Do you think if I feel absolutely wretched with streaming cold, I could dance like Gene Kelly?
One of my favourite film moments is when he dances in the pouring rain to the title song of Singin’ in the Rain. Somewhere along the line I read that he had a temperature and so on, but the show must – and did – go on.
Sadly my guardian angels don’t do swaps. You get what you get. So the only dancing is my fingers on the keys.
Generalisation
is I suppose inevitable but I prefer it tempered, as in qualified by “most” or “many” or even “it seems that…” I loathe hate and detest “all men” just as much as I detest “all women”. You couldn’t possibly know them all, don’t be silly. So though historically, though men are heavier, stronger and more aggressive and had to be for the race to survive, from Eve on, women were part of the way we live too.
So this week – drowning in images of the current President and his yeasayers, I looked to the distaff sides and found small goodies.
Reese Witherspoon
was apparently less than keen on acting and now has a successful career as a producer. Her daughter is beginning to make headway as an actress. To quote RW from a podcast I haven’t heard “ better to pursue your talents rather than your dreams.” I was really struck by this.
If you are the sort of person who will only know if you prove it to yourself that what you want won’t happen, I can see following your dreams. Though a very average 5 ft 4ins (sorry, metric free zone), slim enough but not wand thin, I wanted to be a model.
Marie Lise Gres
My mother bless her chased up hard earned money to let me attend a short modelling course where I was kindly disbused of any hope I had in that direction. I emerged and got on with life. I would like to think I reimbursed my mother but I bet she waved it away..
However lesson absorbed. Never mind all that warbling about impossible dreams – live the possible ones. And I did. And you learn – not always slowly or easily – but you do learn. I used to hesitate about explaining I worked for a women’s magazine in case it sounded exclusive of men. And then I was told, more than once, that men read those publications to learn about women.
I learned too that though John Wayne
might be quoted as saying “Men are men, and women are women, and I can’t think of a better arrangement”, life was actually quite a lot more complicated and various than that, and this was long before apparently compulsory discussion about gender and choice and hormonal knitting patterns. Men and women were very different one from another, via enlightenment, personal experience, education and personality. And they were all people. Some you liked, some you wanted to biff in the ear – and not always divided along lines of gender.
You may not be old enough to remember that a faction felt that feminism was a misled idea because women didn’t like other women.
Let me be the first to argue that there are women – as well as men – I don’t want to eat with. Duplicity and ill manners and worse are not gender specific. You learn to pick your fight and how to fight, and when to give in, when to quit and when to shout hooray.
As a woman writing about the Tate Modern show for Tracey Emin
did last week. Apart from being a really helpful overview |(good ? bad ? irrelevant ? I didn’t know) it showed you a woman who did what she wanted to do – she made art and put her money where her mouth is – into a rundown seaside town where she created an art school and a training kitchen and café for the long term unemployed. “I live art, work art, facilitate other people to do art” she is quoted as saying. “I have come home.” 62 years old, followed her talents. Know your dreams for what they are – dreams -and don’t confuse them with realities.
Annalog 