Taking a tip from myself, I re-read Nora Ephron's "I Feel Bad About My Neck." I have to say, I still love it. Especially the chapter about all the work that goes into holding the line against aging, otherwise known as "maintenance," or in, her words, "Pathetic Attempts to Turn Back the Clock." She includes hair, nails, unwanted hair, exercise, and skin. Eight hours a week she spends on all this, she says, and she laments it even as she sits for three hours getting highlights in her hair.
I would like to say, "Ha, ha, ha, Nora, that's crazy! I'm a Berkeley woman. We don't do that here!" But I do a lot of it, notably hair, for which I travel to San Francisco every six weeks and undergo foil packets and scissors and sometimes wax. It's nuts and probably socially irresponsible, but there you are.
Years ago, I discovered Nora Ephron through her collections of essays, "Crazy Salad," "Scribble, Scribble," and "Wallflower at the Orgy." Boy, did she sum up the sixties and seventies! She called Julie Nixon "a chocolate-covered spider." She described Pillsbury Bake-off dishes as having "snicky snacky" titles (try, "Sweet 'N Creamy Crescent Crisps"). She wrote about journalism, feminism, popular culture, and politics.
Then, blessed event, she got into writing screenplays. This after she divorced Carl Bernstein and wrote the novel "Heartburn" to get even, and it got made into a movie. Then she helped write "When Harry Met Sally," and she and her sister Delia wrote "Sleepless in Seattle" and "You've Got Mail." By then, I was hopelessly hooked. I own all those fluffy movies and sometimes re-watch them. I re-read her books. I wish I could be as funny and smart as she is.
No comments:
Post a Comment