Sunday, August 26, 2007
Sex and the City
¶ 8:39 PM 
My housemate Kelly was a computer whiz and he set up a monitor on our front porch where we watched all kinds of movies and television shows. It was interesting to see what we both wanted to watch.
Kelly, who lived here for ten years on and off, was like a foreign exchange student since he went to Hampshire College, and subsequently worked there fixing computers. It was a unique interchange of 40-something and 20-something.
We played hundreds of games of chess and replayed may brilliant games from the works of Irving Chernev. He was a novice, but he won as many games as I did.
We watched all the Bob Hope/Bing Crosby movies, and then we watched three or four years of Sex in the City. That was a great show for prompting discussions about love -- is it okay to break up with a post-it note, etc.
The show was very popular, yet it had great writing and great acting. Go figure. We both observed that Kim Cattrell, one of the most beautfiul women in the world, had zero appeal after only a few episodes. Beautiful as she was, after seeing her with so many other guys... It was still fun to hear her point of view.
And let's face it, if these women decided to stop having lunch together, there was no more show.
Charlotte was brilliantly portrayed by Kristin Davis. I felt sure I had met her at a Groton-Pingree mixer back in... never mind; that was probably her great-aunt. But if you or your forebears didn't happen to have a major bankroll, you were probably out of luck. No offense, Charlotte!
The real heartthrob for Kelly and me was Miranda (a bit of an obvious choice for the lawyer) played by Cynthia Nixon. I don't know why Kelly liked her, but I liked her because she was repressed, like me. I've found that if you were repressed as a young person, there is actually a payoff when you get old and it's recess all day long.
The theme with her and her bartender boyfriend Steve (David Eigenberg) was that she was smarter and more successful than he was, so how could they have a relationship? And he was grungier in the early episodes. You could see them kind of grooming guys when they decided they might have a chance, making them progressively less offensive, like Charlotte's bald, hairy pit bull divorce attorney whom she wound up marrying.
Anyway, I think the culmination of the show was when Miranda is looking at Steve -- she has a boyfriend at this point who is a doctor AND works for the New York Knicks, and Steve has acquired (we wonder how) a beautiful show-biz level girlfriend -- and she says, in spite of herself, "I love you." And he delivers his line beautifully: "I love you, too."
Love conquers all.
