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The Feminist Moment In “Groundhog Day” You Might Have Missed

Posted on by lcr31

The superhero scale of Wonder Woman’s feminism has been getting a lot of well-deserved praise. (Even a jiggle of Wonder Woman’s thigh inspired a body-positive Tumblr post about the male gaze that has gone viral.)

Sure, Wonder Woman’s feminist power pose is mighty, both literally in the form of Gal Gadot and figuratively in the impact she is having on audiences (and studio executives.) But there’s another character making a statement about women in movies. It’s happening live, eight times a week, at the August Wilson Theater on 52nd Street in Manhattan. Her name is Nancy.

Nancy steps alone into the spotlight at the opening of Act 2 of Groundhog Day: The Musical. The moment is both as unexpected as it is moving. Having trouble remembering her? Nancy Taylor is a minor character in the original 1993 movie. In the movie, Nancy shares an awkward one-night stand with Bill Murray’s Phil Connors. She only has a couple of minutes of screen time. She’s pretty. She’s fun. She’s a punchline. That’s all there is to the big screen Nancy. In the musical, she isn’t much more. That is, until that moment at the start of the second act.

Tim Minchin, composer and lyricist for Groundhog Day: The Musical, gives Nancy some redemption with that spotlight moment. “Playing Nancy” forces the audience not only to see Nancy but to listen to her. He uses the moment as a chance to improve on the original, a chance to look the Bechdel Test straight in the eye for a story that doesn’t. (Even so, both the movie and the musical come up short by Bechdel standards.)

Nancy challenges the audience to examine the role of women in film and in society. Minchin’s words speak for themselves: “I’ll play whatever role I’m cast in,” Rebecca Faulkenberry as Nancy sings. “If you look good in tight jeans, that’s what they’ll want you dressed in.” Then, finally: “Who am I to dream of better?/To dream that one day I’ll be something more than just collateral in someone else’s battle/I will be something more than Nancy.”

In a show filled with physical comedy and a score that gives an exaggerated wink to the pop motifs of the movie’s original music, “Playing Nancy” is a meta exercise in female empowerment.

Groundhog Day is a story about redefining yourself and grappling with the existential challenges we tackle every day, whether that day’s challenges are new or soul-crushingly familiar.

“Playing Nancy” is at once both off-putting and engaging. From a storytelling perspective, the song makes no sense. There is no narrative reason for the audience to get to know Nancy better and perhaps that’s why, in the original film, we never did. But, perhaps, the reasons of the original are more sinister, if unintended. Nancy is simply another obstacle in Phil Connors’ journey, less important than the ever-present alarm clock announcing 6:00 AM. Nancy isn’t a real person. She’s just one of the things Phil manipulates along the way. One of the brutal ironies of romantic comedy tropes is that there is only room for one happy ending and Groundhog Day reserves that for Rita, Phil’s producer and love interest, not Nancy.

For every Wonder Woman, there are a hundred Nancys, even now, but Minchin’s acknowledgment of this one Nancy is a powerful thing. As Minchin has said about the show, “It’s deeply profound in a very gentle way.”

Learning To Swim

Posted on by lcr31

“Beginnings are hard. Endings are harder. And middles are a pain in the ass, too.” – Andre Dubus III

My writer friends and I always talk about writing as a long con, the kind that takes years and years and layer upon layer of deception and lies. At the heart of it, though, is an elemental and essential truth: the writing. Doing the writing, sitting in the chair and grinding it out—whatever ‘it’ might be—is the thing that you have to be honest about no matter how many tricks you try to pull.

I just got back to New York from a month in Florida, the truest home in my vagabond life. The last week of that month I was in St. Petersburg at the Writers In Paradise Writing Conference at Eckerd College, where I was so grateful to have received one of the Sterling Watson MFA Fellowships. Eckerd, to paraphrase Shakespeare, might be a small liberal arts college, but it has a fierce literary tradition.

My workshop piece at Eckerd was a project that, for me, was the equivalent of that run down bungalow at the end of the block—it had good bones, but was it worth saving? Would putting in dozens of hours of effort make any difference? Would it still be the dumpiest house on the street? It was my literary Love It or List It moment.

