Loads of Lovely Love
I’m done hating Valentine’s Day. Instead, I celebrate the sort of love that I actually embrace: the communion of kindred spirits. As Camus (yes, I’m quoting an existentialist today) says: “Don’t walk behind me; I may not lead. Don’t walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.”
This week, I received a Valentine’s package of candy and lace and handmade notes from my glorious goddaughters Delia and Luci—ages 12 and 9, respectively. It reminded me that, when we were kids, February 14 was a time to celebrate friendship and gobble chocolate. So why not bring that back? Let’s take this holiday, however crassly commercial it may be, as an opportunity to beam extra sweetness into the world. Sparkle with great kindness; I know that’s your real self, anyway. To quote dear Anne of Green Gables: “It’s splendid to find there are so many kindred spirits in the world.”
I send love–juicy, limitless love–to everyone.
‘The Last Five Years’ Hurts So Good
“The Last Five Years” may not be for people who don’t like musicals — it is almost entirely sung– but it does cover psychologically complex material that is a far cry from the typical Hollywood tuner. About the stormy relationship between Cathy (Anna Kendrick), a struggling stage actress, and Jamie (Jeremy Jordan), a successful young novelist, it grapples with a question rarely posed on screen or in polite company: Can romances work between two people who prize their artistic ambitions as much as each other?
It’s an uncomfortable question, especially because it calls on the carpet the reality that, even now, most marriages only can handle one alpha if they’re to succeed. The fact that the question is set to music makes it easier to absorb and also more immediate. There’s an emotional accessibility (naysayers might call it ‘sentimentality’) to musicals that, to date, is unparalleled. And aided by wonderful melodies, the unusual combination of material and medium in “The Last Five Years” did prove a great, if short-lived, success off-Broadway. Adapted to screen by director/screenwriter Richard LaGravenese, it is also startlingly good. Continue Reading →
Love Is Real
Whether or not I’m in a relationship, I have become rawther cynical about the possibilities of romantic love–so much so that the other day I gave a mean little shove to two teens with entwined tongues who were blocking a subway door. But Elizabeth Alexander’s New Yorker elegy for her husband doubles as a testimony to what two people can offer each other in the name of clear-hearted intimacy. Of a dream she had a few years after his death, she writes:
I look back. I look back. I can still see him, smiling and waving me on.
It was the two of us walking the road and now he has let my hand go.
I walk. I can always see him. His size does not change as I move forward: like me, he is five feet nine and a half, exactly right. I can still feel the feel of my hand in his hand as I walk. I wake and the room is flooded with pale-yellow light.
This essay is the most beautiful thing I have read in a very long time. It is so beautiful and so lovingly, piercingly true that, though I still think successful marriages are less attainable than Greta Garbo (now), I am once again grateful that they can exist.