t know if she’s even still alive.  Kirk appears to have been raised by some less than affectionate male relative in Iowa.  We know from the original she was a scientist, so maybe she was off-world a lot when he was growing up.  (I think in the original series, though, both Kirk’s parents died when he was young and he was raised by his older brother.)  But like I said, Abrams doesn’t bother to tell us.  When Kirk asks Spock, the original Spock, what happened in the alternative, original, timeline, he wants to know about his father but doesn’t ask Spock anything about Ma Kirk.

Meanwhile, in another major change to the timeline, Spock’s mother, Amanda, who in the original series and one of the first set of movies, is shown to be an important presence in Spock’s middle-age, is killed off in a blink when Spock is still in his twenties, despite the fact she’s played by Winona Ryder.

There are no other significant adult female characters.

Now, go back over in your head the original series and the five real Star Trek movies based on it. (Yes, five.  Nobody counts the first one as a real Star Trek movie.)  While many of them were love interests, mainly for Kirk, but a few for Spock, Bones, and Scotty, remember how many adult female characters there were who were scientists, politicians, and other sorts of high-profile professionals, including at least one lawyer and a star ship commander.  Ok, she was a Romulan, but still.  In the pilot, Captain Christopher Pike’s first executive officer, Number One, was played with no explanation or apology by Majel Barrett.  In Abrams’ movie, Pike’s number one is Spock who in the pilot appears to be or less a proto-Chekhov or Sulu.

Expand the thought experiment to include the spin-offs and now you have among the female leads a doctor, another first exec, and another starship commander, this one a human and a member of the Federation and the star of the show.

The mothers have been disappeared from Super 8 too.

Makes me wonder.

I guess I’ll either get an explanation next week or I won’t, depending on whether or not X-Men wins out over Super 8.   

Re: the title of this post.  I know, technically, The Goonies is not a Spielberg movie.  But he produced it and it’s got his fingerprints all over it and as Matt Zoller Seitz points out it’s clearly referenced in Super 8.  Matt doesn’t list it as one of the best Spielberg knock-offs though or as he calls them the best fake Spielberg movies.

So, your turn.  Best real Spielbergs?  Best knock-off?  How old were you when you had your first real boyfriend/girlfriend?  Which should we see, Super 8 or X-Men: First Class?

Babe magnets

Nurse Baker (breaking off their kiss, as if she’s suddenly remembered): I’m engaged to a pilot!

Hawkeye:  So am I.  I just hope it’s not the same one.

Got passed on the road yesterday by a pick-up with one of those evil pissing Calvin decals on the rear window. (I’ve often wondered why Bill Watterson hasn’t sued.  Maybe he gets royalties.)  It was a little pickup, a kind I don’t see much anymore.  Seems no one drives anything smaller than a F-150 these days.  I saw a 350 recently.  Thing was as big as a tank.  The driver was a very small woman.  I didn’t see the driver of the truck that passed me.  Compared to what I’m used to, and especially compared to my memory of the 350, the pick-up looked like a toy.  The driver was aware of this.  I know this because he, and as you’ll see it was almost certainly a he, had another decal in his rear window that called the truck a toy.  It said:

MY OTHER TOY HAS TITS

I’ll bet it does.  And I’ll bet it really is a toy and it’s inflatable.

Now there’s a babe magnet.  With the Calvin decal?  It’s like Sam Malone’s Corvette.  Women see that in a parking lot and they say to themselves, “Well, I know who I’m having breakfast with tomorrow!”

Why do I think this guy would be scared silly at the prospect of having breakfast with a real live woman?

Good gravy.

Who taught him that the way to attract persons of the female persuasion is to offend as many of them as he can?

Who taught so many American men that the best and only pickup line they need is some variation of “Me want you. Hur-hur.”?

Maybe they pick it up when they’re fourteen from beer commercials which are either aimed at guys like the driver of the toy pick-up truck or make fun of guys like him while pretending to be aimed at them.  By the way, have you noticed how fear of women is a theme of the second type of ads?  I don’t think the guys being made fun of notice.

Been a long time, but I don’t remember this “technique” ever working back in my salad days.  I remember watching in amusement as other guys tried it again and again and then I would shake my head in bewilderment when they whined about getting shot down.  I couldn’t understand why it wasn’t obvious to them why basically grunting like cavemen and beating on their chests failed to charm.

Not that I was a young Sam Malone or Hawkeye Pierce myself, although I had aspirations.  It was just that somewhere along the way I had learned that it was helpful if you actually talked to a girl first---I should say talked with---before inviting her to breakfast.

Frasier: Let’s face it, everybody.  In America, in the 1990s, there are no heroes anymore.

Sam (bursting in the door): Hey, guys!  I’d like you to meet my date.

Norm, Cliff, Frasier, and the gang (chanting):  Sam-my! Sam-my!

I’ve never been taken with evolutionary psychology as a method for explaining all human behavior, but I did develop an evolutionary theory for what those guys were doing, even if they weren’t aware it.  The purpose of the grunting and chest beating, I theorized, wasn’t to charm females of the species.  It was to scare off other males.  Once the competition was driven away, then the horny homonid could devote his attention and his energy towards charming a potential mate and convincing her that he was a worthy breakfast companion.  I just figured that these guys hadn’t learned the second step or that there was a second step.

But the more time I spent in the field observing their behavior, the more I began to doubt my theory.  I began to think that the reason they hadn’t learned about the next step was that there wasn’t supposed to be a next step.  Charming females wasn’t the point.  Getting invited to breakfast wasn’t the point.  Driving off competition from other males wasn’t the point, in fact, the point was almost the opposite.

The point, my theory had it, was to show other males that you weren’t competition for them.

These guys weren’t trying to attract girls.  They were trying to make themselves attractive to other guys.  Not as potential mates.  As potential members of the pack.

The object was for the beta males to demonstrate to the alpha male that they would support and cheer on the top dog but that they didn’t have any ambition to challenging the top dog themselves.

To put it in another, less pseudo-scientific way.  These guys didn’t want to be Sam Malone.  They already knew they weren’t and never would be.  They were Norms and Cliffs who desperately needed Sammy to like them and let them be part of his gang because they knew they were helpless on their own.

Or, to take a more literary approach.  In Romeo and Juliet:  Mercutio is often assumed to be gay because of his expressed contempt for Romeo’s infatuations, first with (the unseen) Rosalind and then with Juliet.  And for all I know or care maybe he is gay.  But it’s far more important that he’s the alpha male of the gang whose only other members we see are Romeo and Benvolio but that probably includes a bunch of other young Veronese bullyboys and swells.  As top dog, Mercutio would naturally try to discourage his gang from pursuing any relationships outside the pack but he would be especially suspicious and jealous of any of the other’s getting involved with women, either because that would threaten the cohesion of the pack---the poor smitten sot might wander off or his romantic and erotic success might incite jealousy among the others---or, since a perk of being the alpha male is first choice among potential mates, Romeo might represent a challenge to his alpha maleness.

It’s to Mercutio’s credit that when he realizes Romeo is seriously in love with Juliet he actually begins to enjoy his company more and treat him with more respect.  He starts to see Romeo as his equal and likes that.

Unfortunately for everyone in the play, a challenge to Mercutio’s place as top dog comes along that he can’t tolerate or adapt to.

And it comes from a cat.

At any rate, it seemed to me, and seemed strange to me, that there were a lot of guys for whom it was more important to show off to other guys than share breakfast with a girl.  And it still seems strange to me.  I don’t know if it’s evolutionary, cultural, or economic, but for some reason the point of gestures like “My Other Toy Has Tits”---and there are all kinds of variations of that, most of them actual gestures---is to fit in among other guys.  Both types of beer commercials, the ones that take these guys’ lusts seriously and the ones that make fun of them, recognize that the real point isn’t to get laid but to share a beer with the guys and both recognize that women are other to that experience.  Women are either accessories to the beer sharing experience or a threat to it.

In the second type of ad it’s often implied that the guys, either the ones in the ads or the ones watching at home, are relieved when they’re shot down.  I don’t know if this has to do with performance anxiety or fear that success would lead to their being driven from the pack.

It didn’t make sense to me that there were guys who preferred the beer-drinking company of other guys to breakfast with a girl.  It still doesn’t.  And I can’t help thinking that guys like the driver of that pick-up want to learn.

If they do, my first lesson would be this.

One semester back in college I had an idiot roommate who decorated the wall above his bed with centerfolds from Hustler.  Not Playboy.  Not even Penthouse.  Hustler!

The wall above my bed was decorated with New Yorker covers and cartoons.

Yeah, I was a pretentious little snot back then.

But guess which one of us had more company for breakfast.

______________________

For the record.  I do not mean any disrespect to pick-up trucks of any size or to their drivers.  I still want a pick-up truck of my own.

The embarrassment of the middle-aged lover

I’m in the drug store.  I don’t like this drug store.  Its layout makes no sense to me.  I get lost as if in a labyrinth.  Takes me several circuits to find two items that usually turn out to be across from each other in the same aisle.  Tonight, I’m wandering around in there, looking for this and that, and on one of my circuits I nearly run into a woman---I’d put her around forty---who has just stepped back in shock from the condom display.

She turned to me with a hopeless, pleading look and for a second I was terrified she was about to ask me for a recommendation.  There are, after all, a lot of choices.  But she said, “When did they get so expensive?”

To which I fortunately did not reply, “The price of everything keeps going up and up, doesn’t it?”

I said something like, “Mumble, um, mumble, uh, yeah, mumble, oh, are the toothbrushes over there?”

Because I’m suave that way.

I’m guessing she hadn’t been shopping for condoms in a while.  I’ll leave it for you to decide for yourselves why she was doing it tonight and if it was just the cost that had her reeling.

I continued my search for greeting cards and vitamins which meant that a few minutes later I swung back around to that aisle and when I did she was still there only she had moved down one display to the lubricants.  Which she stood stock still before, with her arms out at her side, her whole attitude begging, “Dear God, just kill me now!”

I hope they’re having a nice night.

“Do you promise to love, honor, cherish, and actually die of the terminal disease you claim to have?”

Back in April the local paper published a sad but heartwarming story:

Strangers step in to offer wedding for terminally ill bride

CITY OF NEWBURGH — The young woman hurts.

Knees. Feet. Bones.

She shuts her mind to all of it and locks onto the questions of the moment: Long, flowing train? What about the veil? Ivory? Pure white?

Dozens of wedding dresses hang on racks at Bella Couture in Newburgh. Many young women have lingered here, musing on the combination of details that must come together to create the perfect dress.

Jessica Vega is a good age – 23 – for this adventure. She and a girlfriend pick their way through the aisles.

Keri Ciastko is working alone in Bella Couture when Jessica comes in, but that's no problem. She's a natural at this. Even pregnant, Keri reflects the energy of the young women who go whirling through the store, matching their giddy anticipation.

Jessica, however, presents a problem. She needs the dress by May 2. The staff at Bella Couture usually have months for the fitting, tailoring and perfecting all the little details to make sure the dress is THE dress for the wedding day.

But Jessica can't wait months.

Jessica, readers learned, was dying.

The young man hurts.

He worked a 16-hour shift the day before. He's grateful for the work. Hours were hard to get during the winter, but he wrenched his back jumping off the truck last night. He's 23 and moves like an old man today.

Michael O'Connell was like a kid, eager, two years ago when he finally had the opportunity to walk Jessica to class on the Manhattan campus of the Institute of Culinary Education.

“You going to give me your number?” he asked her. “You going to give me your number?”

He asked five times before she finally said he could call. It wasn't long before they were spending long weekends together, and not long after that they moved in together. Their daughter, Ava Lily O'Connell, came in May 2009.

The restaurant where Michael worked suddenly closed, but he was able to find a construction job with Boyce Excavating Co. to support his young family.

Jessica had worked as a private chef in Westchester County – until the diagnosis.
They didn't believe the doctor at first, but a second opinion came back the same: acute myeloid leukemia. Terminal.