(For fans of HGTV’s formulaic import from Canada, you don’t have to wait until have the final commercial break; I’ll spill the beans right now. I decided to love it. Be Advised: This love will involve lots of swearing, gnashing of teeth, and staring at the screen wondering who on earth could ever think that was good writing.)

via BuzzFeed

via BuzzFeed

Campbell McGrath, my new favorite poet, had this to say during one of his lectures: “You don’t know you can do it until you fail.” Dennis Lehane said, “When you’re beating yourself up, try to remember that this is an exceptionally hard thing to do.”

The best piece of wisdom on this topic came from my teacher, the amazing Les Standiford: “When you’re learning to swim, you get water up your nose.”

So I’m back at my computer. I’m reading as much as I can and writing as much as I can and reading and writing and listening to the feedback from my peers and hearing the echoes of great writers in my head.

I’m all in with this long con.

And I’ve got a lot of water up my nose.

How to Vacation like a Griswold

Posted on by lcr31

Traditional family vacations weren’t really a thing for my family growing up. My dad worked in various jobs that involved second or third shifts and then, later on, he travelled a lot. Mom worked, too, as a bookkeeper. We didn’t have a lot of time or money for the elaborate, week-long affairs that some of my friends took every summer.

vacationThat meant a lot of the time I was out of school I spent at friend’s houses, or reading in a corner of my mom’s office. It also meant that our ‘vacations’ involved mom and I tagging along on one of dad’s business trips. So for us it was spring break in Menominee, Michigan, about an hour north of Green Bay, WI or a summer trip to Fort Smith, Arkansas, just east of the Mississippi River. Since we weren’t in traditional vacation spots and often my dad had to get to meetings or jump on conferences call or check in on clients or locations, my mom and I would try and find whatever sightseeing was to be had in these out of the way locations. I was obsessive about the color brochures in the wooden rack in the lobby of the Holiday Inn. Before the internet or Yelp! or Google those brochures were a Technicolor lifeline with directions to all of the local wonders.

We had a routine. When we arrived at the motel, Mom would get settled in the room. Dad and I would “check the place out.” Pool? Check. Ice Machine? Check.

“Did you get all of your literature?” my dad would ask, meaning the stack of brochures.

I would always have more brochures than our time allotted would allow. There would be ads for outlet malls, which were a new thing when I was a kid. There were state parks or, if we were lucky, national parks. There were museums of all shapes and sizes. Waterparks or small local amusement parks always had enticing pictures. We saw lots of World’s Largest (Fill in the Blanks) and long forgotten historical sites, like presidential birthplaces or family homes. One particular favorite was the courtroom of Isaac Parker, “The Hanging Judge,” in Fort Smith. He was the original purveyor of frontier justice when Oklahoma was the frontier.

The unspoken point was that it didn’t matter where we were on our vacation. We might not have been in Orlando or Gatlinburg or at the beach like other families, but we were together. We could swim in the motel pool. We could eat at Howard Johnsons or a local hamburger joint. I could use my dad’s change to buy things from those vending machines that had nail clippers and toothpaste and a magic ink notepad. We didn’t make it to most of the places in the brochures, but it never mattered.

When the original Vacation movie came out, it felt like it had been made just for my family. To this day, my dad and I will stop and watch anytime we find it on television. My mom, not known for her movie trivia, will never forget Aunt Edna being strapped to the top of the family truckster. The most encouraging thing you can say to someone in my family, before a job interview or a tough work challenge or just anytime you need a pick-me-up, is “Remember, you’re a Griswold!” For us, it is about remembering that you’re different, you’re strong, and don’t let anybody get you down, even if you show up at Wally World and the park is closed.

The new Vacation, with Ed Helms and Christy Applegate, may or may not be as good as the original (let’s be honest, probably not,) but I don’t really care. Just spending more time in the Griswold universe with Rusty and Clark is enough for me. As Helms’ Rusty says in the movie, “My trip to Wally World when I was a kid was the best trip I ever had.” My parents and I won’t get to see the movie together, but, in typical style, we won’t let that get in our way. We can have a conference call debrief after. Maybe for old time’s sake we could even do the call from the car in the parking lot of a Holiday Inn.

 

#girlcrushing with Taylor and Cindy

Posted on by lcr31

The conversation with my friend went something like this:

Me: Have you seen the Taylor Swift Bad Blood video?

(Pause)

Friend: (Disdainful sigh) No.

Me: OMG! Trust me on this. You have to see it. It’s amazing.

Friend: No. No, I don’t. Nope, you are wrong.

