A Meditation on the Possibility of Love at First Sight between Actor Ryan Reynolds and a Middle-Aged Frump in a Days Inn Parking Lot

There is this scene in the movie Sherman’s March: A Meditation on the Possibility of Romanic Love In the South During an Era of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation, that has resonated with me ever since I first saw it in 1986. A guy--who might be mistaken for Burt Reynolds by your mildly glaucomatous grandmother when she’s not wearing her glasses--is hanging around the parking lot of some Days Inn-type motel in Georgia, hoping to be hired on as a stand-in for the real Burt Reynolds, who is rumored to be filming in the area. Remember, this was shot back in the mid-1980s, when Burt Reynolds--in all his hairy-chested and mustachioed glory--was a national heartthrob, not a punchline – the George Clooney of his generation, if you will.

The scene culminates when a group of frumpy middle-aged ladies – in their pastel-colored polyester pantsuits, outdated beehive-ish hairdos and garish lipstick – swarm the Burt Reynolds look-alike, mistaking him for the famous actor himself. Excited by the chance to see a real-life A-list celebrity in person, the women wiggle and squeal “Buuuurrrrrrtttt! Oh Buuuurrrrrrrtttttt!” to get his attention while thrusting pen and paper at him for his autograph. At one point, it seems as if they might rip open his shirt to get a look at his hairy man-chest. They can hardly contain themselves in this scene that recalls the screaming girls of 1964 when the Beatles gobsmacked America. It’s hilarious – this juxtaposition of the always dowdy with the anachronistically cool – especially when you view the scene in your 20s, seemingly forever out of the clawing grasp of middle age.

After I turned 30-something, I stopped laughing at and started identifying with those wiggly, dowdy middle-aged ladies (picture a group of excitable Edith Bunkers with big hair), because that’s when it dawned on me that I have more in common with the group of frumps than I do with the “hot” guy. (I use the word “hot” here to reflect the consensus of the Edith Bunkers, not my own personal assessment.) If I ever stumble upon my beloved Ryan Reynolds in a Days Inn parking lot, that is how he’ll view me: just another excitable middle-aged frump with a preposterous crush.

Which leads me to the question,‘Why can’t I crush on a celebrity who’d be more “appropriate” as a crush for me?’ Over the years, I’ve had not-at-all-not-even-slightly embarrassing celebrity crushes on Henry Winkler when he was “Fonzie,” former CNN anchor Aaron Brown, British tv landscaper Alan Titchmarsh, comedian Patton Oswalt, and now on Ryan Reynolds. I know I *should* have better taste in celebrity crushes than pretty-boy actor Ryan Reynolds. He’s such an obvious and pedestrian choice as a crush with his soap-opera good looks, his “you’ve-got-to-be-f*cking-kidding-me” body, and his naturally funny talk-show-banter personality. I get it. It’s not cool for me to have a crush on someone so obviously and excessively attractive. I *should* have a crush on someone more socially acceptable like Steve Buscemi or that tv actor who plays the lead character in House -- actors who are excessively brilliant, if not excessively attractive in a mainstream sort of way.

But I don’t. And I wonder what this says about me – this silly notional crush on an impossibly beautiful celebrity I will almost certainly never meet, and if by chance I did, he’s married and is approximately a thousand years younger than me, not to mention the fact that I already have an awesome boyfriend. I shouldn’t waste my time thinking about such frivolities, when I could be doing something useful like learning to speak German or developing an app that helps determine the celebrities who are socially acceptable for you to crush on, based on your demographic group. On the other hand, it amuses me to think about how Ryan Reynolds would react if I told him, “You are the Burt Reynolds of your generation. Now let me get a looksie at that chest.”

The Third Wheel

I am not a fan of spending excessive amounts of time with my ex-husband. And when I use the word “excessive,” what I really mean is "any." Which is not to say I’m not civil with him -- indeed, I am. I just don’t want to hang out with him as if we're friends. I figure I wasted so much time with him when we were unhappily married, why should I squander even a moment with him now, unless it’s absolutely, unavoidably necessary. Last Saturday turned out to be absolutely, unavoidably necessary, since it was our daughter’s birthday party.

Birthday Girl invited a handful of friends to the Santa Monica Pier for the afternoon, because nothing says “Happy Birthday” like repeatedly waiting in long lines in the hot sun for a short-lived thrill aboard half-assed carnival rides that wouldn’t scare a baby. But it was the party she wanted, so I obliged against my more practical adult judgment. My ex kindly volunteered to help drive and supervise the girls at the always crowded Pier. And since his long-distance girlfriend was in town visiting, she came along too, which meant the three of us got to spend a lot of time together. Fan-f*cking-tastic.

I couldn’t help comparing this somewhat awkward afternoon with the somewhat awkward afternoon a few months ago when I went whale watching with my boyfriend Frenchy, our kids, and his estranged wife, who was visiting from France. This time around, *I* was ostensibly the third wheel – the discarded ex-wife forced by unfortunate circumstance to spend the afternoon with her ex and his shiny new girlfriend. But I didn’t really feel like a third wheel. Surprisingly, that role fell to my ex.

I happen to like my ex’s girlfriend. She’s warm and funny, and has been nothing less than kind to my daughter and me. I ended up chatting with her throughout the afternoon, while my ex buried himself in his phone, no doubt keeping himself company with the many political blogs he obsessively reads every day.

