dual personalities

Tag: nora ephron

May 19, 2017

“The first time we met, we hated each other.”*

by chuckofish

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“What happens to me when I’m provoked is that I get tongue-tied and my mind goes blank. Then I spend all night tossing and turning trying to figure out what I should have said.”

The story of my life. And Nora Ephron’s, it would appear. Today is Nora’s birthday (1941–2012). Nora had a lot to say about Life and she was very amusing and I usually agree with her.

“Here are some questions I am constantly noodling over: Do you splurge or do you hoard? Do you live every day as if it’s your last, or do you save your money on the chance you’ll live twenty more years? Is life too short, or is it going to be too long? Do you work as hard as you can, or do you slow down to smell the roses? And where do carbohydrates fit into all this? Are we really all going to spend our last years avoiding bread, especially now that bread in America is so unbelievably delicious? And what about chocolate?”

And my favorite–

“Sometimes I think that not having to worry about your hair anymore is the secret upside of death.”

So in honor of Nora, let’s watch one of her movies: When Harry Met Sally (1989), My Blue Heaven (1990), Sleepless in Seattle (1993), You’ve Got Mail (1998)…

“Sometimes I wonder about my life. I lead a small life – well, valuable, but small – and sometimes I wonder, do I do it because I like it, or because I haven’t been brave? So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, when shouldn’t it be the other way around? I don’t really want an answer. I just want to send this cosmic question out into the void. So good night, dear void.”

I have to admit I have a real soft spot for this one:

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After all, laughter is good medicine. Maybe the best medicine.

“I loathed being sixty-four, and I will hate being sixty-five. I don’t let on about such things in person; in person, I am cheerful and Pollyanna-ish. But the honest truth is that it’s sad to be over sixty. The long shadows are everywhere—friends dying and battling illness. A miasma of melancholy hangs there, forcing you to deal with the fact that your life, however happy and successful, has been full of disappointments and mistakes, little ones and big ones. There are dreams that are never quite going to come true, ambitions that will never quite be realized. There are, in short, regrets. Edith Piaf was famous for singing a song called “Non, je ne regrette rien.” It’s a good song. I know what she meant. I can get into it; I can make a case that I regret nothing. After all, most of my mistakes turned out to be things I survived, or turned into funny stories, or, on occasion, even made money from.”

Have a good weekend! Wanna see a monkey?

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*Harry Burns in When Harry met Sally

6 Comments
January 16, 2012

I remember nothing

by chuckofish

I am living in the Google years, no question of that. And there are advantages to it. When you forget something, you can whip out your iPhone and go to Google. The Senior Moment has become the Google moment, and it has a much nicer, hipper, younger, more contemporary sound doesn’t it? By handling the obligations of the search mechanism, you almost prove you can keep up.”

–Nora Ephron, I Remember Nothing

Almost. And I don’t have an iPhone. I have to be content to look things up on my laptop, so I can’t do it in restaurants or on the subway etc.

Actually the search engine I love and use the most is IMDB.com–the internet movie database. My brain used to be its own movie database, but, sadly, it is no more. I have to look things up. But thankfully there is IMDB, just in the nick of time. Sigh.

I used to be a whiz at Trivial Pursuit (the original version) and could always answer the movie questions. It was almost embarrassing at times how much I knew. But fun facts about old movies just took hold in my brain like French vocabulary or chemistry equations did not. I have no doubt that some of my friends growing up thought my interest in the movies was a tad tacky, bien sur, but that’s the way it was/is. I loved the movies themselves–it wasn’t some screaming-Beatlesmania-kind of thing. I will admit I was probably the only tenth grader in 1972 who loved Leslie Howard, who had been dead for nearly 30 years at the time. I even stayed home from school once to watch It’s Love I’m After (1937) on television. There were no DVDs back then and no telling when the chance might come again to see it, so I had to take such action! (My mother approved.)

So anyway, I had to check on IMDB to find out the name of that movie I stayed home from school to watch. Thank goodness I can handle the obligations of that particular search mechanism!

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