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Hello Crush,
It’s so nice to have you here this Saturday morning. We’ve got a lot for you today, so we’ll just dive in.
In This Letter. +Hot Thoughts By Dish Stanley I just don’t see that there’s a morally superior way to age. +Meeting Across The River: Springsteen and Me By Lisa Ellex “Is Elvis home?” +PrimeCrush & Chill: Steamy Films Worth A Re-Watch. By Christian Pan At first, the forcefulness of his unwavering gaze proves thrilling. +Three Things I'm Crushing On. From Crush Reader Meredith +Social Media I Loved This Week. +Our Song of the Week Everybody back home will say where the hell did he go
Hot Thoughts: Best of Luck, Joan. By Dish Stanley
Occasionally I sound off.
I’m not watching The Golden Bachelorette, are you? I liked Joan Vassos in The Golden Bachelor and wish her well. It’s certainly not the case that I was more interested in seeing women compete for a man’s love than I am in seeing men compete for Joan’s, it’s just that I guess one was enough? I may change my mind and check it out, but with so much good stuff to watch right now I just haven’t felt compelled enough to tune in.
One thing I will say is that the critiques I’ve been seeing about the “youth washing” with Joan (and of the other women who were on The Golden Bachelor) feel off to me. Yes, Joan (and the other women) look younger than most women their respective ages do in the real world. And yeah, sure, that probably undermines the series’s pro-age message. But aren’t most people on television - broadly speaking - younger and more beautiful looking than the rest of us? They’re not representative. They’re on television! It’s a visual medium.
More importantly, I’m not particularly interested in questioning the choices anyone else makes about how they age. About what makes them feel better or more comfortable or more authentically them as they confront the unavoidable, unrelenting years. Aging brings up a lot of deep and complicated emotions for all of us. What you choose to do about how you age is informed by a plethora of often intense internal and external factors. Things like how your parents age (or aged) and how they felt about it, whether/how aging impacts your career, whether you’re in a long-term, happy marriage or you’re single and dating. Whether you’ve been left for somebody younger. Where you live. What you can afford.
Having spent a few weeks in the Hamptons for the first time this past summer, I started commenting to friends that for sure the best people to get tips from on where to go for the best of everything from getting your hair touched up to working out to filler, were the middle-aged divorced residential real estate brokers. In the venn diagram of whether good looks are required in your personal and professional lives for success, their lives are a bull’s eye overlap. And so, damn! They keep themselves up.
I have a couple of male friends whose respective fathers died early and suddenly of heart attacks while my friends were in their teens. They are both flooded with fears of their own mortality. Each copes differently. One has stuck to a very strict health regimen since his 20’s, long before anybody else was and at a time when it limited his socializing. (He didn’t drink, ate a macrobiotic diet.) The other shared with me that every time he has looked in the mirror since the first lines started to emerge around his eyes he has felt a literal clenching in his stomach. “I won’t see my daughter turn 30,” he once said to me. “I know it.”
I was at lunch with some girlfriends recently when one of them, Hilary, commented that a woman we all knew had had “a lot of work done.” This was in Boston, and in a subculture where obvious cosmetic work - or wearing much make-up - is viewed as déclassé. Without missing a beat my friend Whitney responded, “You know that Michael [her husband] left her on the day they dropped Ken [their youngest kid] off for his freshman year at University of Vermont, right? For a girlfriend 20 years younger?” (Of course Hilary knew; everyone knew.)
That’s about as close as Whitney will ever come to saying “Back off and shut the fuck up.” (Precisely what was on the tip of my tongue.)
The obvious need not be stated, but I will. Joan, and all of the women who were on the The Golden Bachelor, are out in the often cruel world of dating in their 50’s and 60’s — a world that is age and beauty obsessed. As a widow who dated through my fifties, I am obviously sympathetic to their realities. I have a particular sensitive spot for those who judge them (meaning, judge “us“) on how we look, what we do to keep up or what we wear. Those who are long and happily married can forget how brutal their sly comments can be, as they look on at “us” from the comfort of being safely protected from the world of romantic rejection themselves. (The corollary, is just as true, of course: God help me if I wade into the dangerous waters of critiquing how somebody navigates their long-term marriage.)
I just don’t see that there‘s one way to age (let’s say, without interventions) that is morally superior to another (let’s say, with a little or even a lot of intervention). What we think and say about the choices others make is more than anything a statement about how we feel in our own bodies, and the choices we make for ourselves. The friends who ”would never” color their hair/use fillers/get plastic surgery for whatever personal or practical reasons (sometimes social pressures) are often the first to notice and jump on the news that somebody else, who looks “so refreshed,” has.
