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Shoes and starlets
Images today. Prepare for delays.
And if you don't see any images at all, it's because you're one of those people who reads these entries too darned fast after I post them! You're the ones who see all the typos even as I'm sneaking back to the server to correct them - actually, I don't make very many, but it's a safe bet that on the rare occasions when I do, someone decided to read the entry a little too promptly.
As it happens, I would normally upload the images before posting the entry - I mean, I know where I'm planning to put them, right? I can just type the link and all will be well in the end. But it so happens that today I run afoul of a quirk in my journalpixie.
See, this is the first entry of October, which means that the pixie has to create a new directory, as it does at the beginning of each month. I want the photos to go in that directory, since I like to keep them with the entries they belong to. Thing is, the pixie (Sfoglio) gets a little testy if it's not allowed to create the directory itself. If I went in and made the directory by hand so I could put the pictures there, it'd probably refuse to post this entry. So I have to do the entry first, and rush back and upload the pictures afterward.
You'd think, given that I seldom add pictures, that the odds of having pictures with the first entry of a month would be slim. But this is the second time it's happened.
And you can probably also see that I spent the day completely immersed in programming. Sorry about that. I needed to vent some geekiness, I suppose.
Speaking of which, with the photos below I have done something so unspeakably geeky, in the sense of "look, here's a picture of my dog and my house" bad-home-page geeky, that I shudder even to say it.
I have put pictures of my shoes on the web.
But I have an excuse! Hear me out!
I made so much noise about my struggle to find shoes, that when I actually did find some, I felt I had better show a few of you the kind of thing I was looking for.
And you're going to see these and wonder what the fuss was about.
Now, they look huge in these pictures - well, they are huge, I have big feet, but not that huge. The camera's just closer than you think. That thing in the lower right is the corner of my computer keyboard, to give you an idea of scale. Actually, I think these shoes make my feet look smaller, which was one of the goals.
They may not strike you as particularly girly shoes, but to me they are. (I found them in a men's shoe store, and there were about five more pairs I wanted to buy, but resisted - including several which I think would have registered on anyone's scale as girly. Jackpot! And both of these pairs were on sale. Double jackpot!)
It's just that, while they are fairly girly for such chunky shoes (and I was looking for a fairly chunky shoe), they're not especially femme. Femme shoes are slender flats with pointed toes, ankle-strap sandals, and pumps. I have all those. I wanted something more in the butch spectrum. After all, I can't wear my heels to work - eww, and why would I want to? Heels are for short jaunts, not all day long. And my cute Payless flats with the elastic are not really suitable with jeans.
Nonelvis and Judy both coveted these, so I am obviously doing something right. Now I only worry that I have exhausted my Shopping Karma for the near future. I didn't go looking for these shoes - I went into the shoe store literally on a whim, in passing - and it was a store I passed by as hopeless the last two times I was on Newbury St. So clearly these shoes found me.
Change of subject. This has nothing to do with shoes, or anything else for that matter. I just wanted to let it out before it builds up any more steam inside my head - I've been pondering it for days and I need the brain cells for other, better things.
I used to believe that most of the comments about how relatively unfavorable Hollywood is to actresses were bunk.
Oooh, that was a horrible sentence. Let's try again. There's a certain amount of Conventional Wisdom that actors get a better deal, in terms of money, scripts, and available parts, than actresses.
I still disagree about the money - especially since I think that the top tier of actors and actresses alike make too damned much per picture - but that's another argument, and anyway Diane shut me down cold when I tried it on her and I'm still nursing the bruises.
Point is, I am not in a position to judge relative salaries because I don't know what the bottom tier is making, and the top tier bears no resemblance to anything in my personal experience, for either sex. I will never make a million dollars at one go for doing anything in my life, let alone twenty million, so why should I shed a tear?
Where I have repented is on the subject of age-bias against actresses. It has been said that Hollywood is more reluctant to cast middle-aged women than middle-aged men. (And I'm defining "middle-aged" quite broadly here - say, from thirty to sixty-five, after which you can start getting Crusty Old Dowager parts.)
I didn't believe it. Now I do. A couple of movie posters have changed my mind.
Now, look. I liked Six Days Seven Nights, even if no one else did. I thought it was a fine example of an admittedly lightweight type of comedy that people had stopped doing. Maybe I was so starved for any type of semi-witty romantic comedy (romantic comedies these days are all about feelings and not snappy dialogue) that it seemed better to me. I dunno. I certainly would see it again on video. The point is, in that movie I accepted the age difference between Anne Heche and Harrison Ford because they played up to it, made it part of the plot, part of the difficulty between them. It made Ford's actions believable, as an older (but still amazingly charming and aesthetically pleasing) man who didn't want to foist his tired self on this younger woman.
Ford will be sexy until he dies. So why not pair him with a woman his own age? As I say, I accepted it one time. Twice, and I begin to wonder. What is this business with him being in this movie with Kristen or Kirsten whatever-her-name-is? Why can't they find him one of Hollywood's gracefully-aging women? I know they're out there. Problem is, I see them so seldom that I can barely remember their names. The only actress over forty-five that most people can name in less than ten seconds is Meryl Streep - she was fifty this year.
Susan Sarandon is much beloved to me - she'd be a good foil for Ford, she's fifty-three - but can't get a lot of work because half of Hollywood hates her politics, and Angelica Huston - age forty-eight - is justifiably picky about her parts. Who else have we got? I can't stand Annette Bening, and she's at the lower end of the age barrel by comparison to Ford there anyway - she's forty-one. Ford is fifty-seven. He's the same age as Paul McCartney. As Wayne Newton, for god's sake. As Martin Scorsese.
You want to know an actress Ford's age? Streisand. And the only reason she gets parts is - no, no, I can't dump on Streisand here, I'm always in the minority when I do that. Never mind.
(I hate La Babs.)
It makes me wonder if I liked the remake of The Thomas Crown Affair so much because it was a nice neat caper film (another genre that's fallen into oblivion), or because it actually had a woman over thirty in it! (Russo is forty-five.)
But wait, there's more. So I look in the paper today, and there seems to be this movie with Tommy Lee Jones - another gentleman who seems to be getting better as he ages. Tommy Lee is the same age as Sarandon. So what is with this Ashley Judd nonsense? Ashley's such an infant that she's not even listed in my 1997 almanac; she wasn't famous enough then. But her older sister Wynnona's only thirty-six, so how old can she be?
Once is acceptable. Twice is suspicious. Three times is a conspiracy.
I will no longer dispute the claim that Hollywood doesn't have a clue what to do with its older women. I accept defeat gracefully.
© Columbine
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