While the blog is closed for repairs, doing another repost, this one from June 7, 2012, about a night in Dallas sometime in the 1990s.
Before I reached thirty-five years of age (the first and only real time I celebrated that birthday), I’d endured seeing:
- Melanie Hamilton Wilkes suffer a grueling childbirth and outrun the Yankees only to fade to paleness between two long braids before she breathed her last off-camera;
- Juliet Capulet take a dagger;
- Jenny Cavilleri Barrett flare her nostrils one last time before giving up on Bach, the Beatles, and breathing;
- Mary Rose Foster self-destruct with drugs;
- Aurora Greenway make sure daughter Emma was allowed to say goodbye without pain;
- Miss Daisy Werthan get driven somewhere for the last time;
- Ruth Jamison eat fried green tomatoes before she kicked it;
- Shelby Eatenton Latcherie drink her last glass of juice.
I think you get the picture. The BIG picture. On the big screen. A crazed excess of female death. If her own death was defied, our fairer sex might end up on the side of a road spit-wiping blood from her dead lover’s face.
Whenever Lynne, her sister Liz, and Liz’s BFF Brigid would get together, they’d always bring up Beaches.
“No, thanks,” I’d always say.
“But we have to seeeee it–”
“I read the book,” I’d counter.
“Pleeeeease.”
“Leave me out of your estrogen-saturated sob fest,” I’d insist.
But the time came when Lynne and I went to visit them in Dallas. I was plied with a spaghetti dinner. I was promised Yahtzee. I was given a box of Kleenex and no choice, because Lynne had the car keys since it was her car. And I was forced to watch Beaches.
Should this account have a happy ending, with the four of us wiping tears from our eyes and vowing eternal friendship? Yeah, yeah, I cried, whatever. Then I annihilated them at Yahtzee.
Movies referenced above: Gone With The Wind, Romeo and Juliet, (the 1968 version), Love Story, The Rose, Terms of Endearment, Driving Miss Daisy, Fried Green Tomatoes, Steel Magnolias, and the 1976 version of A Star is Born.
Last sentence is everything!