Jessica never knew Michael to cry, but he cried with her each day for two weeks. Just the two of them, sitting in their car parked outside their apartment.

One day, they stopped crying. Jessica stopped talking about the pain. Michael tried to forget the doctor's letter was even in the house. Instead, they would focus on a wedding.

Michael and Jessica didn’t have a lot of money.  But when people heard about Jessica’s condition they wanted to help.

Tom and Kim Kavanagh's son, Shawn, was 10 years old when he was diagnosed with leukemia.

It was a frightening time for the family, and they took comfort in the Young Champions program at Stewart Air National Guard Base. The soldiers treated Shawn like a friend, inviting him on base for an awards ceremony and then back as an alumnus for parties.

Shawn eventually recovered and grew into a strapping, 22-year-old Marine. Tom and Kim never forgot the Young Champions program.

So when a soldier and longtime Young Champions volunteer named Rachel calls Kavanagh's Jewelers one day, it takes about 30 seconds for Tom to offer two wedding rings to a young couple he and his wife have never met.

The dress shop knocked half off the cost of Jessica’s gown. A stylist offered to do Jessica and her bridesmaid’s hair and make-up for free.  Someone offered the couple their time-share in Aruba for their honeymoon.  Someone paid for their plane tickets.

Jessica and Michael had their dream wedding in May.

You can read the whole story in the Times Herald-Record.

Then you can read the story the paper ran Sunday.

Bride’s ‘Till death do us part’ story was false, husband says

Michael O'Connell preferred to pretend there was only today and to forget that his wife's cancer would probably kill her in less than a year.

That's the way he used to think.

"I had to prepare for her to die," O'Connell said.

Now O'Connell says his wife, Jessica Vega, had pretended — saying she had terminal leukemia in order to scam him, everyone they knew and a long list of strangers who heard her story and wanted to help.

Read all of Doyle Murphy’s story in the Times Herald-Record.

The New York Daily News has more.

What do Linda Ronstadt and Anna Karenina have in common?

Not all that much, as far as I know, but I had this song on my mind when I was writing last night’s post, so…

Get a dune!

Other day.  Tuesday.  I’m bobbing about in Oyster Pond, not exactly swimming, more like engaging in some directed drift, around the barrel-supported rafts at the farthest reaches of the roped in swimming area, lazily batting aside moon jellies, which I don’t see but feel on the backs of my hands as sudden and a subtle pockets of tautness in the water, ducking my head when the green head flies come find me, but except for the flies and the jelly fish all alone and mightily enjoying the solitude, until I realize I’m hearing voices.  A young couple, a boy and a girl in their late teens or early twenties, have swum out and climbed aboard the nearest raft while my attention was on something else.

They’re stretched out in the sun, she lying full-length on her back, he propped up on his elbows beside her, and they’re holding a quiet but apparently cheerful conversation.  I don’t know what they’re talking about because I don’t speak whatever Eastern European language they’re speaking.

College students working on the Cape for the summer.  Tip jars on the counters of coffee shops and snack bars around here are labeled with the names of schools like Southwestern University of Bulgaria and Odessa State.

I couldn’t make out their faces.  I don’t wear my glasses when I’m swimming.  But they were lean and fit and deeply tanned and beautiful in outline.  Their voices were filled with affectionate familiarity, flirtatious but not intimate, although a couple of times she shrieked and then laughed nervously in an embarrassed but thrilled despite herself way at something he said and then spoke sharply quite clearly telling him to cut it out in their language.  Mostly, though, their talk was just the this and that back and forth of a young couple contentedly in love enjoying each other’s company.

They weren’t taking any notice of me but I felt awkward and intrusive for taking notice of them and I pushed off towards shore to give them the privacy I thought they deserved.

Back on the beach, I looked out at the raft.  They were still there, still talking.  “Were we ever that young?” I thought to myself with amusement, affection, nostalgia, and a touch of regret.  “We must have been.  So how come I don’t remember it?”

I’m telling you this so that when I tell you about this other couple and you suspect a Hey you kids, get off my lawn quality in what I tell you, you’ll give me some credit and not dismiss me as an old fogey grumping that youth is wasted on the young.  I’m an old fogey who likes to see the young making the most of their youth and the sight of couples like the boy and girl at Oyster Pond make me happy even while I mourn my own lost youth.

This other couple though…

Saturday.  Lighthouse Beach.  The Mannions and Uncle Merlin are frolicking in the numbingly cold surf.  Turning blue, I take a quick look up at the beach and the long dash across the sand to the nearest warm towel and I see that this couple has spread out on their towels and blanket right next to our stuff where they have gotten busy making the most of their youth.

I confess to having gotten carried away a few times in my day.  There were moments in open fields and shady glens and empty classrooms and parked cars and parents’ basements and, once, a library stairwell where the privacy I assumed we had stolen was more of a lucky gift and there was no reason that no one came along to interrupt except that no one ever did.

That I know of.

But I never went looking for an audience.

It wasn’t as if they could think they had stumbled on a temporarily secluded spot that they were too young and too much in love to resist taking advantage of.  While our towels and chairs were empty, other towels and chairs and blankets around and about were not.

They had company on all sides, a dozen or so people of all ages and sorts and conditions sharing a single thought.

“Get a dune!”

She was on top, straddling his hips, and she was not sitting still.  He held her gently, his hands just above her waist.  They were like the other couple lean and fit and deeply tanned and beautiful in outline, but they were also beautiful close up too.  Not movie star beautiful or model beautiful or even professional athlete beautiful.  Beautiful the way averagely good looking people will be for a relatively short period in their youth when a combination of good health, good spirits, genetic luck, and a suffusion of hormones cause them to blossom like gorgeous wildflowers.  This happens to different people at different times.  For some it occurs in their late teens or early twenties, for others it holds off until they are in their late twenties or even early thirties.  These two, who I judged were twenty-one or twenty-two, were blossoming together.

I’ve always believed that couples who engage in prolonged public displays of affection have no other way of engaging with each other.  They don’t talk because they have nothing to say. 

I can’t swear this was the case with this couple.  But they stayed on the beach the whole while we were there and they weren’t lip-locked or hip-locked the whole time and the only time either of them did any talking at length was when he saw a friend of his and went over to say hi.  She tagged after him but she didn’t join in and he showed no sign of wanting to include her.  She hung back, the conversation stayed between the two guys, and when it ended the couple went back to their blanket and their mutual near silence.

It’s easy to imagine that they had nothing in common but the fact that they were both perfect at the same time.  And it’s satisfying to think that in the not too distant future she’ll be out with friends and see him with his new girlfriend and say, “Can you believe he’s going with her?  She’s fat!” or that he’ll be out with his friends and see her and say, “What’s she doing with him?  He’s a geek!”

And it’s pleasant to imagine that the first couple’s conversation will continue, with the same affection and cheerfulness and flirtatiousness on through their Fiftieth Anniversary.

But life doesn’t work that way, does it?

Because they talk to each other and listen, the first couple might figure out sooner that they’re on different paths and need to go their separate ways.

Because they don’t talk, the second couple might never figure it out and proceed happily towards their Fiftieth Anniversary with no clue and no thought that they each might have had a different sort of life.

The first couple might be talking themselves out of a romance and into a friendship.  The second couple, having exhausted themselves one night, might start chatting amiably and discover they can’t shut up and they’ve begun a conversation full of affection and good humor and flirtation that will go on year after year without end  end until one of them can no longer talk anymore.

But for sentimental reasons my money’s on the first couple.  The second couple’s having their fun now and it’s enough and good for them.  Good luck to them both in whatever comes next.  But I want to believe that twenty or twenty-five years from now the first couple will be down here with their kids and he’ll look out from the beach one day and see another couple on the float, talking, and he’ll think with more amusement and affection than nostalgia and regret, “Were we ever that young?”

Random Thought Number Two on the Hoosier Hypocrite---Now With More Middle-aged Sex Appeal.

Nance wants to know why.

I think I’ve read too many nov­els, because when these things hap­pen, when pow­er­ful men take proac­tive steps that they know hold the seeds of their destruc­tion, I want to get inside their heads….Why, Mark Souder? Why, in one’s 50s, when the hot blood of youth has cooled con­sid­er­ably, does one take up with a mar­ried woman? She’s no hot-fudge sun­dae of erotic pos­si­bil­i­ties, just your basic cute north­east Indi­ana Repub­li­can haus­frau, with a bit more pol­ish than the ones you see shop­ping at the mall in Christ­mas sweaters. Maybe, like a lot of guys who fall well short of the George Clooney looks stan­dard, he thought that he would never again find a woman other than his wife will­ing to go to bed with him, and decided not to deprive him­self of the expe­ri­ence.

Um…yep.

This is what I worry’s going to be my downfall.

I’m not concerned I’ll make a fool out of myself over a very young woman.  Not that gangs of cute forty-ish hausfraus are holding auctions to see who gets a night out on the town with Lance, but my guess is that the pool of twentysomethings who’d even consider a fling with me is three, and two of them are nuts and the other is a Tour de France groupie and has me confused with Lance Armstrong.

It’s the thighs.

I have moral and aesthetic objections to chasing women who aren’t old enough to run for the US Senate anyway.  Like calls to like.  Beautiful girls belong with beautiful boys and anybody under the age of thirty is beautiful.  I would mess up the picture.

And a twenty-five year old who preferred having the picture messed up by a man old enough to be be her father over the dozens of her choice only old enough to have graduated from high school with her must be out of her mind or emotionally damaged in some way that I’d feel bad taking advantage of or would lose patience with or would cause me to wear myself out with fear and dread as I waited for the inevitable crack-up, breakdown, explosion, or sudden return of her senses.

There are always exceptions.  I’m sure there are many sane, sensible, and well-adjusted young women who have found happiness in the arms---and beds---of men other women their age have to resist referring to as Gramps.

But I’ve never been inclined to bet on myself being one of the exceptions to anything.

So I think I’m safe from making a fool of myself that way.

Let any prettily plump intern in a red beret flash a thong at me and I’ll give her a good scolding and send her straight home to her mother.

Ah, but if that mother turned up in my office to talk it all over working a nice pair of slacks to her advantage or wearing a sweater revealing a hint of cleavage that would be the end of me.  The Appalachian Trail beckons.

Really, Lance? I hear Nance ask, because I know she won’t mind if I use her as a rhetorical device.  You’d Souder your life, Sanford your marriage for the likes of a forty-five year old Mary Kay cosmetics saleswoman and would-be Republican evil twin to The West Wing’s CJ Cregg?

I don’t know.

Guess it would depend on just how polished she looked in her Christmas sweater.

Particularly if that’s all she was wearing, the Christmas sweater and a pair of heels.

Look, like I said, it’s not as though crowds waving dollar bills are forming at the foot of the stage.  What I do know is this.  I fell into a terrible funk the other day when I realized that I will never again go to a beach with a woman who looks good in a bikini who wants me to notice how good she looks in her bikini.  That was the subtext of my goofy post last Tuesday on Cameron Diaz.  I think---or I want to think---or I want you to think---that the real cause of my funk was the anger I felt at myself for not having followed up my realization with an un-self-sympathetic, Of course you won’t.  You’re an old man.  You might as well feel bad you won’t be asked by the Mets to play centerfield for them.

The vanity behind my self-pity annoyed me too.  There I was lamenting the loss of the sort of company who if I had my wish would not get to enjoy the same sort of aesthetic privilege I would be enjoying.

I don’t look as good in a bikini as I used to.

I used to promise myself I wouldn’t turn into one of those middle-aged men, that I wouldn’t try to kid myself with spiritual and emotional comb-overs and metaphorical red convertibles.  I intended to age gracefully at least to the extent of not whining about the inevitable.  And so far I’ve kept my promise and been fairly true to my intentions.

My problem hasn’t been accepting getting older.  It’s been seeing a point to getting any older.

