Recovery Option

L'esser poeti, non e un vanto-- Eugenio Montale

It is odd to seek appeasement from titanic rupturing in an era of nuclear family idealism that Reynolds represents before JFK's ascendancy. The dowager had yet been born, but this doesn't stop "Tammy" from resonating as a corrupted Romantic/Naturalist melody which at first glance is a simple tune of first love and longing for consummation, the.anticipation of which is a more exalted expectation than any actual climax, no matter how pleasurable. Neither Reynolds's role as a vivacious brown sugared sweetheart in dungarees and braids, nor Livingston and Evans skill as lyricists is simple. This is actually a tightly structured and successful commercial product in the hands of professionals, from Reynolds as an eminently talented vocalist all but tearing at the reins to become the submissive housewife, to the orchestra accompanying her voice, to Livingston's and Evans' clever use of fecund imagery and diachronic crescendo in two stanzas. Cottonwoods whisper, the "hooty" owl is a predatory menace to the dove it calls, causing a joyful heart, singing like a violin, contained within equally structured pastoral frames. Let me have my moment in the 1950's where you and I don't exist. This is my coping mechanism. And I broke out laughing, finding it inexorably funny that the man I was hoping to woo into port had to be necessarily juxtaposed against what I am as such a hard bitten woman-- not that I can extend the metaphor of what Reynolds lost in her humiliation at the hands of Elizabeth Taylor, who simply oozed a beauty and sexuality rivaled only partly by Marilyn. Taylor cannot stand in as an incomparable before whom I was felled, as was the case with her more recently departed rival. No, I aimed too high without being able to specify what I hoped to find on Mount Olympus, but it certainly entailed property ownership, economic sufficiency and career which is all but lost, and now I cannot even out hustle the hustle in a brawny nerdy minority who is my best shot a mobility recapture (and why he "liked" my first hard hitting post about our first contact is an issue I should let lie today, if I'm wise enough; he should push back, be offended, tell me I'm wrong...) Nevertheless, he reads my sentiment that I'll go down fighting, even if I could not assist him in a late afternoon toilet transfer. I cannot accept these looming limitations of my loss of strength either, except by waiting, the hope to regain wiping myself with toilet paper, for instance.
What he and I really feel, who the fuck knows anymore. I am aware of how gratitude can masquerade itself, how much I relish feeling his strength as my protector, and neither of us would strum the stringed instruments if we didn't enjoy it, that too, in holding patterns not enough for my thwarted ambitions in this game of Brawn versus brain, boy-man versus Italian lava, deescalating, re-managing, back in my analytical head, able to proceed, barring the unforeseen, he will be back in ten hours, on the swing set of Reactionary Liberal Fatal Attraction. Where is Glenn Close when you need her to jab someone with a fork?

Constrained in Sequins

"I don't know why I want to write you
now."-- Robert Thomas, translating heritage.

Anyone who remembers the golden age of Eisenhower matinee as an adult is dead, thus this is a qualification to the inexplicable mystery of why men found Lana Turner a worthwhile trophy hard on. It is baffling. Marilyn Monroe is self-explanatory, like her latter day counterpart, Goldie Hawn, who may have upgraded the motif, but followed in its tradition with sterling lack of deviation. Grace Kelly was upper echelon. Doris Day was barefoot and pregnant, the girl scout type. But Lana Turner? Golden heart ho? 

Loretta Young wasn't marketed to men. On the contrary, her capital as a Hollywood diva was her appeal to my mother. The nuclear family tensions beneath the surface, the cover up of the crime worse than the crime itself. Despite obstacles, if you do not violate the theatrical laws of time and scene your sacrifice shall be duly noted, rewarded in the end. The model has been deconstructed a thousand times over in feminist literary theory. I am not interested in defending it so much as interested in the anxiety which threatens Young's constraint through the course of her career, caught in a high wire act between obedience, independence within her own movement, sacrifice to the pressures of the patriarchy with the implicit acknowledgment that she will be granted a degree of autonomy if she behaves, a more talented and palatable Joan Crawford. Crawford was often histrionic because she scared the living shit out of you, and probably saved a few men the trouble of a vasectomy. Loretta was a more honeyed variation, not immune to the sensibility of threat.