Let’s give each other (and ourselves) the kindness of a lot of space and very little judgment about the choices we all make on how we move along the path of getting older, say I.
And that includes Joan. Best of luck to her. I hope one of those bachelors is your next great love, Beautiful.
If *you* are tuned into The Golden Bachelorette I’d love to hear how you’re finding it. Really, really I would. Am I missing out? Let me know at Dish@PrimeCrush.com.
Meeting Across The River: Springsteen and Me By Lisa Ellex
Springsteen is 75. In this piece one admirer recalls the time she got lost and ran into “an extremely fit man dressed in jeans and a skin-tight T-shirt … there was an aura around him …”
I am not one who is easily impressed by celebrity. I’ve sung for Liza Minnelli (a bit unnerving), had my likeness sketched on a cocktail napkin by Tony Bennett (he wouldn’t let me take it home), was chased by Dizzy Gillespie (he couldn’t catch me), and once answered the door to Robert De Niro to find him wearing nothing but an exquisite pair of autumnal-hued, paisley-patterned silk boxers that appeared to have been painstakingly hand-stitched by fourth-generation seamsters somewhere near Ponte di Legno. (Okay, so maybe I stared a little too long but it’s not what you think!).
My interest in Bruce Springsteen was suddenly piqued after hearing him recount an incident that occurred very late on the night of April 29,1976. Following a gig in Memphis to publicize his album, Born to Run, Springsteen and his guitar player, Steven Van Zandt, took a taxi to Elvis Presley's home, Graceland. They approached the famous iron gates when Springsteen noticed a light on in the mansion’s second floor window. He jumped over a wall and started running up the driveway toward Elvis’s front door with nothing in mind other than wanting to meet the King of Rock and Roll. And why not? Springsteen had recently been dubbed rock ‘n roll royalty too, having simultaneously appeared on the covers of the October 1975 issues of Newsweek and Time magazines. Besides, he had written his hit, “Fire” in the hope that Presley would record it.
Just as Springsteen knocked on Elvis’s door, security appeared.
“Is Elvis home?” Springsteen asked.
“He’s not here,” the guard replied.
Springsteen explained that like Elvis, he too, was a guitar player and second-floor had just finished playing a show in Memphis. The security guard was unimpressed. In a last ditch effort to gain entry, Springsteen mentioned being on the cover of Time and Newsweek, at which point the guard took Springsteen by the arm and escorted him to the street where Van Zandt was waiting.
Continue reading here
PrimeCrush & Chill: Steamy Films Worth A Re-Watch. By Christian Pan
In this series from Christian Pan, we hook back up with our favorite ex's--as in, classic steamy movies worth a re-watch.
9 ½ Weeks (1986)
Starring: Mickey Rourke, Kim Basinger
Released: February 14, 1986 (USA)
Basic Plot: A brief affair between a man and woman proves to be an exploration of sexual dominance and submission, before crossing the boundaries of consent into fear and violence.
Gallery owner Elizabeth (Kim Basinger) hasn't dated anyone since divorcing her husband three years ago. Her friend and co-worker Molly (Margaret Whitton) does her best to encourage her friend to start dating again, but Elizabeth seems remote from all talk about sex, and disconnected from articulating her desires. Things quickly shift when she meets the mysterious John (Mickey Rourke) by chance, an elusive lone Wall Street broker who resists revealing details about himself. He instead wants to shine his intense focus exclusively on Elizabeth: wants to take care of her, provide for her, and please her. At first, the forcefulness of his unwavering gaze proves thrilling: Elizabeth enjoys receiving so many new gifts, and new facets to her sexuality awaken when John blindfolds her, or when they have sex in public spaces, or she dresses in drag. But the relationship quickly escalates to include greater and greater degrees of domination, and Elizabeth becomes scared of John‘s pleasure at callous manipulation, and appetite for sexual violence. Before completely losing herself into this world of utter objectification, Elizabeth chooses to pack her bags and walk away from John´s intoxicating but destructive reach.
Why Re-watch: Adapted from the dark semi-autobiographical erotic novel by Ingeborg Day (writing under the pseudonym Elizabeth McNeill), the film was shot on location in New York City in 1984 by Adrian Lyne right after Flashdance and just before Fatal Attraction. In developing the material for the screen with his wife and screenwriter Patrica Knop, producer & co-screenwriter Zalman King aspired to achieve multiple things at once with 9 ½ Weeks. Not only does it hope to blur the line between mainstream Hollywood filmmaking and softcore pornography in a similar spirit as Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris (1972), but it also seeks to interrogate some of the feminist ideals of its time. How does the modern American woman enjoy a successful career and a fully-satisfied sexual life, all at the same time? Lyne’s direction seems to borrow equally from tropes straight out of a rom-com to something more sinister and dark.
