I went to see Sex and the City tonight with a group of women in their 20’s, much younger than Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte or Miranda. I’m older than all of them. They liked it, thought it was disorganized, or OK, or so-so or good. I loved it.
As I tried to explain why, I got strangely emotional, struggling to describe how Samantha’s 50th birthday, the remarkable relationship shared by these four friends, the happy endings and the fairy tale aura, just made me happy. It’s tough to measure the impact of experience on a life perspective, or the different perspective of those just beginning to accumulate those experiences; good friends who are young adults newly married or newly parents – still far from my place as the mother of grown sons.
This, the film’s opening weekend, saw it push Indiana Jones out of first place. I’ve complained a great deal about the latest Indy movie. My husband emailed our older son that the movie "sucked." He responded that he had loved, it, that it was just "one big comic book." Clearly, he felt the same way I’d felt about the girls of Sex and the City. As he put it, with his usual wisdom "I guess everything is a matter of perspective."
NOTICE: YOU MAY NEED INSULIN TO READ THIS – IT IS REALLY SAPPY — CONSIDER YOURSELF WARNED
Right now, I’m crying. Not just teary, crying. Right now, the third time I’ve been to this moment. It’s so embarrassing that until I complete this post I don’t even know if I’ll ever let you see it. Why such emotion on a sunny day so close to my birthday? Over a television show? The final epsiode of one that went off the air in 2006. One that’s about witches?
If, like me, you never paid much attention to CHARMED, appearing on the now-defunct and youth-oriented WB – about three sisters who are witches and who have witchy powers including, when acting together with the “power of three”, to best Ultimate Evil (I know, I know), let me tell you a bit about them. I’ve written about them before – when I first found them two years ago and again almost a year ago, after a wedding whose ritual reminded me of theirs, even though in theirs families gather from across the divide between living and dead. As I wrote then:
On my favorite guilty pleasure, Charmed, rituals of birth and marriage are attended not only by those who share the lives and loves of the Halliwell sisters (yeah they’re witches and their story spent 8 TV seasons enchanting us all) but also by those who came before. They summon, “through space and time” all members of “the Halliwell line.” Surrounded by these translucent figures of past
generations, today’s Halliwells celebrate marriages and new arrivals. Those fully and those ephemerally present conclude together “blessed be.”
What does this have to do with Jewish weddings — or any other terrestrial weddings for that matter? A lot. Eight years on the air, the longest running show with female leads, it dealt often with travel through time and space and dominions never imagined. But when really important events arose, all the magic was supplanted by a single, simple spell that basically –well — brought the family together.
I just looked the show up on Wikipedia and discovered that it went off the air on my 60th birthday – having run from October 7, 1998 to May 21, 2006. My
husband, when he’s in psychiatrist mode, talks about “anniversary reactions” – when we experience deep feelings but can’t quite figure out where they come from. Sometimes, they have to do with the occurrence of anniversaries we haven’t even noticed have arrived. In this case, though, I didn’t know the year the show ended, much less the date. In fact, I was in Paris with my family to celebrate this 60th birthday landmark on that day and didn’t even notice the demise of the long-running series. In fact, I first discovered it, in re-runs, airing as I worked in my office. I used it to keep me company (believe it or not, it’s on four hours a day – two in the morning and two in the afternoon.) Didn’t know a thing about the show or its success.
I got an earful from one of my sons when I asked though, who claimed that the show caused plenty of fights with his (then) girlfriend. Apparently, it was on at the same time as the Simpsons and every week was a negotiation.
But for me it’s somehow more than that. These three sisters, and their powers, are deeply moving. Their battles and solidarity, their humor and courage, their conviction that they could literally save the world from evil (p.s., they did) all resonated in a very weird way. Still do.
Hence the tears. The final episode, as the post-show future unfolds, feels like my own life. Endings. Loving farewells. The (hopefully) gratification of recognizing a life at least partially well-lived. The kids and their kids and an idyllic togetherness among sisters and their husbands and their children and their destiny. A lot to hope for and, I guess, as my own life moves forward, something to cry about.
This week the Carnival stops at John Agno’s So Baby Boomer. If you want to read about "green" cars, summer dresses, good marriages, TV for all us 40+ folks, our crumbling infrastructure or Barack Obama, you can get there from this inventory of our latests efforts. Take a look.