#

A few things to know about my friend: She is kind and generous and supportive of (almost) all of my craziness and pop culture obsessions. She also has an encyclopedic knowledge of music and bands from around the world. Every December she posts a list of her favorite songs from the prior year and I generally have only heard of (maybe) one of them and only know how to pronounce (maybe) half of the list. She is also strong, smart, and super kick-ass in almost everything she does.

This is all to say that she doesn’t shoot me down very often, especially when it comes to pop songs. She indulges my ridiculousness in the way that only a true friend will but which makes her Swift rejection all the more frustrating, even if it isn’t unique. I haven’t been able to get any of my friends to watch Bad Blood, much less let me explain to them why they should.

Two words: Cindy Crawford.

Crawford was a force of nature in the 1990s. Remember the first time you saw the George Michael Freedom 90! video? She and her fellow supermodels—who are all still around and still looking fierce—virtually stepped from that iconic Herb Ritts photo into MTV. Like Lauren Bacall, Lena Horne, and Sophia Loren before her, Crawford possessed, of course, a not-of-this-earth beauty, but it was grounded in wisdom and strength. Her origin story (all good super heroes have them) is one of legend: brainiac decides against career in chemical engineering to become the highest paid supermodel in a world that only just learned what the term supermodel even means.

For young women of the 90s, Crawford was also another kind of model. She was a role model to those of us struggling to find our identity and embrace our own uniqueness. Much was made of her mole (today it would have its own Twitter account), the imperfection that wasn’t. Compared to Christie Brinkley and Farrah Fawcett, she was so much more normal-seeming, even if that kind of normal really wasn’t at all. She seemed like a girl you could find working at the food court at the mall or sitting next to you in English class. She never bothered to play dumb or ever pretended that she wasn’t beautiful. She worked it all—her career, her fame—like the boss she was. Since then she has continued to demonstrate poise, grace, and independence, even when selling sofas or skin cream.

Her daughter Kaia has decided to step in front of the camera. Crawford told Yahoo! Celebrity it was important for her daughter to, “Be on time, be prepared, listen. For me, that’s so much of the reason I’ve had such a long career. People knew I was going to show up and give 100 percent. It’s not glamorous, but that quality, in a fickle industry, was essential.”

I was never going to look like Crawford, or Bacall or Horne or Loren, for that matter, but I could stand on my own two feet and own my life. I could show up, work hard, and be smart about it. I could get married and have kids and have a career or all of the above. Or I could do none of the above. In the post-ERA era after Gloria Steinem and Helen Gurley-Brown, Crawford was an unlikely icon in the most unlikely of professions.

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Next year Cindy Crawford will turn 50. Taylor Swift is 25. I love the fact that Swift cast Crawford as the “Headmistress” to her kick-ass all-girl gang in Bad Blood. It feels important, even if that ‘important’ is only with a lower-case ‘i.’ Women and girls could do worse than learn a thing or two from Crawford.

Now if I could just get someone to watch it with me.

Full Shade: Netflix’s Bloodline

Posted on by lcr31

It took zero effort or promotion on the part of Netflix or Bloodline’s producers to get me to watch this show. South Florida and the Keys, including a scene in the pilot of one of my favorite places on Earth, Alabama Jack’s? Just ask Burn Notice how much I love that.

Kyle Chandler, beloved Coach Taylor from Friday Night Lights? Clear eyes. Full hearts. All that.

Sold. 100%. I’m in.

At first I didn’t even understand it. There are time jumps which are, at best, confusing and, at worst, indecipherable. There are flashbacks and dreams and hallucinations. People are there who aren’t there. Drownings. Fires. Drugs. Adultery. Murder.

Watching Bloodline is sort of like being on a small fishing boat. Leave the calm, protected waters of the Keys and you can go just far enough offshore enough to get caught in the waves of a summer storm rolling in. A moderate chop, that’s what the weather people call it, not rough enough to send you back in but bad enough to churn up that queasy, sick feeling in your gut and make you instantly regret the gas station fried chicken you bought when you stopped to get ice for the cooler. You eventually get your sea legs, but you still don’t feel right. The world fades into fuzzy focus. Shards of light splinter off the waves, flashing like strobes. The air is heavy with dread and portent and the smell of dead fish.

o-BLOODLINE-570The episodes release information slowly and deliberately. Mostly, you know enough, but you never know it all. Each moment, each visual, elicits a specific mood. We move from inside a character’s head, experiencing visions and flashbacks directly through his point of view, shot with extreme close-ups, to present day action seen through far away long shots that have the look and feel of surveillance footage. It feels like we are eavesdropping on conversations. Many of the intimate moments are shot through windows and doors. We are pulled from being uncomfortably close to uncomfortably distant, sometime within in the same scene.