But just because I am determined not to be one of those middle-aged men doesn’t mean I don’t sympathize with those middle-aged men, and it certainly doesn’t mean I don’t feel pangs of envy when I hear about how one of those middle-aged men has made a fool of himself in the way now Ex-Congressman Mark Souder has made a fool of himself.

Souder is odious and despicable because, well, he’s odious and despicable generally, but also because he was so brazen in his hypocrisy.  Souder wrote a note excusing himself from moral PE a long time ago, and then made a political career out of telling the principal every time he caught someone else skipping gym.  But there’s still a part of me that watches that risible video of him sitting there going all Aw Shucks, folksy as the woman he’s committing adultery with praises him for his efforts to make other people feel bad for having sex and thinks, You lucky bastard, I know why you did it.

“Really, Lance?  Really?” Nance asks again, still comfortable in her role as rhetorical device.  “Isn’t that insulting to the blonde?  And would you actually do that to her?”

Look, Nance.  Like I said.  I don’t know.  How can I know until I face the temptation?

I suspect that I am now as far past desperate housewives wanting to tempt me as I am past women of any age or marital condition who look good in bikinis wanting me to notice.  But for all I know I have faced the temptation and either I’m such an angel I don’t even notice when I’m being tempted or I’m a blind fool.

It may be that the same problem---if you can call it a problem, and some of you won’t---that cut down on my opportunities to give in to temptation in college and grad school persisted into my graying middle-age.

Back in college there were girls who “wanted to” but they thought I was such a good guy that they were afraid I would think badly of them if they’d put the moves on me.  Telling me this was a way of putting a move on me, of course, but these confessions---and it’s not as if there were dozens of them---came too late, at times when I had a girlfriend in the vicinity when the confessions got made and in letters written and phone calls made after we’d both left school and were living with large chunks of the country in between us.  Once it was made under both circumstances, in a phone call I got while my new girlfriend was in the room.

In graduate school, the problem was slightly different.  The women who claimed later they would have liked to have tempted me were a little older and wiser and knew I was no angel, but I’d made the mistake of letting my girlfriend (the blonde) come visit and the would-be temptresses had met her and liked her and they told me they couldn’t do that to her.

Sisterhood.

So, for all I know, years have gone by when I could have been tempted if only I hadn’t appeared to be quite such a nice guy or if the blonde had struck the right wrong woman as more of a bitch.

You might have noticed that in the above characterization of myself as untempted, temptation presents itself—or rather fails to present itself---in the form of women putting the moves on me.  This might make you think I was a passive by-stander in my own romantic and erotic life, either because I really was too much of a nice guy or I was a coward.

Scroll up.

You’ll see I said the problem cut down on my opportunities.  It didn’t eliminate them.

There are some guys, the Sam Malones of the world, who can focus their seductive attentions on more than one woman at a time.  There are men who can juggle chainsaws and men who can solve differential equations in their heads and men who can stare down grizzly bears and grin them to death.

I’m not one of them.

The truth is I don’t know what I’d do but not because I am clueless about my own ability to resist.  I know what I did in the past and sometimes I was good and sometimes I was bad.  I was young then and it would be pleasant to think that now that I am old I am wise and have developed more strength of character and an iron-willed self-command.

But that’s not the way life works for most of us.

We don’t get stronger morally as we grow older any more than we get stronger physically.  We just don’t have the same opportunities.  Fewer temptations come our way for reasons similar to our not being asked along to climb a mountain or hang-glide or run a marathon or drive all night to be on the beach at dawn to catch the waves.  The younger and stronger people---people stronger in will and mind as well as in body---who plan and arrange these things, including the things that are temptations of one form or another, know we’re not up to it. 

Older people who feel the urge to cluck smugly over the sins and foibles, crimes and misdemeanors of others need to ask themselves if they are really such moral paragons themselves that they would never do anything that rotten or stupid or if it’s actually the case that no one thinks anymore to ask them to join in on the sinning, foibling, criminality and misdemeanorhood.

After a certain age, it’s just not going to happen.  Fame, fortune, and beach dates with someone who looks as good in a bathing suit as Cameron Diaz or Tom Cruise are for the young or, at least, the younger.

As it happens, women reach this certain age sooner than men.  It’s unfair.  But it’s the way it is.  There seem to be more younger women who are crazy enough or damaged enough or just plain unprejudiced against gray hair, bald spots, slack guts, and wrinkles or for whom a trim waist and a youthful attitude and a sparkling personality are attractive enough than there are younger men similarly crazy, damaged, or unprejudiced.  That may be changing.  But for now there’s also the problem of that hormone drop which has the effect of making women of a certain age less interested in sex (at least for a certain key number of years) and one of the things that makes a person interested in having sex with another person is that person’s interest in having sex.

But the same thing does happen to men.  That certain age does arrive, and sooner than the men themselves know.

Sooner than they are ready to admit, at any rate.

Actually, I think a lot of women admit to it too soon, that they underestimate the allure of a good figure, a youthful attitude, and a sparkling personality, but that’s another post, and probably one I don’t have the courage to write, but back to men.

A trouble people have adjusting to getting older is that bodies don’t age all of a piece.  The parts of us that make us desirable age faster than the parts of us that make us desire. 

Our spirits and personalities do age and they age in response to the aging of our bodies, and you would think that a man who knows he can’t vault parking meters anymore would know he can’t do other things either.  But as other parts of our psyches decline, one thing seems to grow stronger.  Our vanity.

That certain age arrives.  The hormone levels drop.  The bald spot expands, the wrinkles deepen, the jeans start hanging slack in the rear.  And Vanity says, Nah!

Vanity says, It’s not happening or if it is it doesn’t matter or if it does matter, it matters generally, but not to a stud like you.

Vanity says, And anyway, you deserve one last chance.

And vanity isn’t always talking about sex.

It’s just that in this case that’s what I’m talking about.

Vanity conquers some men right way and with obvious sad results.  They buy the convertible.  They do the comb-over or the equivalent, applying Rograine, shaving the whole head, buying the rug, or going in for plugs.  They start thinking that biochemically induced four hour erections are what nature intended.

They might as well wear signs.  “I Am One of Those Middle-Aged Men.”

But for other men, Vanity lies in wait.  It sits back, reading a newspaper or surfing the web, patiently, knowing that the moment of weakness will come when the man in question, whom Vanity has been indulging with the foolish idea that he will never be one of those middle-aged men is suddenly shaken by the realization that he misses going to the beach with Cameron Diaz lookalikes and that an older, dumpier, grayer, dweebier man like Mark Souder has been enjoying the company of a cute Hoosier hausfrau who looks good in, and probably out of, her Christmas sweaters.  And when that moment arrives Vanity puts aside its paper, sets down its iPad, steps up and throws a friendly arm around the poor, disappointed, and self-loathing man’s slumping shoulders and says, Why not you too?

The issue here, then, Nance, and now I’m addressing you as a pal and not just as a rhetorical device, isn’t whether or not I’d give in to temptation and why I’d be such an old fool.

I don’t know.

The issue is that I want to know.

One way or the other.

I want the temptation.

More humiliating to admit.  I still expect the temptation.

The disappointing point is that I failed in my resolve.

I am one of those middle-aged men.

Happiness is…

Ok, let’s answer David Brooks’ almost too lazy for a college bull session conducted during commercial breaks on Letterman question.

Two things happened to Sandra Bullock this month. First, she won an Academy Award for best actress. Then came the news reports claiming that her husband is an adulterous jerk. So the philosophic question of the day is: Would you take that as a deal? Would you exchange a tremendous professional triumph for a severe personal blow?

The answer is…

Meryl Streep.

Or, a bit more relevantly, since he won an Oscar this year too, Jeff Bridges.

Meryl Streep and her husband have been married for thirty-two years, Bridges and his wife for thirty-three.  Maybe Brooks didn’t watch the Oscars so he didn’t hear Michelle Pfieffer gush about what a great family man Bridges is or hear Bridges himself make part of his acceptance speech a valentine to his wife.  Possibly, like many of us, he was caught up in wondering if Bridges was stoned, drunk, or goofing or all three and didn’t pay attention to what the man was saying, man.

The point is that in order to answer Brooks’ question as simply and simple-mindedly as he expects us to or, rather, doesn’t want us to, so he can lecture us on how wrong we are---

if you had to take more than three seconds to think about this question, you are absolutely crazy. Marital happiness is far more important than anything else in determining personal well-being. If you have a successful marriage, it doesn’t matter how many professional setbacks you endure, you will be reasonably happy. If you have an unsuccessful marriage, it doesn’t matter how many career triumphs you record, you will remain significantly unfulfilled.

---you have to accept the idea that life is an either/or proposition and that the way your life is now is the way it’s always going to be.  That’s all right for a college bull session but absolutely useless as a basis for navigating through life itself, which makes Brooks’ lecturing us on how best to live our lives based on an answer that depends on a useless absurdity absurd.

Streep and Bridges are living arguments that life is complicated (That’s not a plug for Streep’s movie.) and unpredictable.  But they and their marriages don’t prove anything about how to achieve happiness, any more than the heartache Bullock’s suffering now proves that following her example will lead to unhappiness, because what’s the example anyway, in any of their situations?  Brooks makes it sound as though the choice is always and only between professional happiness and personal happiness through a happy and stable marriage, but Streep and Bridges appear to have managed both.

Meanwhile, what about Sandra Bullock?

The answer to that is Tom Hanks.

Or Paul Newman.

Neither of whom managed personal happiness through a happy and stable first marriage.

Things didn’t work out for Bullock with Jesse James but that doesn’t mean that tomorrow she won’t meet someone who is not a sleazeball with whom she will live as happily ever after as anyone ever does with anyone.

To take Brooks’ question, and his answer, seriously, requires something else---ignoring the problem of talent.

Problems.

The first problem is that most people don’t have it.  Not to a degree that gives them grounds for reasonably assuming that the highest levels of professional achievement are obtainable for them.  It’s easy to say, oh, I’d trade my Oscar for a good and faithful husband in a flash, if there was never any possibility that you would win an Oscar or even act in a movie that would get you considered for a nomination.

The second problem applies to those that have it.  Any degree of it.

Brooks’ answer, that marital happiness is better than professional happiness, depends on believing that a person with talent can feel fulfilled in a life that doesn’t make serious use of that talent.

I’ve known some talented actors and actresses who once aspired to professional careers who found some satisfaction in lives spent teaching college drama classes and acting in community theater.  None of them did it for love though.  They landed where they landed because they either failed in their professional careers or got worn out.   Those of them who’ve had happy and fulfilling family lives have had them as consolations and there’s not a one of them who doesn’t miss the days when they were young professionals with reason to hope.

But they’ve been lucky in at least having outlets for their talents.

Imagine having a talent for science and having no outlet for it beyond supervising science fairs at your kid’s grade school or having a talent for medicine you only get to practice when your kid’s sick or a talent for architecture you can only apply to building blocks or a talent for diplomacy that only comes into play when breaking up a fight in the backyard.

Actually, there are lots of women in America over 60 who don’t have to imagine.

There are millions and millions and millions of women of all ages all over the world who don’t have to imagine it either.

And there are many men who sweep floors, dig ditches, plow fields, empty bedpans, load and unload trucks, drive cabs, sell cars, sell suits, sell appliances, sell insurance, and spend their entire working lives pushing papers that are making other men and women rich, who were by talent and intelligence intended for other things and how likely is it that even those who go home to happy and contented families feel fulfilled?

“Oh well, could be worse,” isn’t as rousing a motto as Carpe Diem for carrying on, but that’s all it is, something to say to yourself when there’s not much else to make you excited about getting through another day.

Brooks’ condescending bromide of a point---really, are we supposed to listen to a best-selling author, television pundit, and New York Times columnist tell us that we don’t need a successful and challenging and creative professional life to be happy?  It may be true, but it’s something I’d rather hear from my old mother than from someone who could command a five or six figure speaking fee to tell an audience  of the rich and powerful the same thing.