I can remember reading Doris Kearns Goodwin‘s wonderful No Ordinary Time, about the World War II years in the White House: FDR, Churchill, Eleanor – it’s a wonderful, inspiring story and forever changed my understanding of leadership. I read the book on tape, mostly in my car. As I came to the book’s end, and the death of President Roosevelt, I drove around so that I could finish it. All the while, I kept hoping — "maybe this time he won’t die." Totally irrational but still – that was what I felt And I didn’t feel it again until tonight, as I watched Kevin Spacey, Tom Wilkinson, Laura Dern and Denis Leary in HBO‘s Recount, the story of the 2000 presidential election battle in Florida.
Reviews have reminded us that the story has been "altered" for dramatic reasons even though it’s presented as a docudrama. There may be more drama and less docu than historians would wish, — but the basic reality is there – and from the perspective of 8 years and the traumas of the Bush Administration, very painful to watch. In some ways it’s like watching a car accident about to happen – in slow motion — and not being able to do a thing to stop it. Here’s a little bit of it:
Today is my 62nd birthday. It’s pretty amazing. Not only am I, while still healthy and not rickety, able to witness a Democratic primary where a white woman (for the first time) and an African-American man (for the first time) are the major Democratic Presidential candidates. Not only am I, while still healthy and not rickety, able to witness the probable nomination of the 46 year old product of an interracial marriage, who has lived outside the U.S. in the developing world, and who is running on a platform of unity and commitment to helping our country have a better future. AND who is the first candidate to sit for a video interview with BlogHer, thus demonstrating a comprehension of women who blog — and those women who read them.
Not only that. This morning, half-awake, watching C-Span footage of the Obama Iowa rally last night, I saw a nice white Iowa lady of a certain age, like the one in this photo, put one hand on either site of Obama’s face and kiss him on the forehead. And it wasn’t even a big deal.
You need to realize that in my lifetime as someone old enough to notice – probably the past 40 years — that would have been unthinkable. That a highly regarded TV drama was canceled after one season because it featured a white male and black female social worker working together and stations across the south refused to carry it. Slowly, as the Civil Rights movement brought us forward, things changed. And here, I’m really only talking about symbols – not all those individual life moments that remain so difficult for so many. I believe that when symbols change, real change will follow. And some of that appears to be true.
In September of 1967 Peggy Rusk, daughter of then Secretary of State Dean Rusk, married Guy Smith – and it was so unusual it made the cover of TIME Magazine. Which wrote this:
Resignation Offer. As recently as 1948, California law would have made the union a criminal offense in the state. Until last June, when the U.S.
Supreme Court killed Virginia’s miscegenation law, 16 states still banned interracial marriage. More to the
point, and more poignant, in a year when black-white animosity has reached a
violent crescendo in the land, two young people and their parents showed that
separateness is far from the sum total of race relations in the U.S.—that to
the marriage of true minds, color should be no impediment. Indrawn as usual,
Rusk pronounced himself “very pleased.” Clarence Smith, Guy’s father,
said simply: “Two people in love.”
That’s right – Rusk offered to resign because of the wedding – that was
how unusual it was. In the early 90s I visited a high school
near Cincinnati, OH, which was once KKK country. I was producing a “space
bridge” — a satellite conversation between high schools in Ohio and Moscow. The night
before the show I gave a reception for the families of the kids featured
in the program. As they wandered in, there in the middle of Ohio, I noticed that one couple was comprised of a white man and an African American woman. Apparently I was the only one who did though. One of the boys’ parents had divorced and his dad had married this woman who was now the kids’ stepmom. And in the middle of semi-rural Ohio, close to the Kentucky border, nobody cared. I guess you’d need to have been around for canceled TV shows and Secretaries of State offers to resign, to be so struck by what happened.
Fast forward to the Grammys, 1990, this winning song and video, with this kiss.
I guess it’s just that we forget how bad things used to be; a kiss like Neville and Ronstadt’s once could ruin both careers.
There’s lots more. But what does all this have to do with a presidential candidate? In Iowa? I don’t know why but as I watched this morning I was so struck by the changes I’ve seen in my lifetime. Probably it’s just the birthday. Whatever happens in the campaign, and I am worried about the race stuff that came out of Kentucky and West Virginia, it was a reminder that at least things are better than they were before. OH and last week I read that there has not been a white male Secretary of State in the US for 11 years! Nobody’s been yelling about that, either.