People are exactly who you’d expect them to be. Then they aren’t. Danny—the ne’er–do-well brother—looks like a Key rat from a mile away but he’s strangely charming and sympathetic. John is the boy scout sheriff but wears his guilt like a Kevlar vest in the Florida sun. Kevin and Meg are their own brands of ‘effed up. Even Mom and Dad Rayburn find surprising ways to let everyone down. In short, everyone is always kind of the worst—the nasty wreck you can’t turn away from.

The show isn’t perfect. Sometimes it is too slow. Sometimes it is too obvious. But. But. But…

Uncomfortable. Enigmatic. Mesmerizing.

Bloodline is all about the slow burn. The moderate chop. Just enough discomfort to make you unsteady but not so bad that you leave for calmer waters. The sort of trip that stays with you even after you’re back on dry land.

Literally, The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

Posted on by lcr31

I was at the movie theater early yesterday. Early enough that they were just finishing the first batches of popcorn. I could smell it walking in from the parking lot. Other benefits of going to the 10:30 AM showing of The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel are that you get to feel like a real youngster compared to some of the other movie goers and you get to see trailers for movies you’ve never even heard of before. I am soooo not complaining about things like Avengers: Age of Ultron or Furious 7. I love those. I just like to mix it up sometimes with something like the new Cameron Crowe movie, Aloha.

best-exotic airportThe first The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is sort of like The Breakfast Club with English pensioners instead of Chicago teenagers. Instead of taking place in the 80s, some of the characters are actually in their 80s. It has the same existential angst of the Hughes classic but instead of a jackass assistant principal, there is an over energetic and inexperienced hotelier. The movie is heart-warming and heart-breaking all at once. The easy jokes about oversexed and altogether over-it retirees are balanced by Judi Dench’s search for meaning and Tom Wilkinson’s struggle with his identity. The movie is saturated by the colors of India and the authentic emotional conflicts of each of its characters.

So, is The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel any good? I’ll get to that, but, for me, it was kind of beside the point. When I sunk down into my seat with my ginormous Diet Coke I didn’t really care if the movie was great. I didn’t even need it to be good. It’s been a long winter and spending two hours bathing in the sun of the sub-continent was good thing. I like marking time with Judi Dench, Bill Nighy, and Maggie Smith. Dev Patel’s Sonny is exuberant and enthusiastic and who doesn’t need more of that in your life?

Turns out, though, it is good. It’s better than good. Okay, so maybe it lives up to its name as the Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (those italics all mine) when you compare it to the first. Some of the emotional tension is gone and is replaced with a secret-shopper sub-plot and Richard Gere. But anyone who knows me knows that I like a good hey-gang-let’s-pull-together-and-put-on-a-show show like Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney did in White Christmas. (This is part of why I unabashedly love the CW show Hart of Dixie but we will save my regard for Bluebell, Alabama for another day.) Maggie Smith will break your heart again in all of the best ways. Bill Nighy’s seemingly effortless charm barely masks a winsome loneliness. Throughout it all, though, there is pop music and wedding dancing and painted elephants and marigolds. Lots and lots of marigolds.

If the first movie was like your favorite spicy curry, the second is like naan fresh from the oven or a warm cup of Chai. Both go surprisingly well with the mini-churros and a ginormous Diet Coke from the concession stand.

More Sweaters

Posted on by lcr31

I don’t have super powers. I just own more sweaters.

That’s what my friend Marc said one day at lunch. We were all living in Southern California at the time. Our view at lunch was the Pacific Ocean and the Malibu Pier. Occasionally, pods of dolphins would swim by. Another one of our friends, a native Californian had asked Mark how he survived the winters in his native Minnesota. article-2026274-0D71123B00000578-647_468x330To the Californian, Marc might has well have grown up with Superman in his Fortress of Solitude or riding a Tauntaun with Luke Skywalker on the Ice Planet Hoth.

I just own more sweaters.

Today I shoveled my driveway for the second time in two days and the I’ve-lost-count time since January. Yesterday’s snow/ice mix was like a Slush Puppy without the whimsy. Today’s snow was light and fluffy but there was a lot more of it. I would like to say I’ve gotten Zen about the shoveling, the physical labor a spiritual activity like the monks who dig holes only to fill them up again. I would like to say it, but it would be a lie.

