sorry, rob. even in french, this sucked.
robert redford was at work today.
jeeeeeaellllllloussss?
he was in the cafeteria (for reasons i cannot divulge). i certainly hope he didn't have the chef's salad. i really should've warned him. i don't care how sentimental and trite the horse whisperer was, nobody deserves the instestinal woes our cafeteria's kibble can and will inflict upon an unknowing consumer. movie star status be damned. our cafeteria's food is an equal-opportunity nauseator.
every woman in my building - no matter what age - traipsed up to the cafeteria to check him out - including moi. we tried to be nonchalant. i don't think we succeeded. i don't think we cared.
in my mind, he will forever be the glowing, beautiful (albeit prideful, conflicted, and screwing that golddigger Kim Basinger) man in The Natural. i am (but of course) the Glenn Close character, resplendent and celestial in a white wide-brimmed hat, standing in the bleachers, smiling down upon my aging phenom. the perfect movie of requited love, it taught me about the power of love and patience. if one just waited long enough and was a good person, true love could and would find you. (best to wear white and wide-brimmed hats, however, so true love can pick you out in a crowd.)
…or, the kindhearted, goh-geous aryan Hubbell in his naval dress whites and i, the large-nosed, difficult, feisty Barbra Streisand character from The Way We Were. their love, from the very beginning is ill-fated. i remember watching it and thinking that it was teaching me something about the correlation of beauty to relationships in our culture. Beauty could love Beast, but...eh...not so easy to make it last. our culture wants perfectly prettily matched couples who look good in photo shoots and birth perfectly pretty facsimiles of their pretty selves. think about it - there are few more pitied than the unattractive children of beautiful women who have married beneath them in the looks department.
TWWW also taught me something more true about love, i think. no matter how much you love, it still might not work. love is powerful and beautiful, poetry and doilies, but there are so many other things that influence why a relationship will or will not work, and sometimes the sum of those myriad other things, is greater than the single variable of do/do not love. i'm still wrapping my brain around this doozie. whenever i catch TWWW and AMC, i can't help but hold out hope that they'll somehow end up together even though i've seen the movie hundreds f times.
oh, but i digress...
i wonder if he noticed the endless stream of women trailing through the cafeteria?
i glanced at him for about 2 seconds, embarassed that he should think i was gawking. (oh, but wait...i was gawking) he looked like robert redford. still, at the age of 65, has that glow about him, although his face is considerably more lined and craggy, his hair still a bright golden shock of tousled youth, offset by a form-fitting (yup, he's still got it) black t-shirt.
oh...how dreamy.
then, in typical me fashion, i offended an entire elevator of older (50-something) women on the way back down to my desk.
lady #1: "oh, my gosh. he's still so cute."
lady #2: "but you know, he hasn't aged well."
me: "but he's old. he's almost 70." meaning: he looks great for his age. give the man some credit! - but, i don't think it sounded like that, and it's certainly not how they took it.
open mouth, insert foot.
ladies #1 and #2 take in my 30-year old, relatively unlined visage.
lady #1 quips through a forced smile, obviously offended:
"well, age is relative, young lady." (she didn't actually say "young lady," but she inferred it.)
DING. elevator door opens.
they all begin to exit the elevator.
wait wait wait! i don't mean it that way!
"well, i mean, he's got to be at least 65!" i shout out after them.
open mouth, insert other foot.
further offended:
"well, 65 is just right for us," lady #2 says.
ugh.
wonder if i will wake up tomorrow with karmic crow's feet?
hm. won't mind much if robert's there too. we can compare furrows.
2 comments:
fyi - the way we were is the first bryant park movie on monday, 6/20.
How come we learn about life through movies? It's not real. But it sticks in your head as if it was a real life experience and after a while its hard to tell the source. Maybe there is not enough realness going around and that's why blogs like this are so popular.
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