What’s interesting is my similar reaction to both Frenchy’s estranged wife and my ex’s girlfriend. I feel sorry for them, albeit in distinctly different ways. The sympathy I feel for Frenchy’s wife is rooted in the loss not of Frenchy himself, but in the grievous loss of giving up on being a family with the father of her children. Unless you’ve gone through it, you might not realize how deeply painful it is to let go of that dream. I feel sorry for my ex’s girlfriend because she’s stuck with him, and I know how lonely that feels. If not now, I expect she will come to feel like an unwelcome third wheel in her relationship with my ex, just as I did.

Of course, both of them may feel sorry for me too in those very same ways. But no matter--I don’t. I feel pretty good about my life, even though it’s still very much a work in progress. I may not have more than a vague sense of what my future holds, but at least I’m no longer the third wheel in my own life. And that truly feels fan-f*cking-tastic.

Why Dating a New Boyfriend is Like Training for a Marathon

Taking on a new boyfriend is kind of like training to run a marathon, or at least what I imagine it’s like to train for a marathon. Yes, there’s *that* comparison – the obvious one involving the sheer physical exertion of both long-distance running and marathon sessions in bed. Tellingly, men always assume I’m referring to that whenever I make that comparison. But I wouldn’t really know, since I can barely run a mile, much less 26. Although this does give me a more charitable explanation for my tendency to carbo-load the night before a big date, instead of my usual explanation, which quickly degenerates into a self-loathing internal monologue along the lines of ‘Isn’t your ass huge enough as it is? Do you really need to eat like a bear about to hibernate for the winter? You are *not* a Green Bay Packer, therefore you cannot *eat* like a Green Bay Packer.’

But I digress. The comparison between dating a new boyfriend and training for a marathon rings most true for me in reference to time. Both require a major time investment every day, in addition to all of the other activities of your regular life. Although Frenchy and I live in the same huge city, we are separated by a not insignificant number of miles of jammed highways and surface streets that are often just as busy. Sometimes it feels as if I’ve committed to a regular *second* commute, in addition to the one I make for work. And on those nights we don’t spend together, we usually chat on the phone or facetime for a while.

But the time commitment isn’t the only similarity. My runner friends--who actually do run marathons--tell me they get antsy if they can’t run every day. They crave the runner’s high they get from a good daily run. Seems similar to the “dater’s high” one gets during and after a great date. Kind of the opposite of many of my dates before Frenchy came along. Those dates induced "dater's panic," an attractive combination of flop sweat and PTSD.

Finally, there’s the lure of the costume. Sure, I could train for a marathon in regular sweats and a t-shirt, just as I could go out on a date in the same old regular clothes. But it’s that desire to dress up for the occasion, of looking the part – whether it’s that of a serious long-distance runner or a sexy date who is making an effort – that is similar. Oddly, both often involve spandex. At least if you’re doing it right.

And Such Small Portions

Just after my ex-husband and I split up, several friends -- all of whom, not coincidentally, are writers -- advised me to start a "divorce journal" to write down all of the chaos in my life. Perhaps they envisioned a book that would rise up like an angry, spiteful phoenix from the embers of my shitty dead marriage -- an anti-coffee table book full of harsh invective and scathing expose. More likely, they were just sick of hearing me uselessly and endlessly bitch about how my ex didn't appreciate me, blah, blah, blah..., hoping I'd exorcise myself of the need to complain by writing all that shit down.

Much of it *was* useless, because what's the point of complaining about someone who doesn't appreciate you, when you've already decided to be done with him? It reminds me of that old joke about two Jewish grandmothers going on about a bad restaurant. "The food was just terrible," one of them complains. "And such small portions," irrelevantly piles on the other. Who would want to eat large portions of terrible food?! And yet, I could not stop complaining about not feeling appreciated by the guy I didn't want anymore.

I recently paged through my old divorce journal, a euphemism which extracts any whiff of untamed, raw emotion and makes it sound much more civilized and antiseptic than it is. "Bitch Book" is a better name for it, since it's mostly filled with my pissing and moaning during that very turbulent period in my life, the first six months after my ex and I broke up. Most of it would not be interesting to anyone other than me, the same way someone else's vivid dream combining the oddly random with the mundane is only interesting to the dreamer. But I did come across two things worth mentioning. 

One was the title of my divorce journal, "F*ck You, NPR," which I hope to use as the title of a book I write some day -- even a cookbook. Especially a cookbook. I remember how annoyed I was after listening to some overly earnest, overly educated NPR newscaster trying to sound folksy to take the edge off the latest dismal news about the wretched job market in America -- the worst since the Great Depression. As an unemployed stay-at-home mother facing an already uphill battle to elbow my way back into an unforgiving job market, that was the last thing I wanted to hear. Thus was born "F*ck You, NPR," a phrase that *still* delights me whenever I say it.

The other notable thing was a list of all the qualities I was looking for in a guy. Over the course of a few weeks, I came up with 85 things I wanted in "my next boyfriend." Some of them were inspired (e.g. someone who smiles at me when he sees me), others prosaic (e.g. someone who likes to watch crappy tv with me). Most were things I felt were missing from my failed marriage.

Out of curiosity, I went through the list and discovered that my boyfriend has 82(!) of the 85 qualities I wanted back then in my next boyfriend. Not even my beloved crush Ryan Reynolds would be able to outscore Frenchy. When I told him that he had scored so highly (96%) on my 85-item wish list, Frenchy pointed out to me that I had creatively visualized him by writing down very specifically the kind of man I wanted in my life. In essence, I thought about him, and the Universe delivered.

Powerful stuff or magical thinking? Not really sure, so I'm going to try it again. This time I'll write down the 85 things I want in a career and see what the Universe provides. I'm crossing my fingers I won't end up working as a televangelist, a rodeo clown or an unctuous newscaster on NPR.