I’m imaging banquet tables crammed with elderly millionaires turning wistful eyes on their third trophy wives and patting their hands as Brooks assures them that it’s not money but love that matters most in life.

I suppose Brooks might be giving some comfort to those of us sinking sadly into a dull and mediocre middle-age with nothing more to look forward to in our careers but their end, that is, those of us who’ve been lucky enough to get this far with our families healthy and intact.  Brooks assumes that marital happiness is a default state and not mainly a matter of the gods having decided not to screw around with you for the fun of it.  Brooks likes to recommend classical reading in his columns, although you have to wonder if he’s read what he’s recommending himself.  This is a guy who once quoted Tolstoy as an expert on marital happiness.  I recommend that he go read the Book of Job.

But as advice to the young, smart, talented, and ambitious it’s worse than useless.  It’s a recommendation for giving up before you’ve even started.

Seek not after fame and fortune, my children, seek not even after the satisfaction of a job well done.  Find yourself a nice boy or a nice girl, settle down, and start cranking out the kids as fast as you can.  Surrender, that’s the key to happiness!

Never mind all the people who have ruined their chances for personal and professional fulfillment by chasing after marital happiness in the form of lovers who aren’t worth the chase or all the people who having thought they had achieved personal fulfillment by settling down with a nice boy or a nice girl have discovered after years of fulfillment the person they felt fulfilled by was not fulfilled themselves and had decided to seek fulfillment elsewhere.

I’m guessing Brooks didn’t give a thought to Elizabeth Edwards’ probable reaction to his column.  Or Elin Woods’. 

Or Sandra Bullock’s, because, as Brooks apparently didn’t bother to consider, she’s forty-six, this is her first marriage, and in marrying Jesse James rather late in life, she was apparently accepting the idea that a high-level of professional achievement---Bullock didn’t need the Oscar, except maybe to make people forget about All About Steve---wasn’t enough.

Still, somehow I doubt she’s thinking, “I would trade my Oscar for the return of my husband’s love.”

More likely, she’s thinking, Good riddance to bad rubbish, and getting her agent on the phone to find her a good follow-up to The Blind Side.

Maybe Bullock should have known that James was a bad bet.  But that’s saying that she was better off being content with professional fulfillment instead of trying to find personal fulfillment with a known bum.  And maybe Elin Woods should have stuck to modeling.  But at the time she got married would anyone have told Elizabeth Edwards that she was going to be sorry---thirty-odd years later, and if they had would it have been reasonable for her to believe them and change her plans?

What if someone had told her that between her wedding day and the day she found out her husband was worse than cheating on her she would lose a child and be diagnosed with a cancer that would certainly kill her?

I have no idea what she would have, should have, or could have done, except what she did, make the decision she thought would make her happiest.

Life is a gamble.  There are no such things as destiny and fate.  Whatever the purpose of the life is, if there is a purpose, it is not the happiness of individual human beings.  No matter what path you choose in life you are choosing pain and suffering.  There is more along that path, wherever it’s leading, that will cause you unhappiness than will give you a sense of satisfaction and fulfillment.  There are paths that are less dangerous, that are smoother, that include fewer mountains to climb and fewer to fall off, and that will carry you past prettier scenery, but how are you to know you to know which path that is?   Even if you could know, how are you to know that you will enjoy traveling along it?  It might bore the life out of you.  Falling off mountains may be what you need to make you happy.

Chose the path that leads to a life of marital contentment, if not bliss, says Brooks, as if he doesn’t know that that path may require you to fall off mountains every day.

Chose love, says the starry-eyed romantic David Brooks.  But Freud said people need love and work.

Jeff Bridges and Meryl Streep appear to have found both.  But did they decide to have both?  Doesn’t matter in the long run.  The initial decision doesn’t guarantee the outcome.  Along the way they’ve both had to make many more decisions.  They’ve had to make accommodations for their personal lives in their professional lives and for their professional lives in their personal lives.  They were both lucky in having married people willing to make their own accommodations for them. 

Nobody can decide to be lucky.

There is a very short period in life when we get to decide on what path we’ll take and a long period after that when we have to come to terms with the results of that decision.

What excites us and makes us want to get up and out the door at twenty may be our idea of hell at forty, and that goes for a job as well as for a spouse.

But how can you know at twenty what you will be like at forty?

All you can know is what makes you happy at the moment and your best choice then is to do what makes you happy.

The happiest people, married or single, are those who are doing what makes them happy.

Whatever that is.

Hat tip the McEwan.

Tiger, Tiger, Burning With Desire

I know, I know, you’ve all been holding your breaths, waiting to hear what I think about the Tiger Woods affair or as the French say, if they spoke French as badly as I do, L’affaire du Tigre Dubois.

So, what do I think?

Not much.

That’s not to say that I don’t think there is anything to think about Tiger and his women.  I’m not saying that it’s not an interesting story.  And I’m not saying you shouldn’t be interested, if you are, and you probably are, even if you say you aren’t, although I’m sure you’re not as interested as the Media seems to think we all are.

It’s not even that I’m not interested.  I’m certainly not claiming any sort of superior moral detachment.  No hypocritical liberal sniffing that other people’s sex lives are none of our business from me.  No pietistic pontificating about judging not lest ye be judged.

What I’m saying is that when I read the stories and watch the news clips nothing particular occurs to me.

I have no insights, profound or even commonplace.

My mind doesn’t go blank.

I just have trouble getting past two words.

Lucky bastard!

Or, to revert again to the French, le batard heureux!

If I do manage to get past those hose two words, they’re usually by two more.

Only eleven?

To tell you the truth, while I am interested in the story, I’m not all that interested, and that’s not because I’m not all that interested in the sex angle.

I’m just not all that interested in Tiger himself.

I don’t play or watch golf.

But to the degree I am interested in him, I am interested in him only because of how well he plays golf.

I only know who he is and care because of his amazing success on the golf course.

Off the golf course, he is a complete stranger to me.  Who he is as a person, what he thinks, what he does around the house, who he does outside of the house, all of that matters to me as much as what the private life of any stranger matters to me.  By matters, I mean its effect on my life not its hold on my casual interest, and without its having any real and direct effect on me, it’s not just hard to care, it’s hard to even see it.  I have to work on imagining what Tiger is like as an actual human being, same as I’d have to work on imagining what your brother-in-law’s second cousin’s boss’s plumber is like if you told me a story about a contracting nightmare.

In other words, what I know about Tiger, like what I’d know about your brother-in-law’s second cousin’s boss’s plumber, is the work of imagination, which is to say, fiction.

I’d be making it all up, and what I made up would be full of projection.  It’d be a story that was more about me than about that plumber or about Tiger Woods.

And if I’m going to spend time caring about what might as well be fictional characters I’m better off reading actual fiction, novels and short stories by talented writers who can invent good and truly interesting characters and who can tell me the truth about them.  Simply put, whatever I think I know about Tiger Woods is pure fiction.  Whatever Anthony Trollope tells me about the Reverend Mr Slope or Mrs Proudie is the truth, and I prefer the truth because I’m literal-minded that way.

As for any prurient interest I might have, again, it’s based on imagining the private life of a complete stranger, and other people’s sex lives are only intriguing to me if they spark my own erotic memories or inspire specific fantasies. 

Nothing I’ve read or heard about Tiger’s running around reminds me of my own romantic and erotic past.  Nothing I’ve read or heard makes me wish I was getting what Tiger’s been getting.  I’ve never been a fan of the casual pickup.  My cheatin’ heart doesn’t beat faster at the thought of taking home strangers.  I sure wouldn’t mind being like Tiger, young, good looking, rich, famous, extremely talented, and therefore attractive to many and a wide variety of beautiful young women.  But if I was those things---and assuming that I would still be me if I was---and if I was inclined to run around on my wife, I’d be more likely to have affairs than flings, and my romantic partners would be women I’d gotten to know well while on the tour, journalists, women in the business, women golfers, somebody’s wife or girlfriend.  In short, I’d probably get myself in bigger trouble faster.

But I’d bet the occasions of my trouble would be sexier.

Here’s the thing, though.

If I was as young, good looking, rich, famous, talented, and as attractive to beautiful young women as Tiger is, I wouldn’t cheat on my wife---because I wouldn’t have one.

I wouldn’t be married.

Not yet, at any rate.

Last night, when I went to pick up some milk at the dairy store, I happened to overhear a bit of the conversation of some of the gang of old coots who make the place their clubhouse---The Cracker Barrel Club, the blonde calls them---who were sitting at one of the booths, having their coffee and discussing the affairs of the world.  They were talking about Tiger and the thing one of them couldn’t understand was why he had gotten married, and the other men agreed they didn’t understand it either.

They did not mean they didn’t understand why he got married if he was only going to turn around and cheat on his wife.

They meant why would he risk losing all that money in a divorce.

As far as they were concerned, Tiger’s marriage was a bad business decision.

Tiger became a celebrity at a very young age, celebrity marriages are notoriously short-lived, only a moron would marry someone as rich and powerfully lawyered as Tiger Woods without an extremely favorable and tough pre-nup, Tiger’s wife doesn’t seem to be a moron, so, the Cracker Barrel Club agreed, it was Tiger who was the moron for signing a contract he should have known he was bound to break to his great cost.

The old coots weren’t being cynical.  They were being realistic, and their realism about the Woods’ marriage applies to all marriages.

Marriage is not a romantic adventure.  It’s an economic enterprise.

A marriage is a business deal that’s complicated by the fact that the two people who contract to it are in love with each other.

Love isn’t the reason to get married.  It’s simply an asset to the business.  If you’re lucky.

The reason to get married is because you’ve found someone who will make a reliable partner in the business of living a life.

The business of that business is keeping body and soul together.  Marriages are partnerships dedicated to feeding, clothing, sheltering, and, if there’s money to spare for it, entertaining and comforting the partners.   If there are children, then the business expands to include feeding, clothing, sheltering, educating, and, if there’s money to spare, entertaining the children. 

Once upon a time, all those tasks and expenses could only be done and afforded if they were shared.  And once upon a time that didn’t mean shared by only two people.  Marriages merged families into larger economic enterprises, with more people to help carry the load.  But it’s been a very long time since two people could live more cheaply than one, at least here in the United States, and at least among the middle class and the well-to-do.

These days, most people can afford to provide for themselves what it used to take at least two people working together to provide.  Most people can buy everything essential that our ancestors needed a spouse’s talents, skills, salary, or help to acquire. 

It’s still easier for a couple---a middle-class couple---but it isn’t absolutely impossible or a great hardship for a single individual to manage on his or her own.

Basically, there isn’t a good, practical reason for most people to get married, and what reasons there are things that don’t kick in until later in life.

If you’re young and reasonably well-off, that is, if you have a job that pays your rent and covers the cost of three squares a day, with money left over for other necessities like clothes and, if you’re foolish enough to live in a place where a car is required, a car and gas, marriage is in effect an agreement between two people to share living quarters while they wait around to get old together when they will then need each other.

Or it’s an agreement to raise children together.

If you’re rich or at least relatively so, then you don’t even need a spouse to help you do that.  You can hire people.

(Some feminists might want to point out here that that’s what a lot of men do, only they call the hired help wives.  And Tiger Woods appears to be one of those men.)

What I’m finally getting at is that there is one other thing I think about Tiger Woods.  Why?

As in, why did he get married?

He’s been rich as well as famous since he was a very young man.  There was no economic benefit to him and a major potential downside.  Yes, his wife is beautiful, but so are the eleven (and counting) other women. 

The blonde thinks that it’s a case of his wanting to have his cake and eat it too.  She thinks he wanted the picture perfect traditional family and to be free to have sex with any beautiful and willing woman who came his way.

If that’s the case, though, then here’s something else I think about it all.

