Have you seen the movie 27 Dresses?
I didn’t see it at the theater. I didn’t want to see it.
It seemed like the sort of forced, contrived chick flick I don’t usually enjoy.
But some of my friends have started to love forced, contrived chick flicks. Yes. These are the same friends who now watch Lifetime.
I don’t know when it happened. One day my friends were the kinds of women who read the Wall Street Journal, trade publications and non-fiction books for their professions, and used vacation days to go to in-depth courses pertaining to their jobs. We had long discussions about politics, religion, the environment, our place in the world, and our responsibility to make it a better place. We didn’t just talk. We brainstormed ideas, launched plans, got involved. For fun we went to concerts and movies. We liked to go to small (usually grimy) clubs to hear new bands. We saw bands whose music we liked, good music, meaningful music, music with depth, music that mattered. Not the slick, overproduced cute front-man bands at the arenas and cool clubs. When we went to movies we chose indie releases. Moves that mattered. Movies that made us think. Movies that explored concepts. Movies with great art direction. And subtitles. Yes. Often they were pretentious or reaching or affected or just stupid. (Hint: Just because a movie is French with subtitles doesn’t automatically qualify it as important or art.) But. We liked stepping away from the pabulum that the big production houses served up as entertainment. We liked seeing actors other than the media-darling cookie cutters Hollywood flaunts as hot, new, young, or popular. We liked seeing movies, which were not financed via megaconglomerate corporations. We liked seeing movies that were something other than vehicles for selling products, clothes, cars, actors …
One by one those friends got married. And bought condos. And started having children. And quit their jobs. And moved to suburbs.
And the next day their interests changed. They stopped caring about their professions. The careers they spent years in college studying for and years working, striving and enjoying were abandoned and forgotten. These were smart women. I mean, they are smart women. Magna and summa cum laudes. Most have advanced (masters or above) degrees from top tier universities. They had big ideas, big aspirations for their lives. They were going to take on the world and change it. And yes, they did have an impact, make changes to the world. They’ve impacted and changed the world by populating it with new people. In a few cases I know parenthood is just a hiatus—they will one day return to work and impact the world in ways other than producing new people.