But this isn’t a rant about the weather or climate change or how hearing a snow blower across the street while you struggle with last year’s snow shovel can induce white-hot rage. Nope. I may not use clearing the driveway as a mindfulness exercise, but it does give you time to think. Tonight, it was quiet outside as the sun went down. Schools were closed today so the after work traffic was light. The weight of the snow muffled what noise there was and the sun set softly, without fanfare, into the cold night.

I thought of Marc and his sweaters. South Florida is where I call home, even though I’ve lived in places like Philadelphia, Detroit, and now New York. I get the opposite question from Marc. “How can you stand the humidity? It’s so humid in Florida.” I always remind everyone that it is humid and gets a lot hotter in the summer in Philadelphia and New York than it does in Miami and it never does snow. Not ever.

The truth is you just own more flip flops. Or rain coats if you live in Seattle. Or sun hats if you live in Palm Springs. Or sweaters if you live in Minnesota. The ability to adapt and find your place no matter where you are is something I learned early from my mom. We moved a lot and she always made the best of it. She always made sure I had what I needed, whether it was flip flops or sweaters. She was fond of the saying “Bloom Where You’re Planted.” Sure, it’s corny. But I’ve thought of it over and over again during lonely, tear-stained nights.

New York is not an easy place to live, snow or no snow. Today while I watched the news coverage of multi-car pile-ups and a plane that skidded off the icy runway at LaGuardia, my parents were at a golf tournament. I ask myself, a lot, why I don’t move back to Miami. But this is where I’m supposed to be. At least I think it is. So, for now, I just own more sweatshirts.IMG_2294

In case you’re wondering, Marc didn’t go back to Minnesota after we graduated. He stayed in California. I don’t know how many sweaters he owns now.

 

 

California Dreamin’

Posted on by lcr31

I have two (almost complete) sets of California friends. They come with a mismatched collection of knick-knack memories, some I keep on the bookshelf by my desk and some I keep tucked away in plastic bins in climate-controlled storage space.

My own experiences while living in California were fraught with disaster, personal and impersonal, natural and man-made. At our law school graduation, the student speaker gave a shout out to riots, earthquakes, and fires. Oh, my!

I left California in a hurry, vapor trail style. I moved so quickly, I left a lot behind, and I’m not talking about all of my stuff that was looted (is that really a verb?) from my fractured apartment in the Valley. Maybe it was CHiPs, and Simon and Simon, and Hardcastle & McCormick, and Van Halen but I had wanted to live in California for as long as I could remember. From 3,000 miles away life looked more special there. The interstates were freeways. The cars were convertibles. There were surfers—surfers!—bobbing in the waves with the dolphins all along the Pacific Coast Highway.

My reality didn’t match my childhood imagination, but, even after everything, I did fall for California. Dysfunctional, co-dependent, and anxiety enabling at times, but still…

When I fell, I fell hard. Few days pass where I don’t tell someone a story from those days. Even fewer days pass when I don’t remember how those friends helped me through some of the most challenging times of my life. We were silly and ridiculous and serious and committed. We shared $44 hotel rooms in Vegas and survived a hippie cleansing ceremony huddled in tents at Buttermilk Boulders. We briefed hundreds of cases and survived a lot of Socratic questioning. The star filled nights in Joshua Tree made us question our own relevance in the big, bad universe and also question our decision not to stop in Twentynine Palms for pizza before setting up camp. These moments, and, more importantly, the people populating them, are the existential building blocks of my career, my law practice, and my adult life.

A couple of years ago, I went all LL Cool J and went back to California. Not full-time. No more condos in Thousand Oaks or rented rooms in Malibu for me. This time, I was closer to Joshua Tree, baking in the desert in the Coachella Valley. I spent days workshopping stories and more nights staring at the stars. I ate what my friend calls “the best chili in the world” at Pappy & Harriet’s in Pioneertown, a movie-set ghost town in the high desert and, chili aside, one of my favorite places on the entire planet.

I made new friends, writers, who share my passion for words and stories in a not-altogether-different way than my lawyer friends. The ability to craft a narrative, string together facts into a cohesive and meaningful story, is something all of my friends share. We believe in the power of shared experience, empathy, and the humor of humanity.