Tiger’s problem isn’t that he’s selfish, or compulsive, or devious, or misogynistic (in thinking that women exist only as things to be used for his pleasure or convenience).  He may be all of those things, but how would I know?  Like I said.  He’s a stranger and whatever I think he thinks or feels is pure projection on my part---fiction.

But there is something I can objectively conclude about him.

He’s impatient.

Or rather he wasn’t as patient as Warren Beatty.

Now, leaving aside that Warren Beatty’s romantic adventures are more interesting to me than Tiger Woods’, because Beatty slept with far more interesting and beautiful women---doesn’t look to be any Julie Christies in Tiger’s many ports of call---leaving that aside, what I admire about Beatty is that he had the good sense not to get married until his days of being irresistible were just about over.

He didn’t try to have his cake and eat it too.  He showed patience and discipline and self-awareness.  In his way, he was considerate. 

So if I was as young, good looking, rich, famous, and talented as Tiger Woods, my role model wouldn’t be Tiger Wood.

It would be Warren Beatty.

If you’re going to be a selfish, narcissistic, philandering jerk, you ought to at least be a gentleman about it.

_______________

Related:  Over at the Agonist, Numerian thinks more than not much about Tiger Woods, the brand as much as the man.  Read Tiger Woods Falls Into a Trap.

Jonathan Ames on making people think they enjoy sex

Jonathan Ames, the writer who is the creator of HBO’s Bored to Death and the real person Jason Schwartzman’s character is the projection of, wrote a novel about an alcoholic writer who hires PG Wodehouse’s Jeeves as his valet.  Odd thing is no one but the writer ever sees Jeeves.  The novel’s called Wake Up, Sir!   There’s not much of a plot.  The writer lurches from mix-up to mix-up, counting on Jeeves’ help and advice to straighten things out only to find that Jeeves never shimmers in in the nick of time to save the day the way he does for Bertie Wooster.

The writer becomes involved with a woman with whom he is, as Jeeves often advised Bertie about the likes of Lady Florence Cray, Honoria Glossop, Madeline Bassett, and Bobbie Wickham, temperamentally unsuited.  But unlike Bertie, the writer’s entanglement with this said unsuitable female does not get him into trouble by landing him in jail, or in the clutches of the unspeakable bully Spode, or sending him fleeing the country to escape yet another scolding from his Aunt Agatha.  The writer gets into trouble by getting into her bed and getting her into his.

The result, as it concerned me as a reader, wasn’t high hilarity as much as it was a mixture of arousal and embarrassment, as if Ames, had somehow found out about a cherished erotic episode in my life and used it in his novel in a way that was not flattering to my opinion of myself as a man and a lover.  It was pretty much like learning that a former girlfriend hadn’t had quite as much fun in my company as I thought.

Except I had never dated a girl like the girl the writer makes a fool of himself over in Wake Up, Sir!

I had never had a relationship that was in similar.

For the simple reason that at the time in my life when I was a young writerly type whose circle of acquaintances included any number of girls like the one in the novel---hyper-intelligent, creative, sexually aggressive, extremely neurotic---I made a point of steering well clear of them.

Which didn’t mean I wasn’t attracted to them.  I was.  Strongly.  I just had a feeling.  Kind of like the feeling that has kept me from bungee-jumping, rock climbing, and visiting war zones as a reporter.  The thrills that I know I would enjoy come with too many risks and attendant pain.

But I always wondered what it would have been like if I’d been braver, or dumber, particularly with one girl, a dancer and composer who was probably a genius but who could never put her genius to work for herself because as soon as she began to get her intellectual engines revved up she started hearing her mother shouting over the roar about what a disappointment she was as a daughter.

I would have gone to bed with this girl in a heartbeat if I didn’t suspect it meant also going to bed with her mother.  What are those messages from home Mrs Weasley sends to Ron at Hogwarts?  Howlers?  This girl received howlers every hour on the hour.

Still, she was nice and she was interested and she was a dancer, so I always wondered…until I read Wake Up, Sir!  Then I knew, because Jonathan Ames knew and he’d written it down for me.

It would have been very sexy, and terrifying, and exhausting, and constantly and finally humiliating.

In the video below Ames talks about how sex scenes in his writing are opportunities for character development.  He describes sex as “this little theater where all sorts of issues and problems can express themselves.”  That’s what an affair with her would have been, a constant drama of issues and problems.

It might also have been funny.  In hindsight.

Here’s Ames.

You can watch the whole interview or read the transcript at Big Think.

PS.  I’m still hoping someone out there has recorded the whole season of Bored to Death and won’t mind burning me a copy.

Cougars

Updated.

Ok, I'm an old fuddy duddy who spends his time in his basement working on his model trains, so you'll have to explain it to me slowly and with patience.  What exactly is a cougar?

If you're a cougar, and I called you a cougar, would you be flattered or would I get my face slapped?  My guess is that if you would slap my face you aren't a cougar even if you are.

Apparently cougars are attractive single women of a certain age, but I don't know what that age is.  Also apparently not all attractive single women of a certain age are cougars.  What's the difference?

Who thought that name up?  Who thought it was sexy?  How are cougars like cougars?  Are they big and cat-like?  Are they always on the prowl?  Do they lie in wait up on rocks in mountain passes for passing big horn sheep and antelope or drop from tree branches on unsuspecting white tail deer?  That suggests cougars are something else besides single, attractive, and of a certain age, possibly dangerous.  Do other non-cougar women like them?  Do they want to be like them?

Isn't the male equivalent of a cougar a fifty year old guy with plugs, a spray-on tan, a red sports car, and hefty child support payments?

Is the cougar phenomenon a good thing?  Good for whom?  Men?  Women?  Porn Studio Executives?   Thirty and forty something guys who are tired of the snickers of the twenty years olds they've been hitting on and have learned that one advantage of being with a cougar is that older women have learned to be kinder and more tolerant and save their snickering for the ladies' room?

Slate thinks I should be interested in cougars enough to watch this video, Cougars Gone Wild.  Excuse me.  I'm going to do that now.  Solely in the interest of research.  Then it's back to the basement.  I'm building a candy store for Mannionville Junction.

Updated in solidarity with Jon Stewart, Fellow Reddenbacher:

A too young to be a cougar reader sent me this one.

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Burning Desire Notice

Not yet ready to throw over Uma or break things off with Gwyneth, but I can feel myself falling hard for Gabrielle.

I'm watching Burn Notice again tonight.  Season 1, Disc 2 came in the mail from Netflix today.  Episode I've got paused six minutes and fifty-two seconds in on my laptop.  Image on the screen is of palm trees and the Miami River and looking into the heart of the city.  Image I'm resisting backing up to, at two minutes and fifty-seven minutes, is of Gabrielle Anwar in a yellow tank top, her breasts rising as she sighs heavily.

Complication is that she---that is, Fiona, the character Anwar plays---is looking out a window at the Czech assassin who's waiting in ambush to kill her ex-boyfriend, our hero, the former spy Michael Weston, and it's not clear if Fiona's sighing because she's bored, sighing at some inner, secret sorrow, sighing because she's attracted to the assassin, or sighing because she can't decide what weapon she'll use to kill him when he makes his inevitable run at Michael, or all of the above.  With Fiona it could be any or all or various combinations the listed causes.

Fiona is, um, troubled.

Bill Nothstine has warned me away from her.  "Very high maintenance," is how he's described her.  I've replied that it's Anwar herself I'm smitten with, not the character, as if my feelings for either didn't represent a delusion on my part.  But I'm not fooling anybody.  It's Fiona.  I've seen Anwar in other things, most notably as Henry the Eighth's rapaciously libidinous sister in The Tudors, and I've managed to appreciate her charms and her talents without feeling my devotion to Uma and Gwyneth shaken.

It's Fiona.

And part of the attraction is the high maintenance.

There are many ways of being high maintenance and different high-maintenance types require different kinds of maintenance on different schedules.  And I hope you'll notice that I'm not using gender specific language here.  The worst type is simply spoiled who think the world revolves around them and you're there to prove it.  The second worst is spoiled and helpless.  There are others.  Fiona is not helpless and if she's spoiled it's in a very weird way---she demands to be kept amused not attended to and her favorite forms of amusement involve violence.  Long-time fans, do we ever learn anything about her childhood?  I hope not.  No, the maintenance a high-maintenance type like Fiona seems to want and need, is the kind that proves that you are as crazy about her as she is about you.  She also wants constant acknowledgement that she is what you have been searching for all your life. 

This would explain Fiona's constant need to be in and/or cause trouble, because in the middle of this trouble one of two very desirable things can happen.  She can show Michael how skilled she is at getting out of trouble and prove how useful she is to him or, if she can't get herself out of a jam, Michael will have to drop what he's doing and come to her rescue which he wouldn't do, would he, unless he really cared.

So, with the Fionas of the world, the maintenance that appears to be needed because it's all about them is really proof that it's all about you, that they are all about you.

What it comes down to, then, is that high-maintenance types of Fiona's type are attractive because they play right to your vanity, and admitting that I'm not immune to the type is admitting that I don't mind having my vanity played to, not one little bit.

Fortunately, for my vanity, because I'm vain about not being the kind of fool who lets his vanity get the better of him, my attraction to Fiona also depends on geography and fantasy.

Fiona is much more attractive for being surrounded by Miami than she would be if she was surrounded by Fort Wayne, Indiana or Lansing, Michigan, and she grows even more attractive when I forget who and what I am and start thinking I'm a highly-trained and super-competent former spy making a living by helping out people in trouble while I'm trying to track down whoever burned me at the Agency.

__________________

Once upon a time, I was did some hanging around South Miami Beach, like Michael Weston, only minus the helping people for hire while dodging Czech assassins business.  Also minus a Fiona.  But I spent a fair share of my time drinking in the glow of the neon at outdoor bars by the waterway at night and watching women in string bikinis stroll the sidewalks and beaches by day.  I was there because of this blonde chick.  She was there for her first job out of college.  I would come down when I could from Iowa where I was in grad school.  This was an inconveniently long commute.  So she took a job in the Midwest, as close as she could get to Iowa and to me.  Except that I was about to graduate, which meant that I was no longer "stuck" in Iowa.  I could go live wherever I wanted to.  Which of course would be wherever she was.

And that's how I came to spend five years in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where there is very little neon and  where very few women stroll the sidewalks in string bikinis.

Like I said.  There are all kinds of ways to be high-maintenance.

At the ballpark, still

I wasn't the only one watching the pitcher and the tall girl who thought what I thought was going on was going on.

When the pitcher broke off his conversation with the girl and her friends and started up the path behind the bleachers towards the club house he was intercepted by a local cop who greeted him with a beaming grin and, as he fell in behind him, several congratulatory pats on the back.  I couldn't hear what they were saying but the cop kept looking back over their shoulders in the direction of the tall girl.

The cop was a short guy, shorter than the girl, for sure, and maybe shorter than both of her friends.  He was young, in his late twenties, I think, but built like a much older man, wide in the hips, with sloping shoulders and no waist to speak of.  He wore his pants high and his belt and holster rode up around his kidneys.  He walked duck-footed.  His head appeared to be shaved but it was hard to tell for sure under his old-style police cap which was too big and from which he'd removed the wiring so that it flopped over his ears.  Next to the tall, strapping, good-looking younger ballplayer, he cut a comical but somewhat sad little figure.  Here, I couldn't help thinking, was a guy for whom a uniform, a badge, and a gun did the opposite of what he'd probably hoped they would do when he'd joined the force.

He and the pitcher finished a short conversation and the cop let the player go with another hearty pat on the back, and I probably don't have to mention that the cop had to reach up to catch the pitcher on the shoulders.  The pitcher walked off to find that other player he'd come strolling back with in a few minutes, leaving the cop standing there alone, his thumbs tucked into his belt, trying to look nonchalant, as he kept glancing over towards where the tall gall was trying not to look like she was waiting for the pitcher's return.  The beaming grin was gone from the cop's face and I thought he looked more than a little wistful.