Watching this film, viewers may find scenes shifting from sexy to silly, and from disturbing to ridiculous and back again. While Lyne wisely chose to shoot the movie sequentially over a ten-week period, for example, to capture the spontaneous reactions between his co-stars ́characters as they evolve through the script, the director also made the unwise choice to team up with Rourke to manipulate Basinger’s performance in some scenes through intimidation, humiliation, even physical harm. (Unfortunately, such abusive tactics were also used by Bertolucci and actor Marlon Brando during some of his scenes with Maria Schneider).
That being said, both Basinger and Rourke are each sensual and gorgeous to look at in this cinematic world. The best scenes in 9 ½ Weeks are the ones that Lyne structures almost like sensual music videos: Elizabeth masturbating to slides of surrealist art, or John feeding her various foods while blindfolded, or her private striptease in his apartment. Particularly when combined with a soundtrack by Eurythmics or Joe Cocker, and shot in frames filled with shadows and rain, these are the moments when this creative team comes closest to capturing the dark eroticism of the original source material.
Three Things I'm Crushing On: Meredith
In this series, readers like you share recommendations for the things they love the most, right at this moment. Thank you to Meredith and all the other CRUSH Readers who have shared their “crushes.” We’d love to hear yours, too (yes, you!).
Well, I prefer to poach my eggs and then gently lay them over some whole wheat toast. A particularly thoughtful ex-boyfriend, who often observed me swatting at the boiling eggs in water, bought me this poacher as a gift. I use it 3-4 times a week. When I make my guests poached eggs, they often go out and buy it, too.
These might look like “just a set of storage containers” but I can’t emphasize enough how functional and nice they are. How well designed, which makes your life easier. You can see through the clear tops, they take up less room in your cabinets because they nest, you put them right in the microwave.
The bathroom in my guest bedroom is tiny with very little storage or counterspace, but I have had my Mother come stay for the summer. Putting this on the back of the bathroom door works perfectly - blow dryer, brushes, toilet paper, all the bathroom products, cosmetics. A lifesaver.
dishing.
Things I thought you might want to know about, and some you probably don’t.
This humorous poke “When Your Boyfriend Listens to Andrew Huberman” is so on point, from the comedian @thehumanchilidog.
I’m only one episode into this intense, stylish drama about two rival French fashion houses but boy, it’s promising: La Maison.
If you’re thinking about investing in an LED light face mask, you’ll want to read what Jennifer Rommolini picked after trying a number of them, from yahoo!life.
Jean Smart, Hacks star and Emmy winner will be hosting SNL tonight, and I’ll be watching.
I have a friend who re-married a few years after divorce. He admitted to me years ago that about six years into his second marriage he regretted the divorce from his first wife. “I realized once I got deep into my second marriage that it wasn’t that my first wife and I had irreconciable differences. It’s that marriage requires a lot of work. I thought hard work on relationships was a signal we weren’t a match. I believed in a fantasy. I learned that in my second marriage, when things started getting hard. I could have avoided the hell of splitting from my first love, the hell it caused our kids, the hell of not having my kids with me every Christmas, the hell of splitting our finances.” This article on the rise of divorce regret speaks to my friend’s regret, from The Guardian.
Social Media I Loved This Week
Song of the Week
Scooter Blues By Johnny Blue Skies
This week’s Song of the Week comes to us compliments of CRUSH Reader John Kirk, a guy with a lifelong passion for finding great versions of great songs and author of Building the Perfect Music Collection. Scroll down to read more about his wonderful, highly personal book. Thank you, John, for dropping by.
The new album called Passage du Desir by Johnny Blue Skies, aka Sturgill Simpson, is clearly special. It doesn't quite hit on all cylinders for me, but fans are very emotional about it and choosing different favorite songs from the record. It's probably going to win some big awards this year, even though Simpson is an outsider in the music community, much in the way Willie Nelson conducted his career.
Try "Scooter Blues" first; it's easy to like. After that, my second fav is "If the Sun Never Rises Again".
XO,
Dish
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The Crush Letter is a weekly newsletter from Dish Stanley curating articles & intelligence on everything love & connection - friendship, romance, self-love, sex. If you’d like to take a look at some of our best stories go to Read Us. Want the Dish?
