crush

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    I'm a little bit weirded out by myself these past few days.

    It just feels a bit odd to be getting huge crushes on the exact same dudes that my mom had crushes on when she was my age.

    Like Peter O'Toole.

    Or Roddy McDowall.

    I mean, it's just...I don't know.

    I am glad that I do not have a crush on Clark Gable, because that would be in double mom-and-my-aunt territory.

    Why is it so much weirder this way than when my mom and I fall in love with the same dude simultaneously? Like Jeremy Brett. We watched his Sherlock Holmes stuff together (neither of us had seen it before) and both eventually mooned, though he's more her thing by now. I say eventually because the first episode we saw was The Speckled Band and we were understandably under the impression of his being, like, kinda totally weird at first.
    Or Fred Astaire - she knew about Fred Astaire rather longer than I did, bein' some 32 years older than myself, but I was the one who got us into the Fred and Ginger movies. (She'd never actually seen a full movie of his, just clips on tv things.) And now we both totally adore him. Admittedly, Fred is more of an "oh he is so dreamy and charming and gentlemanly and snazz-tastic" thing rather than a Peter O'Toole-ish "damn it if only I could just get my hands inside his shirt" thing, but there is still love and eyeballing involved. And none of it is the least bit weird-feeling.

    Sigh. There's also the part of crushin' on dudes before one's own time that involves knowing their futures, so to speak. One looks at young Peter O'Toole and marvels that he looks so different from his ancient, grayer, modern version. One admires Roddy McDowall's handsome self and curly locks in Cleopatra and tries to focus on the thought of "o! to involve my hand in those golden curls whilst he speaks cunning political treasonings like a sexy thing!" and ignore the little curdle in the back of one's skull which murmurs, "yes, and also he died of cancer when I was six." I suppose my mother must know the feeling. Clark Gable, for example, died just over a month after she was born.

(sexy things that are dead are not as sexy)