At the ballpark, continued

"These seats taken?"

"Nope," I said without looking up to see who was asking.  Harwich had men on second and third.   I took my foot off the bleacher bench in front of me.  A mountain slid in and blocked my view.

I'm exaggerating.

It was only a house.

Big guy.  Tall guy.  Wide guy.  When he asked about seats, plural, he meant it.  He took up three spaces on the bench.  And I couldn't see around him or over him.  His head covered third base and the pitcher, angled as he was, his shoulders took out home plate and first base.

Nothing for me to do but move.  I walked around the clubhouse to the stands on the third base line where, because it's where the home town crowd mostly sits, I couldn't find a seat.  So I found a place to stand where I could look through a gap in the bleachers and see most of the field.  Except that I didn't.  Look through the gap.  I was distracted.

Behind the bleachers is a favorite gathering spot for the pretty young women who are planning to still be there when the game's over and the fans go home and there's pretty much nobody left but them and the ball players packing up their equipment.

Few years ago---Jeez, was it almost ten already?  IMDB says so---movie came out set on the Cape, Summer Catch, about a player in the Cape Cod League (Freddie Prinze) who falls in love with a local girl (Jessica Biel).  The premise was that Prinze's character was a hardscrabble working class kid and Biel's was a WASP Princess---get it?  Prinze's character was playing out of his league both professionally and romantically.  The reality is often the opposite.  Cape Cod, for all it's summertime wealth and visits from celebrities and Presidents, still has a large working class population.  Chatham is a fishing village.  The Cape League is for college ballplayers.  They play here against the best of the best in hopes of attracting big league scouts but because they don't get paid they don't lose their amateur status.  Mike Lowell played for the Chatham A's.  Evan Longoria and Jason Bay did too.  Most of them take part-time jobs to pay their expenses but they're on scholarships at their schools.

What I'm saying is that if these kids aren't princes, they are princes-in-waiting, and if they're smart as well as talented and they make the most of their opportunities, even if they don't make it as professional ballplayers, their status as college heroes and the connections that come from that will carry them far in life.  For the most part, then, in any romantic encounters between players and fans, it's not usually going to be the case of Simple in his seven league boots winning the hand of the Princess, but a case of a beggar maid pining for the king for whom she's done an anonymous kindness.

Which is what I always think about whenever I see something like what I saw going on behind the bleachers Monday night.

One of the Chatham pitchers circulating through the stands helping to sell 50-50 raffle tickets and give out programs (and autographs) had stopped back here to chat with some fans---three college-aged women, one of whom was clearly smitten.  Her friends were just star struck and they were talkative and giggly.  But she was quiet and still and her eyes were huge.  She was the prettiest of the three too.  Not Jessica Biel movie starlet gorgeous.  Normal human being beautiful.  Her legs were long and her cutoffs were not.  She was tall, but the pitcher was over six-foot and she had to look up with those wide open eyes into his.  She had his attention, but he was cool enough not to show too much.  He also knew enough not to hang around too long.  he left them each with a program and then excused himself to go continue his rounds.  The tall girl stared after him and her friends tried not to laugh too hard.

Several minutes later the pitcher came back this way.  There was another player with him.  They walked right past the tall girl and her friends who I don't think saw them.  The pitcher and his friends were talking quietly but the pitcher gave his chin a quick jerk in the tall girl's direction and the other player lifted his head, held it still a second, then nodded.

I don't know if the pitcher was looking for his friend's approval or encouragement or to be warned off in case another friend was interested in the tall girl or in case she had a reputation as a nut or a clinger or a heartbreaker or someone who's heart it would be too easy to break.  I don't know that I was seeing the story I've just told.  I don't know that all I was seeing was a ballplayer being gracious with some fans and then talking over the finer points of the game with another player.

I do know, that if I was seeing this story, I'm rooting for the tall girl to find out that, one way or another, whatever way she wants it, this prince turns out to be a prince of a guy.

An examination of misogyny, gynophobia, and the redemptive power of tigers in a movie too slight to bear such a discussion

Scroll down to the bottom of this post---and it's a long way down.  A long way down.---and you'll see that one categories I've filed it under is Everybody has a hungry heart.  That's a clue that this isn't meant to be just another post about The Hangover.  Like a lot of my posts about movies, it's as much or more about things in real life the movie got me thinking about than about the movie itself.  In this case it's love, marriage, men, women, adultery, guilt, self-repression, Cheers, Shakespeare, and Cary Grant.

Commenter Dan was disappointed that I liked The Hangover.

Actually, he was disappointed that I was "so positive about this misogynistic dreck."

Dan has other objections to The Hangover, but the misogyny complaint is the one I was already prepared to deal with before Dan left his comment.

That's because one of the things I liked about The Hangover was that it wasn't misogynistic.

I've read reviews that call it misogynistic, like this one in the Daily Mail and this one in the Telegrah, but in both cases the reviewers have used the word lazily in a way that makes it almost meaningless.  For both of them, the filmmakers' misogyny is proved by the fact that one of the main female characters is unlikable and the other, while likable, is something of a cliche.

If the absence of admirable and memorable female leads is misogynistic in and of itself, almost all war movies are misogynistic.  If the presence of unlikable female leads is misogynistic, then Macbeth is the most misogynistic play ever written, after King Lear.

Neither review acknowledges that there is a third female lead and that, although undeveloped as a character to the point of being not much more than a stick to beat the plot along, is a strong, intelligent, adult, and likable presence.

  

In fact, the bride-to-be Tracy's likeableness is the key to liking the movie, which depends on our having a rooting interest in Stu and Phil's finding her lost groom Doug and getting him home in time for the wedding and thereby saving their relationship.  We have to like Tracy, and Doug, and care that they get married in order to care about Stu and Phil.  Otherwise they are just a couple of jerks making bigger jerks of themselves.

It's hard for me to see how a movie that is to a great degree about the happiness of a strong, intelligent, decent woman and her love for a strong, intelligent, decent man is misogynistic.

Unless you think that the character of Melissa, Stu's live-in girlfriend, is supposed to define our attitude towards all women.

Or you think that together, Melissa and Jade, the stripper and prostitute played by Heather Graham, are supposed to define it, that they represent our only two options in how to think about women, either as castrating bitches or whores.

Obviously, I don't think this is the case in The Hangover.

Melissa is a bad person.  She's nasty, selfish, grasping, stifling, and an all-around pain in the neck.  That's what I liked about her.

If you met a Melissa in real life, you'd call her a bitch, even if you are opposed to using that word in principle.   But she's not a real person.  She's a character.  More to the point, she's a type.  She's a shrew.

Shrew's another word there are principled objections to using to describe real people.  But that doesn't mean there aren't real shrews, just as the fact that the word bitch is used to put women in general down doesn't mean there aren't in fact real bitches, some of whom aren't women.  A shrew, though, is not a bitch.  Bitches aren't types because they aren't characters, just attitudes.  Bitches don't do anything but act bitchy.  Shrews are active.  They have a cause , which is the general improvement of all around them, particularly the men in their lives, and their preferred method for improving people is scolding, which they can do just as well quietly as by yelling.   P.G. Wodehouse described the (relatively) quieter sort of shrew when he described Lady Florence Cray as not being able to look at a man's soul without being overcome with the desire to get behind it and push.  Melissa is a shrew, not a bitch, and she doesn't represent all women as shrews, she represents only herself as a type.

In fiction, and in psychology, types are characters who are trapped inside a vicious circle of self-limiting behaviors.  Another word for them in real life is neurotic.

Besides having a goal, another way a shrew is different from a bitch is that a shrew, like Katherine, can be "tamed."  That is, she can break free from her neuroses, with or without help from a Petruchio.  A bitch is just a mean person not worth the effort of taming.  A shrew is someone who could be a nicer, better person, if she could only see her way to changing her act.

And in The Hangover the possibility is that Melissa is a nicer and better human being than we see her being on screen or at least at one point in time she was nicer and better.

Part of that possibility comes from the casting of Rachael Harris as Melissa.

 

Harris is playing a shrew, but she doesn't look like one.  She doesn't look like anything or anybody in particular.  She could be cast as a lawyer, a soccer mom, a school teacher, the loan officer at a small town bank, a nurse, a clerk in a department store---almost any thing.  She is attractive, but she is not a knock-out.  She is not ice queen beautiful, or movie star beautiful, or repressed schoolmarm beautiful, like Lilith on Cheers, who was not a shrew but was often put into the position of one by Fraiser and the gang's childishness and so in her own controlling, quietly bossy, treats-her-husband-like-a-dimwitted-child was a precursor to the type Harris is playing here---a smart, strong woman who to her own surprise and dismay has found herself attached to a weak and foolish and not as bright about life as he ought to be schlub of a man and rather than dumping him has decided it's her job to make the schlub shape-up.  Harris is a normally pretty, as opposed to starlet pretty, pleasant-featured woman, so normal and pleasant looking that whenever she starts in on Stu it's more disconcerting than infuriating, or funny.  It's hard to believe that this woman could be this cold and this mean.  We start wondering if we are seeing the true Melissa.  Her shrewishness might be a symptom of something, if it has cause other than her own ill-temper, and very quickly it's clear that it does have a cause and that cause is Stu.

What makes shrews shrews is the way they try to make their schlubs shape-up and what sort of person they want their schlubs to shape up into.  They don't emasculate their man, they take advantage of their man's self-emasculation.  They are reflections of a male character's weakness not its cause.

Stu is a cringing, fawning, needy, indecisive schlub whose one act of self-assertion is to spin an elaborate lie about where he and his buddies are about to spend their weekend.  He desperately needs shaping up.

And that's a major part of what The Hangover is about, Stu's needing to shape up and how he's made to.

At first glance it might appear that all Stu needs is to escape from the shrew. 

Now, if you've decided your story is the schulb's escape from the shrew into the land of happily ever aftering, a question you might want to answer is does he escape through his own efforts or is he saved by the love of another, nicer woman?  If he's to be saved, how?  And if your answer is that another woman saves him and she saves by loving him for what he is, you might be writing the script for a classic like Bringing Up Baby, but you are not writing the script for The Hangover.

Stu is not saved by Jade.  He meets and hooks up with Jade because he is in the process of saving himself.  They do not get together in the end, although the possibility that they will get together in the future is there.  But it's there because Stu is a changed man.

The Hangover is more concerned with Stu's escape from his shrew than with Melissa's escape from her schlub.  But there is a story to be told about a shrew being saved from a schlub by the love of a man worthier of her spirit and intelligence and strength.  These aren't necessarily taming of the shrew stories.  The Philadelphia Story is one of those.  Gone With the Wind is, although the taming doesn't take.  His Girl Friday isn't.

My point isn't that The Hangover is in the same class as those movies, only that it's easy to imagine Stu and Melissa's story told from her point of view and see that she needs to get rid of him just as urgently as he needs to escape from her.

Most comedies and all farces derive their humor mainly from the ways their characters are reduced or reduce themselves to types.  The "drama" is in how the characters we are meant to care about break free of their type.  I don't like farces in which the characters break so far free of their types at the end that they become realistic human beings.  But I do like to be able to see the real human beings that are behind the types, and I think I can see that in The Hangover's subplot about Melissa and Stu.

We are told very little about them or their history together.  We know they've been a couple for several years, but we don't know how they met or what attracted them to each other.  We can guess that neither one was the person we see on screen when they got together because its unlikely that Stu would have fallen for anyone this nasty and bossy or that Melissa would have gone for anyone this craven and unctuous and, well, repulsively needy.

We are told one significant fact about their past.  She has cheated on him.

As far as we know, it was just once, and we don't know the precise circumstances exactly, although it's implied that she was drunk at the time and it was on a cruise ship and with a stranger and Stu saw it happen.  We don't know if it was just a mistake or something more.  We can guess, though, that it changed their relationship for the worse, because it changed them.