Catherine Morgan, star of stage, screen, (well not really, but she should be) and (yes this is true) blogs including Political Voices of Women, has sought posts on the news that Senator Edward Kennedy, seen here with Senator Barack Obama, whom he endorsed, is suffering from a malignant brain tumor. It really is a sad thing. People make jokes about the Senator, some of them really cruel, as I discovered while searching for images for this post. And he’s made mistakes, including those surrounding the tragic events at Chappaquiddick.
But as a great speaker and legislator, he’s used his talents to be a champion of the “downtrodden” and many of the rest of us, for over 40 years. Coal miners, civil rights advocates, children who need better schools, American who need access to health care, soldiers in Iraq and veterans of every war and dozens of other causes; he’s been a mainstay of support for them all, often when not too many people were willing to be.
Since he lost his two brothers, President John Kennedy and Senator Robert Kennedy, to assassins, he’s also been the protector of their children: JFK’s two, John and Caroline, and Bobby’s eleven. He’s buried John’s son and two of Bobby’s. His own son Edward contracted bone cancer and had a leg amputated at the age of 12. Kennedy himself nearly died in a plane crash in 1964. And there’s plenty more; take a look at this Wikipedia entry on the “Kennedy curse” which left him with burdens of care for so many. Weddings, illnesses, even funerals, it was he who was there for them all.
When I first came to Washington, I was a very young researcher in the CBS News Washington Bureau. Because I was so young, I was assigned to call the Kennedy “boiler room girls” – campaign workers who knew the young woman who had died in that car in Chappaquiddick, Mary Jo Kopechne, to see if they would talk to us. I called. All of them. Every day for a year.
Every day for a year they took my call. Every day for a year they were polite, gentle and silent on the subject of the crash. And so they have remained. Since I know many other people who have worked for Teddy and shown a devotion and loyalty seldom seen in public life, I am not surprised; that’s how people are in the Kennedy universe. It says a lot about the Senator and his family and the sort of commitment they inspire.
When I think of the Senator though, it’s not any of that I think about. Or of the fact that he can be hilarious, self-effacing and very kind to those around him. My strongest, and most unambiguous memory, is of his eulogy at the funeral of his brother Bobby* in the summer of 1968. You’ll see why.
*This is audio accompanied by cover footage; I couldn’t locate any video of the speech although I remember it vividly and can see it in my head. Can’t get that up on the Web though, at least not yet.
As you know, I am a very loyal supporter of BlogHer and a great admirer of its three founders, who have built a community of respect and honesty, humor and warmth that is a treasure to many of my sister bloggers and to me. At last year’s BlogHer conference much was made of the absence of presidential candidates, even though they’d all been invited AND even though we were in Chicago, where Yearly Kos (now called Netroots Nation) was happening in literally one or two days, and all the Democrats came there. It was if the "little ladies" were just not worth the trouble.
So it’s very exciting to see Barack Obama sit down with BlogHer’s Erin Kotecki Vest and answer questions submitted by the BlogHer community. No headlines, but a broad survey of topics with sound, thoughtful and well-expressed responses. This is a landmark moment and I’m so proud to be a BlogHer and a small part of its universe. Watch it for yourself.
We went to Long Beach Island, off the Jersey shore, a few weeks ago. I’ve been there often but never before May — it was still winterish there, hardly anything open and just lovely. We came with friends for my husband’s birthday — four adults and four little kids. It’s so much fun to be there with little people searching the beach for shells in their parkas and climbing all over the furniture. We took them to Barnegat Light — a 150 year old lighthouse I’ve loved since I was a kid.
It was a 20 minute walk in very cold weather, everyone excited about seeing a real live lighthouse. Somehow anything, no matter how many times you’ve seen it, looks brand new when you see it with small children. When it’s new to them, it becomes new to you too.
It was, according to my husband, a perfect birthday. Much of the credit for that goes to the friends who came with us, who wrote and performed a song for him as a gift because "you have too much stuff already" and, in so many ways have taken us into their lives with love. I just posted a meditation on being a ‘fake grandmother" on the SV Moms "over 50" blog, where I’m a new contributor. It’s such a peculiar privilege – hanging out with preschoolers in that easy way that can only happen with frequent contact.
From across the sea in the UK Ann Harrison has complied this week’s Blogging Boomers Carnival at Contemporary Retirement Strategies. It’s got everything from new tax laws to new fashion advice with plenty of other savvy ideas (including thoughts on marriage!) in between so stop by and see what’s going on!
