Companions Thru Life, of a Sort

I wonder if this is peculiar to me, or whether it is shared by nearly everyone else on the planet.   I just know that so far I haven’t heard or read of anyone else doing this.   I mean mentally connecting one's self with a couple of big celebrities purely because they happened to have been born close to the same moment or at least within a year of when you were -- and if, of course, you felt that in some chance encounter, they wouldn't brush you off for at least 10 seconds.

In my case it was Teddy Kennedy and Elizabeth Taylor, even though in my mind both were tainted at the beginning by circumstances that were not in any way their fault, Kennedy by having been a rich kid and Taylor by having had a sir-name that was the same as that of my stepfather, a man with whom I never saw eye to eye, except for the remarkable house that he moved us into.

Notwithstanding Chappaquidick, I greatly admired the way that Kennedy always took the same stands in Congress that I would have and by so doing constituted a permanent red hot poker shoved up the nostrils of the right wing, even if in his later years he looked as if he had thrown back a few thousand too many, though I never heard that that was indeed the case.

Similarly, I  never shared the universal opinion that  Ms Taylor was the most beautiful woman in the world -- I thought that she fell a bit short of the Italian line of Manganos, Lollabrigidas, and Lorens.  And her only movie that I thought worth going back to see a time or two was her defining film, "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf."   But she did have great eyes, and her performance in “Who’s Afraid” was definitely a greatest moment in cinema, for in it she exuded true bitchiness so easily and gracefully that she was either giving one of the greatest acting performances of all time or she was just doing what came naturally and that would help account for her multiple marriages.

But, whatever the reasons, this pair and their widespread acclaim long ago came in handy as good company and also as measuring sticks of a sort, against my own totally uncelebrated "grand fantasies" and the course of my life.

Now it has worked out that both have skated out of here for good, Kennedy so long ago that it feels as if his birthdate couldn't have really been that close to mine, and Taylor just the other day, and therefore this post.. 

Later now, Eliz!