Clearly, it terrified Stu to the point that he doesn't dare assert himself with her because that would risk her either breaking it off with him or, worse, telling him why she cheated, that why being that he is not sexually or otherwise enough of a man for her, an irony, since what's he's doing is making himself less and less of a man and she plainly despises that in him even as she takes advantage of it.

How it changed her is less clear, but it likely made her afraid too.  Afraid of losing Stu and afraid of herself.

What does it say about her, a strong-willed, decent, well-behaved adult, that while on vacation with the man she supposedly loves she could get drunk and rip one off with a stranger in public?

What it appears to have said to her is that if she could goof up like that then the odds were good that Stu would eventually goof up too.  She's projecting all over the place, of course.  But she's determined that Stu won't get the chance to do to her what she did to him.  She bullies him and spies on him and takes control of every aspect of his life she can get her hands on.

The trouble for Melissa is that she's decided that in order to keep Stu in line she has to keep right on top of him, which leaves her with no breathing room of her own. The cage she's built around him, she's also built around herself.  In trying to deny that the side of herself that allowed her to go wild on that cruise isn't there, she's repressed every urge to have fun, any sort of fun, including sex.

None of this is there explicitly on the screen, but none of it is precluded by anything on the screen.

And if The Hangover's treatment of Melissa was misogynistic it would have been precluded.  We wouldn't have been allowed to see past not the type but the stereotype to a real human being worth our understanding if not our admiration.

Nasty as she is to Stu, she is also being nasty to herself, and that makes her a sad and pathetic character---or it would make a real life version of her sad and pathetic.  It also makes her a particular character.  Melissa isn't representative of all women, or most women, or many women.  She is representative of herself or at least the self she would have if she was an actual person.

A lot of the stupid attitudes towards women and sex in movies is due less to hatred for women than to fear of them and not even to fear of women themselves but to men's fear of not being worthy of them.  Oh, ok, to men's fear of not being able to get it up.  Men's fear of sexual inadequacy is an ancient theme of farce.  As Yoda says, fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, and so gynophobia can turn into misogyny when men blame their own flaccidity on the women in their lives.  But while Stu is afraid of upsetting Melissa and thereby losing her, the movie's attitude towards women in general is neither fear nor anger.  Love, marriage, commitment, and intimacy between a man and a woman are portrayed as good things.

None of those qualities are present in the relationship between Melissa and Stu.  In fact, their relationship is based on anger and fear---in her case the anger is overt and the fear is repressed, and with him it's the other way around.

To repeat myself:  Most comedies and all farces derive their humor mainly from the ways their characters are reduced or reduce themselves to types.  The "drama" is in how the characters we are meant to care about break free of their type.  A lot of comedies fail when instead of their characters breaking free of type they simply turn into another type or into cliches and then demand we love them for it.

I think that both Stu and Phil break free and become, if not more like real people, at least much less their original type and more like rounded characters.  That we don't see Melissa breaking free of her type and are not meant to care one way or the other is just a fact of the movie being about Stu and Phil and not about her.  That she's a woman has nothing to do with that or with the fact that our dislike or her is left unchallenged at the end.  It's just not her movie.

Something else.  Melissa is not the movie's villain.  The movie's bad guy, to the extent that it has a bad guy, is Phil.

Phil is a selfish and careless jerk.  He doesn't like being married, but that isn't because he doesn't like his wife.  The cause and effect work the other way.  It's not that he dislikes his wife so he dislikes being married to her.  He dislikes being married so he dislikes her, as his excuse.  And he doesn't like being married for the same reason he doesn't like being a teacher.  Both things require him to be responsible to and for other people.

And if a shrew is a strong woman stuck with a man who is not a worthy match for her, and if the filmmakers meant us to see all women, or most women, as shrews, then Phil's wife ought to be a shrew too.  But she's not.  She is warm, good humored, affectionate, and quite happily surprised by the change in him which she recognizes instantly and apparently not because he's come back from Vegas a different person but because he's come back as his old self.  Her single line, which Gretchen Egolf delivers with a charming mix of surprise, relief, and love, "Is this my husband?" is rhetorical.  It's her way of saying she is glad to have him back, not just from Vegas, but from whatever dark place inside himself he's been hanging out in lately.  In short, Phil's problem is not women, or this woman.  This woman is a positive good in his life.  Phil's problem is a man.  Phil.

So, the reason I didn't think The Hangover harshes on women is that I didn't think it was about women's bad behavior at all.  This is a movie that begins with Phil tearfully confessing to Tracy on the phone, "We fucked up!"  It's about the bad behavior of two men.  It's about Stu's weakness and Phil's selfishness, and to the extent that women have anything to do with their bad behavior it's mainly that they suffer because of it.  Even Melissa.  Stu makes a fool of her with his complicated lies throughout the movie.   We're not expected to think she deserves to be lied to.  We're expected to think Stu's a creep and a coward for lying to her.  What she deserves is to be stood up to.

Seems to me that for a movie to be misogynistic women as women have to be presented as the problem. 

Now...please don't ask me to explain Mr Chow.

___________________

Courtesy of Turner Classic Movies, funny clips from His Girl Friday and Bringing Up Baby.

Tell me what she did to deserve this kind of humiliation?

Maybe you've heard this story already.  Goes like this.  Fifth grade teacher out west, by accounts a good and well-liked teacher, burns a DVD for her students, a wrap-up of their year together.  She makes copies and mails them out to all the kids' homes.  Nice teacherly thing to do, right?  Why she's considered a good and well-liked teacher.  Except that somewhere in the middle of the scenes of fun and frolic, learning and striving, there's a scene of the teacher at home, on her couch.

Naked.

And obviously in the grip of sexual passion.

The teacher did not intend for that scene to be in there.  I don't know how it did get on the DVD.  Probably she saved something to the wrong folder and wasn't careful enough when she was clicking on files to copy.  Kind of amateur mistake could happen to anyone.  It might have been a YouTube video or a clip from a family vacation to Disney World.   But it happened to be what it was.  Then she didn't play the final version through to review it.  Another mistake.  The real mistake.  She's a teacher.  She knows the rule.  Always double-check your work.

She watches it later.  Or someone watches it and tells her what she's done.  Too late, naturally.  In a panic, she starts calling parents, begs them to return the DVDs or destroy them.  She's on the phone in tears.  Most humiliating day of her life.

But someone didn't return their copy or trash it.  They sent it to a local TV station.

The station does a story.

And they show the scene!

Pixilated, blurred, so you can't see anything definite, including her face.  But you can tell she's naked.  You can tell she's a youngish woman with light brown hair.  You can tell she's having an intimate moment. 

And then they name her.

How do they get to do that?  Show the video or give out her name?

She's not a public figure.  She hasn't been arrested and it doesn't appear the police are thinking of charging her with anything.  What would they charge her with?  From the station's story, it doesn't even sound as if she's in trouble with her school district.  To me, and I would guess to most reasonable adults, what she did was the equivalent of accidentally leaving her curtains open on a day a parade happened to be passing by her house.  She goofed, but it's up to the grown-ups outside to look the other way and not let themselves become Peeping Toms.  All the DVDs should have been returned or thrown away and all the adults in her life should have gone about pretending it didn't happen.

Instead, she's on television starring in a soft core porn short.

On the internet too.  The station's story has been picked up by its network and they put in on their website, with the video and a screen capture, pixilated and blurred, but still clearly the image of a youngish woman with light brown hair, naked and aroused.  If you know who it is, and you would know because the network gives her name too, you could tell it was her.

What you can't tell is what exactly is happening to arouse her or who's making it happen---if anybody, because something else you can't tell is if she's with someone.  Looks like one body and one set of legs to me.  She's facing the camera...Well, she's facing the ceiling, but you get the picture.  I suppose there could be somebody under her or off to the side out of the frame.  The camera's at the far end of the couch, but raised a bit so that it's looking down at her at angle, so the somebody with her might be holding the camera.  But it's an awfully steady shot.  Whoever it is might just have superhuman self-control.  Maybe they're using a tripod.  But maybe she was using a tripod.  Maybe the camera's on top of a computer or on a shelf.   She may have been filming herself.  Not that it matters, except that she's married.  She's identified as being a Mrs, at any rate.  Story doesn't say if there's a Mr, but if there is and he was the someone with her, under her, beside her, holding the camera, shouldn't he get a mention, as in this was something between a wife and her husband, not an audition for Playboy?  Even if she was alone, isn't it likely that he was her intended audience?  Maybe he was out of town and found or was supposed to find a pleasant surprise in his email?

What I'm saying is, the reporter doesn't present this as part of a married couple's sex life---and do I need to add the word private before sex life?---he presents it as something she did.

As if all on her own decided to ask for trouble.

Of course, not mentioning the husband does something else.  It keeps the focus on her as a naked woman posing for a camera instead of allowing it to broaden to her as a person with a life.

And about that life?  What if her husband wasn't the intended audience?  What if he wasn't there, under, next to, in front of, wherever?  What if the someone under, next to, in front of her wasn't him.  Or a him?  Or one him?

Besides broadcasting to the world her mistake, making her into a public spectacle, and giving everybody who knows her a rough idea of what she looks like naked, the station and the network might have let the world in on her private soap opera.

Why do they get to do that?

Where are her lawyers and why aren't they on TV cackling with anticipatory glee at the prospect of a whopping big settlement in the law suit?

Even if the network and the station are legally covered, how did they justify adding to her embarrassment and humiliation?

No, don't tell me.

This isn't about her.  This isn't about sex.  It's about the children.

You can probably guess, probably hear in your heads, how it goes.  The reporter, in earnest and unctuous tones, framing it as a story about shocked parents and traumatized eleven year olds.  "What do we tell the children?"  The reporter's even found a father to blather on pompously about the problems he had explaining it to his kids, how he had to stay up all night discussing "the birds and the bees," as if it's the worst thing in the world, having to talk about sex with your own children when they're on the brink of adolescence.   This father is angry, not just at the teacher, but at the school district, which so far hasn't contacted him to offer "counseling."

Counseling?

What happened, guy?  Kids walk in on you when you were watching the DVD by yourself?

I don't know what I'd have told my kids at that age about something like that.  Part of the reason I don't know is that I don't know what they'd have seen.  I don't know how explicit the scene is or how long it goes on.  The story doesn't say.  The reporter doesn't even hint at what's going on.  He and the anchors just call the whole thing "a sex tape."  I'm a cynic.  I'm convinced that if it was something really dirty they'd have found a way of cluing the audience in.  So this is what I think:  It's her, alone, and it's quick.  From the blurred screen shot, it looks to me that you can't see much, maybe some flashes of her breasts.  I think you'd have to be more sexually experienced than your average fifth grader to know what you're looking at isn't more than what curious kids might see in an ad in Cosmo or on HBO, and what would you tell them if they happened to cast their innocent little eyes upon either of those?

It's complicated by the fact that in this case they know the naked woman and she's their teacher, but I think that may actually make it easier to deal with.

"Kids, even teachers are human and they have lives of their own that are none of our business.  Your teacher didn't mean for you to see this so for her sake we'll pretend we didn't."

Maybe it's clear that she's masturbating or doing it reverse cowboy or taking part in an orgy, in which case there'd be some questions I'd have trouble answering off the top of my head.

I don't think it would keep the whole family up late into the night though.

There are questions I couldn't answer.

Like, what kind of creep wouldn't have trashed the DVD like she asked but hand it over to the TV news instead?  My money's on the pompous father demanding counseling for his children because how else did the reporter find him and why is he the only parent on camera or quoted in a story supposedly about shocked and outraged parents?

And what do the reporter and the producers at the station and the network think the teacher did that she deserves to be humiliated like this?

I know the answer to the question why did they air the story?

Sex sells.

But why do they think her sex life is their story to sell?

The main question I've got no answer for, however, is the one I've been asking all the way through this post.

How come the station and the network can get away with this?

