More Reasons to Stay Alive

Maybe you remember this scene from towards the end of Manhattan --  Isaac lying on his living room couch in the grips of deep post-romantic trauma, talking into his tape recorder, as is his wont:

"Well, alright, why is life worth living?  That's a very good question.  Um...  Well, there are certain things I guess that make it worthwhile.  Uh, like what?  Okay.  Um, for me... Oh, I would say... what, Groucho Marx, to name one thing... ummm, and Willie Mays, and uh... the second movement of the Jupiter Symphony, and ummm... Louie Armstrong's recording of "Potatohead Blues"... ummm..."

Bringing Up Baby.  A clip from it came up in the midst of my "history of the genre" reel during the first class of my Writing the Romantic Comedy course at UCLA last night: Katherine Hepburn, Cary Grant and Asta the dog singing (and howling) "I can't give you anything but love, baby," to coax a leopard named Baby off the roof of a Connecticut home in the middle of the night-- and I was momentarily at a loss as to why, precisely, I felt that 16 students and 1 Out of Town Visitor needed to see this. I'd already established what a "screwball" was, there was no specific lesson in comedy craft to be gleaned from the scene, it's just always been one of my favorite moments in moviedom.

"If you're ever considering ending it all, Bringing Up Baby will snap you out of it, at least temporarily," I offered, by way of quasi-explanation, as if everyone was attending a course in suicide prevention, as opposed to comedy craft.  My Out of Town Visitor (OTV), auditing this class as our last fun salvo before she left town, sat at the back of the long table, looking highly amused.  It's one of her favorite films as well, so she didn't need to be sold on its angst-palliative effects.

My OTV knows from the romantic comedy, and living it, since she was a guest in my world for a couple of weeks.  I credit her for enabling me to enact a reversal on one of my least favorite rom-com cliches, to wit:

OTV's flight plans had changed, and I was a little fuzzy on the arrival time anyway -- those Europeans and their military time system, what's up with that, I mean does anybody over there really say "I'll meet you at a quarter after twenty-two?" -- but in our last phone conversation, I'd swear she'd said something about "getting in towards midnight," so even though it did say "19.55" in the e-mail she'd sent earlier, "five to midnight" was what stuck in my head.

So at around ten to nine on the night in question, I finished wrapping up a couple of gifts I'd gotten for her -- one of them, in fact, being a framed reproduction of the the '30s French poster for Baby (it's got a great caricature illustration of Hepburn with a leopard under one arm and and a butterfly net over Cary Grant's head, above the title "Le Impossible Monsieur Bebe") -- and phoned the airline to see if OTV's midnight flight would be getting in on time.  When the helpful United Air staffer informed me that the plane had landed a little under an hour ago, I had one of those Twilight Zone moments where I briefly questioned the sanity of the world (not my own, of course) and then lurched into hyper-high anxiety.

Someone traveling across the ocean and another continent on a 13 hour flight expects to be met, if not with flowers, at least by the person they're coming to see.  I am nothing if not prompt (ask anyone who knows me -- please -- it's totally, annoyingly true) and the romantic in me was mortified.  I was out of the house, into my Mini and inviting a police escort in record time.  Fortunately I live only fifteen minutes from LAX, but even so, with traffic and the usual demons of fate who love to stick it to you at these junctures (e.g. inexplicable pile-up on the "arrivals" entrance ramp, etc.), I was agonizedly aware that I was showing up close to an hour and a half late.

Would she still be there?  What if she'd taken a cab to my place?  And where exactly was I supposed to find her, since it wasn't likely, knowing my OTV, that she'd sit on her luggage by the curb for over an hour?  I gambled that a quick park in the structure across from United would be better than driving to that curb ("the white zone is for the immediate unloading of passengers only..."), parked and ran, dodging travelers, airline people, cabs and luggage carts, honed in on the door to the baggage area, dashed for it -- and nearly collided with my OTV, who at that precise moment was emerging with her baggage piled in a cart.

If you saw it in a movie, you wouldn't believe it, but that's how it happened.  And it was nearly worth it just for the priceless expression on my visitor's face -- she's got expressive eyebrows, which arch up in an extremely articulate way at moments like these, and bless her heart, she was actually smiling at me, instead rearing back to brain me with her backpack.    

And it was only later, driving home in a more leisurely manner, that she pointed it out to me:  I had just done the infamous "dash to the airport" scene, beloved of so many bad romantic comedy climaxes... only in my case, I'd dashed to meet someone arriving, not departing. 

Regardless, we got a good laugh out of it -- thank goodness.  And the pay-off in the back end of our little living rom-com came after class last night, when we ended up rolling around atop my bed, and that wrapped poster gift which I'd so cleverly hidden underneath the pillows slipped out to bonk her on the head.

At any rate, these are the kinds of absurdities that movies like Bringing Up Baby delight in, and that one in particular, with an astonishingly loopy plot that manages to put Cary Grant into a ladies' silk bathrobe, in passing ("I guess I just went gay all of a sudden!" he snorts in exasperated explanation, a kind of wild line for 1938), is in the top end of my Suicide Prevention short list (along with that smile on my OTV's face).  Anyone else out there got a personal fave "movie that makes you think life might still be worth living?"  We can always use more.

Comments

[OTV]

The wonderful thing being, of course, that Bringing Up Baby was instrumental in Bringing Us Together...

I could always say that the smile on my face was one of anticipation of finally Meeting the Mini, but no, I'll have to be honest and admit that seeing the Mernitman on his own turf had much to do with it. And we had fun, didn't we? Despite the fact that the comedy in our romance seems to stem from everything happening backwards, and that we are, after all, two die-hard romantics desperately trying to put a rational spin on this whole "falling in love" business...

[Denise]

I hope it's not too late to join in on this conversation. I'm a bit behind in my blog reading.

My "movie that makes you think life might still be worth living" is Desk Set. In my mind I have always been Bunny Watson.

I must say I'm terribly jealous of the Bringing up Baby poster. I found a vintage Adam's Rib poster in a shop on Bleecker, but alas, I had to purchase it myself. Not quite the same experience I'm afraid. :)

[mernitman]

Hey Denise, welcome, never too late. Re: your Bleecker poster shop experience (pause while I'm lost in a moment of mawkish nostalgia), to paraphrase something Mr. Allen once said about another activity: at least you gave the gift to someone you love.

[Mystery Woman]

That line you're referring to is one of my favorites. And it's so true, isn't it?!

Thanks, I needed a good laugh today. :D