Burton’s Antony, Elizabeth’s Cleopatra & a Ground Run at the Crust

Their tumultuous liaison-- before the marriages and divorces-- famously began in 1962 on the set of the colossally over-budget epic, Cleopatra.--Liz Ronk

Although my new found old age presently puts this to the test, I was never much one for the feminine accouterments of vanity, and unlike my mood challenged cousin, I rather shirk the effort when it comes to daily appointments with cosmetologists. My hair, though otherwise unknotted thanks to temporary fill ins prior to my current depth charges in search of authenticity, hangs unpleasantly silver white, thinning and unruly, and I can hardly afford to be fashion conscious, so I have no idea who Kate Spade is. My only indicator toward rancor is for the 13 year old daughter, as thirteen was also a traumatic year for me. But if I wrote in my post above that we should learn to accept the consequences of obdurate suffering, the flip side of the coin is it is relatively unimaginable that her privilege wasn’t worth combating whatever her problems amounted to. Philadelphia’s oozing ineptitude is like one long string of rock candy ruthlessly blistering my esophagus, one calamity after the next, my interpersonal space all but barren of any meaning unless you include the endless revolving door of minorities whom I’ve despised (and what does Galahad do with this truism, pray tell?), and here a fashion guru engages in a violent act of dramaturgy which give women of her mindset pause. Fuck the mental illness caveat. The majority of those who adhesive themselves to psychiatric disorders tarry on like the rest of us, oftentimes micromanaged by the welfare state with the same degree of competence I’ve gotten since my 1996 resignation. Financial difficulties, divorce? None of these things would have landed her where the majority of spastic savants land, sinking in quicksand. One can only imagine what anguish drove her to her cessation. In my case, you don’t. Interspersed throughout my threads since I came to Blogger was the outcry I have nothing left. This now includes lack of control over my mobility, and although my focus has condensed on this male nursing aide, now joined in my default conspiracy, to the point that preoccupation seems obsessive, my vulnerability fraught with being damned again, it isn’t so much that he’s another unobtainable male inadvertently reeled in and driven back, not quite. It is merely that he represents what Frank Versante should have been for me: a middle-aged relationship worth settling for, one that died in a flash fire and yet remains binding, at least, as long as I stay put. He has been both, conflicted and hard on me, seducing and diffident, fearful too. In so many words, I told him, jokingly, that if his hands got near my cherry, then I would be staking a claim, with one of my winsome smiles. He now behaves as if my vagina was a radioactive mine. I happen to find it amusing. Nonetheless, whatever I think I still feel, or trying to calculate what he does for me, I will eventually cut the cord. I forgive him for, well, our foreplay. He forgives me, for both the foreplay and my hard slash into the social stigma of a white cripple and a black lover who isn’t her lover, yet, but I am not one who blissfully buries her dead. He woke up my sensuality, left it in midair, and I’m not having it. Necessity merely demands a hold on the end game. And now I’m off to bed, as promised.

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?