__________________

For the record:  No links.  You can find the story yourself, too easily enough, if you're inclined.  You don't really need to.  I've given a pretty good account.  Left out one thing though.

That pompous father?  The story doesn't give his full name.  He's just referred to as "Joe," with the quotation marks to imply that "Joe" might not be his real name.  "Joe's" face isn't shown either.

So this is how it goes.  If you're a woman and you get naked in front of a camera even for your own private viewing, your name and essentially your face are going to wind up all over the place.  But if you're a man and you volunteer to go on TV and publicly condemn that woman (and remember I'm convinced this is the guy who dropped the dime to begin with), you get to keep your identity a secret and wear a mask to the stoning.

Doonesbury disappointment

Anybody else feel that the Alex and Toggle romance is kind of...forced?

Seems to me Trudeau is entering For Better or For Worse territory and letting his personal sentiments about his characters drive their stories.   As a couple these two generate about as much heat as Elizabeth and Anthony.   It's almost as if he's rewarding Toggle for what happened to him in Iraq and giving him a happy ending by marrying him off to the Princess without regard for the Princess's own narrative demands.

 

Related Mannion re-runs:

Garry Trudeau's dance to the music of time.

Bland-thony and Elizabeth get married.

Stand By Me

When the night has come
And the land is dark
And the moon is the only light we'll see
No I won't be afraid, no I won't be afraid,
Just as long as you stand, stand by me.

Everybody!

So darlin'...

Happiness Shmappiness

Bill Scher wants to know, "Will Ross Douthat argue that Sotomayor is unhappy today?"

Bill's referring to Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the Supreme Court and the newest New York Times' op-ed columnist's brilliantly original regurgitation of an age-old conservative and patriarchal argument against allowing women to be full-fledged grown-ups.

Having a job makes women unhappy.

I'd agree, if Douthat means that it's no fun working as a cashier at Wal-mart or cleaning toilets at the local convenience mart.  But he doesn't.  Like many elitists, of the right and the left, in whose thinking about gender and work working class women often seem not to figure, Douthat means any sort of job, but is thinking really about the kinds of jobs held by smart, ambitious, competent women of his own class and educational background, because those are the women who from the point of view of men like Douthat need putting back in their proper place lest they make men like Douthat feel less smart and competent themselves.

The world needs its toilets cleaned.  It does not need doctors, lawyers, scientists, and journalists who may be smarter than Ross Douthat, make more money, and show no deference or desire to give over their lives to bearing and raising his children.

Douthat forgot to mention it, but having a career makes a woman act like a man, too.  So those of you ladies who want to be feminine and therefore attractive to men like Douthat need to march right out of that cubicle and back into the kitchen before you start sprouting mustaches and following UFC.

Ok, let's forget that these polls and surveys are usually of questionable provenance and doubtful methodology.  Let's just consider a fact about women that I think Douthat would agree is true.

Women are under a lot of pressure to be happy.

I don't mean that the feel compelled to attain some higher level of bliss on their way to self-enlightenment and fulfillment.

I mean that generally, at work, at home, around friends and family, just walking down the street or sitting on a park bench alone with their thoughts, they are expected to be happy in the same way they are expected to be busy.  It's in their job description.

"Smile, dear."

Or to put it another way.  A man in a grumpy mood is a man in a grumpy mood.  A woman in a grumpy mood is being a bitch.

Most of us know to steer clear of the man in the grumpy mood.  With the bitch, not so much.  Plenty of her friends, coworkers, and family, female as well as male, will make it a point to tell her to snap out of it.

Women are the peacemakers and the comfort-bearers.  They are the happy homemakers---it usually falls to them to make the home a happy place to be.   This is the traditional wife and mother's first duty.

Which means, of course, that for a woman, admitting to being unhappy is tantamount to admitting to being a failure.

It's worse for the traditional types Douthat wishes all women within his dating range would emulate.

In short, when asked to participate in these surveys and polls, these women have a strong incentive to lie, if only to fool or flatter themselves or, more likely, keep up their morale.

"Liberated" women of the type who apparently shatter Douthat's fragile sense of male superiority and whose senses of self-worth and success are not as strongly defined by how good a job they do at making  other people happy don't have the same incentive, and they can flat out say what is in fact true, life usually sucks and happiness is fleeting if not an illusion altogether so there's not much gain in making it the point of one's existence or the measure of one's...um...happiness.

Boy, there's a post in that one---happiness is not itself a necessary ingredient of happiness.

Of course, one of the first complaints men had against women becoming liberated was that they would feel liberated to speak their minds because they were afraid it would turn out as it has turned out that a lot of what was on women's minds was not flattering or comforting to men.

Now, let's add this.  Happiness---being happy---is an American virtue.

We're a nation of bucker-uppers.  This is one of the great things we do for each other.  We cheer each other up.  We're constantly telling each other and ourselves to buck up, cheer up, suck it up, live it up, look for the silver lining, put a shine on our shoes and a melody in our hearts, gray skies are gonna clear up, put on a happy face, pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, start all over again, and shut up, stop your whining, nobody wants to hear it, and I like this about us.

It can be overdone, and it's nice to take a vacation from it now and then, either by sinking into your own private slough of despond or by finding a bar full of kindred dour spirits and share complaints or by visiting New York City or by just kicking a mime.

But on the whole I'd rather be stuck on a stopped elevator or on a broken down train or in a long line at the supermarket with people who think it's their job to find the situation at least mildly amusing.  And I think it is everybody's job in a family to try to make things pleasant for everybody else.  I don't mean by burying feelings, by living in denial, by enabling, or by living a lie.  I mean by doing whatever little things we can do and saying what little things we can think of to make home, and home is where the heart is, so that can include work and school, bearable.

And it's important to remember that there are ways of doing that besides prancing around the house singing and telling jokes---which, in fact, can be a good way to make the place a living hell---or even without smiling all the damn time. 

There's a marvelous poem by Robert Hayden that captures this, Those Winter Sundays:

Sundays too my father got up early
And put his clothes on in the blueback cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

There's an ambiguity in the poem that's troublesome when you start to think about the many images in it that allude to pain and bruising and that line about "fearing the chronic angers of that house" tells you that the boy's indifference to his father's favors isn't just the usual case of a child taking his parents for granted.  But I love the last line, "love's austere and lonely offices," and it still makes the point---there's a lot of pain and suffering, sacrifice and hard work that goes into being happy.  And to get back to Douthat's rather childish notion that mothers and housewives are the happier women, who knows better how lonely and austere love's offices can be?  When these women respond to nosy poll takers, it's very likely that they are taking rather small comfort in being happy and what they are doing instead is keeping themselves going.

Back when I was in grad school I taught a correspondence course in creative writing.  Really.  It was offered by the university.  I was a pioneer in distance learning although it was all done through the mail and not over the internet, that's how old I am.  My students included all sorts and conditions, but I'd bet that the great majority of them were stay at home wives and mothers---this being Iowa, staying at home for a lot of them meant working at home on the farm.   I didn't get know my students well, naturally, and in fact knew very little about them, just what they chose to reveal about themselves in their stories and poems.  But since their work was usually autobiographical the main thing I learned was that people who enroll in creative writing courses by mail have a lot more sadness in their lives than the twenty-something wiseguy presuming to be their teacher would have suspected or was prepared to deal with before taking on the job of grading the expressions of that sadness.

I remember one poem in particular.  It was by a woman living on the far western side of the state, which I imagined to be all bleak and desolate prairieland.  Her poem was a litany of personal and familial disaster.  Cancer, job loss, divorce, estrangements between parents and children and brothers and sisters, financial ruin, fatigue, stress, loneliness, and not one but two tornados.  I was devastated while reading the poem but I was utterly dumbfounded by its last verse which was very close to being, "But God's in His heaven and all's right with the world."

Being young and arrogant and naturally self-centered, not to mention fashionably cynical and world-weary, I was impressed, or convinced myself I was impressed, by the poet's naivete.  And I went around for weeks afterwards telling everybody who would listen about it and spouting theories about what the poem proved about Iowans or Midwesterners or Christians in general---I used to blog before there were blogs by shooting my mouth off a lot---and otherwise proving my own spiritual and intellectual superiority.

Just in case you're worried that about how big an asshole I was capable of being, I kept these theories from the poet herself and limited my jerkiness to suggesting, tactfully, that her poem would be better if she left the last verse out.  Which from a purely critical point of view was actually true.  It wasn't a bad poem at all.  But what did I know about love's austere and lonely offices?  That last verse was her point in writing the poem, and she wrote back to tell me that, tactfully, speaking as a grown-up to an arrested adolescent.

And I'll tell you, I'll bet if you'd asked that woman if she was happy, she'd have said yes.

Because what else did she have left to be?

This isn't me, I swear...

Letter to Dear Abby this morning:

DEAR ABBY: I am part of a group of people who read our local newspaper online and comment on the news of the day in the public forums provided. It's great fun and offers an excellent place to interact with others.

Some of us have become close, exchanging e-mails and chat messages. One of the women has suggested we all get together at a local watering hole and meet each other, and the gang has agreed.

I would love to join in, but the problem is that the persona I built online is that of a hunky, handsome young man -- including a pilfered photo I posted as "me" on my profile. Needless to say, he is NOT me. I am a 54-year-old, chubby, graying man who wears glasses.

I thought this kind of thing went out with AOL chat rooms.

This guy, who signs himself Abs of Sponge, is old enough to know better.  How many TV sitcoms have had stories about a character who'd lied to a pen-pal about what he or she looked like and did for a living and now had to fess up.  Radar sent one of his pen-pals a picture of Hawkeye and told her he was an officer and a doctor.

I sympathize with him though.  Although I've never hidden the fact that I am a stooped and wizened old man, in the early days of blogging I became convinced that the only reason I was enjoying any popularity at all is that people had developed all kinds of wild fantasies about who and what I was based on my ridiculously macho name.  It was James Wolcott's fault.  "Manly name, manly blog," he wrote one of the first times he linked to me.  Inquiring emails from curious readers and gossip passed along by internet pals confirmed my fears.  I became terrified of meeting any of my readers or blogging buddies in person.  "If they find out what I really am, they'll drop me from their blog rolls and delete me from their bookmarks in a heartbeat!" I told the blonde.

Who scoffed, of course.  "Nobody's staying up late, dreaming of what Lance Mannion looks like," she assured me.

That's why men get married.  For the ego boost.

But eventually I started attending some events where I was bound to bump into other bloggers and you know what?

It turned out the blonde was right.  Nobody had spent a whole lot of time thinking about me.  No women looked particularly disappointed (or thrilled).  No truly manly man blogger sniggered, except Neddie Jingo, who has a right to feel mas macho---he owns both a motorcycle and a chainsaw.   I just wasn't the legend in anybody's mind I'd fooled myself into thinking I was.

So, you might think my advice to Abs of Sponge would be, Go and don't worry about it.  No one will care.  They probably won't even notice you're not what you think they think you are.

Except...

Abs of Sponge has been flirting with some of the women he's met online and the flirtation is clearly based on their thinking he is "a hunky, handsome young man."

By the way, I'm just pretending to believe this guy exists at all.  I've heard that advice columnists have a habit of mashing together letters and conflating three or four or ten advice-seekers into one "person," as a way of addressing a common problem with a single column.  If Abs of Sponge writes to his online friends in the same style as he writes to Abby, they're not fooled.

Abs tries to make it sound as though these women have all taken the initiative and flirted with him without his encouragement, as if he's been a perfect gentleman, except for, you know, the lying, but of course that's a crock. 

I'm sure Abby knows it too, and I think her advice to him is malicious.

She's sending him out to meet these women!  She wants him humiliated.

She assures him he won't be, that it will probably turn out he isn't the only fraud in the group and everyone will have a good laugh.

Abs!  Don't listen!  Stay home!   Sign up for AOL and find a nice safe chat room.

By the way.  I'm not 54.  I'm not chubby.  But I'm graying and I wear glasses.  Wanna chat?