A well-worn movie scene is reenacted
It was a scene I could never imagine I would be destined to reenact.
And yet, there I was, performing what so many actors and actresses had performed before me, they for directors and audiences, I for a more personal purpose.
I first took note of the act in question at the tender of age of twelve, long before I would discover the cause that would prompt me to try it – girls – but just at the time when I was familiarizing myself with all of those other rituals of adolescence, including the giddy thrill of staying up late – late enough, in fact, to catch Billy Wilder’s <i>The Apartment</i> on the worn black and white television set that was the centerpiece of the less-expansive-than-Jack-Lemmon’s apartment in which my father and I lived. There was Shirley MacLaine, the centerpiece of a long, climatic dolly shot, running, running, running to Lemmon’s brownstone in the sudden realization of her all-encompassing rapture for him; a breath-shortening announcement that he, faults and all, was the one, despite the prospect of the much more respectable – at least in some ways - Fred MacMurray.
Ironically, the object of my replication of this moment would bear a certain resemblance to Shirley; I still prize, in fact, a rare photo of her without her trademark glasses, in which the parallels are even more pronounced: upturned nose, boyish bob, pixie-ish grin. There was something else they had in common, too, something that this photo, a medium shot, does not reveal: an incredible set of legs.
It was the legs, in fact, I noticed first, planted in stylish heels and swaying beneath the frilly hem of a dress half modern, half retro. Wow!, I exclaimed internally from the seat of the bus from which I spied these formidable specimens, how come <i>I</i> don’t know anyone like that? Less than second later, my eyes inevitably found their way to her face – and my heart stopped with the shocking realization that indeed, I <i>did</i> know someone like that. It was her, a girl I had had a brief, difficult relationship with a few summers back, back when we were both much younger (17?) and unsure of ourselves. In the short time that had passed, she had become – and her legs were certainly testament to it – a woman.
I rang the bell and, happily forsaking the important appointment I was on my way to, jumped off the bus. Then it began: the run, the one Shirley had shown me in <i>The Apartment</i>, the one Woody Allen had performed in <i>Manhattan</i>, the one endless icons of the screen had run and would run
I caught up with her, and indeed, just as the movies had promised, the reward awaiting at the finish line comprised of some sly double entendres, a little nervous, semi-silent flirting, and, lastly, the mutual recognition of romantic destiny.
The relationship that followed was my first proof that life is not, despite the fact that I desperately wanted it to be, the movies; neither of us, despite the years that had passed since our first pairing, was as mature as we thought.
Still, how I cherish that initial encounter: one of the few instances where life and the movies were, step for hurried step, in perfect synchronization.