This week, as I drove through the giant flakes of a snow shower here in New York, I listened to Diana Krall’s haunted version of California Dreamin’. I was overwhelmed by how much I missed my friends in California (and the ones I made there who now live all over, many in places as snowy as here.) All of them. Both sets. The ones I see and talk to and the ones who are packed away in the time capsules of my life there. It is not about the weather—even though I wouldn’t mind a walk in the sunshine of Palm Springs or the misty coastal layer of Malibu today. It is about who could take that walk with me. The people who knew me, and stayed with me, and stay with me still, at my worst, most vulnerable, most creative, most fragile times.

Collectibles lose their value when you take them out of the package. Unwrapping those friendships and those memories, like that John Spartan from Demolition Man action figure, threatens to decreases their value as sure as driving a new car off the lot. But the chips and the breaks, the yellowed crack of glue where something has been put back together, are the scars of a life lived. Lived, if not well, completely. And with a reckless disregard for resale value.

Better Living With Bravo

Posted on by lcr31

bravoLonger-than-I-want-to-think-about ago, Bravo fundamentally altered the television landscape with Queer Eye for The Straight Guy. It seems crazy now how shocking that title was for basic cable and how five gay experts giving a clueless, straight dude a total makeover could be so revolutionary. But it was. And it wasn’t just the straight guys that benefitted from Carson Kressley’s advice on zhoosh-ing or Ted Allen’s smarts about food, wine, cheese, and all things gastronimical. We all did.

And so it went. Show after show, Bravo taught us about fashion and design and real estate.

Then came the Real Housewives. The Housewives seemingly don’t have much to teach us. If Queer Eye was reformative, the Housewives are performative. In Orange County they are intent on making sure we know they are businesswomen, not just blondes in body-con dresses. In New York, they pride themselves on philanthropy (SO MANY charity functions) and European titles. In Jersey, they are all about family, which they will tell the cameras, but not their actual families, who they may or may not be speaking to at that moment.rhlogo

On other reality shows, particularly with ones with contestants and prizes, at least one person will say, “I didn’t come here to make friends.”

Not the Housewives. Oh, no, no. They did come here to make friends. At least that’s what they want us to believe. The illusion is that these women get cast together on a show and become instant besties who eat lunch (usually by sharing an appetizer or a small salad) or meet for a glass of wine to talk about their problems. “Can we talk?” is heard at almost every gathering. Throughout the season there will be alliances and feuds, heartbreaks and goopy cameos from the House-husbands, but you can generally count on some season finale, fancy dress party where they kiss, even if they don’t make up. Then there is the ubiquitous reunion show where each woman is called to the (red) carpet for all of the snarky backhanded comments she made in her interview segments (remember the confessional on The Real World?) or the aired footage where she talked about someone behind their back. The season will end with a toast and on we move to the next city, the next season, the next set of women.

For all of the bluster and plastic surgery, there is something to be said about accountability here. While I am always amazed at the things these women will say and do WHEN THEY KNOW there are cameras filming (sometimes BECAUSE THEY KNOW cameras are filming), I give them credit. Whether they want to or not, they have to own what they say about each other. If one starts or spreads a rumor about another one sleeping with someone’s husband, it’s all there for everyone to see and Andy Cohen and the legions of Housewives super fans are going to call her on it.

What if we all lived our lives like the Bravo cameras were watching? What if millions of people were watching as we repeated the story we heard at the nail salon about the guy from the place doing that thing he’s not supposed to do?

I have been on both sides of this equation. I have been the person humiliated and hurt by things people said about me. I have also said things, and repeated things, that I wish I could take back. The temporary surge of superiority is no salve for the sting of shame and embarrassment.

Recently, I spent time with a friend whose life has been upended by hurtful gossip; gossip that went beyond kibitzing over a cup of coffee into the world of real-life damage. There have been phone calls and awkward talks and tears. Relationships have been shattered. Feelings weren’t hurt; they were trampled.

The story I heard upset me more than I would have expected. I am angry and sad. I am disappointed in people who are my friends. I am ashamed of the times I have gotten caught up in email flame wars or back-room back-biting.

So this year I’m adding a new resolution to my list: Live like the star of my own Housewives franchise. Sure, there won’t be many cocktail receptions on yachts or glam-ping vacations in Montana, but maybe I will take a beat before I speak. Maybe I’ll hold myself accountable for the things I say about other people. Maybe I won’t have to wait for Andy to run a clip package of highlights before I own my own shit.

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