Elwood and I went on a Date tonight. Perhaps in another season of our lives this would not have qualified as a capital-D Date, but when you have five kids you take what you can get. We saw Casablanca at our neighborhood theatre, and then we went for a drink at the bar down the street. The bartender remembered me from August, and remembered that I like Laphroaig, and even remembered that I like it neat. So I left her a big tip, and also, because I am the Queen or perhaps the Empress of Lightweights, I am now writing a post that may be a bit different from my usual.
The only time I'd seen Casablanca was in 1987, in the fall during my freshman year of college. It was one of those don't-know-what-you've-got-'til-it's-gone kinds of things -- there was a student organization that sponsored movies most nights of the week. We could see all kinds of cool things on the big screen for peanuts, though I rarely took advantage of the opportunity. Elwood tried to get a group together to see Casablanca, but it wound up being just three of us: him and me and another freshman named Marjorie.
Now I don't think I've posted about this before, but I had a giant colossal RIDICULOUS crush on Elwood that started about five minutes after I met him. This was a PREPOSTEROUS crush, a crush so memorable that it merits all of those capital letters. I did not think he would ever be interested in a frizzy-haired and rather awkward girl from southern West Virginia. In fact, I was pretty sure he liked Marjorie, the other freshman, and I spent the evening tormenting myself with the ways in which she surpassed my shortcomings. (Neat hair? Check. Disinclined to shoehorn another foot into her mouth every three minutes until you began to wonder if she had cephalopod ancestry? Check.)
The first time around I found Casablanca very confusing, perhaps because my southern West Virginia education meant that I was alarmingly vague about the Vichy regime, but I remember Ingrid Bergman's first entrance with painful clarity. In 1987 I wasn't entirely convinced that Ingrid Bergman was a separate person from Ingmar Bergman, but Elwood knew the difference all right. "She," Elwood murmured emphatically, "is hot."
I knew he'd never think that about me.
It was a little strange to see it again 25 years later. It is, of course, much more fun to watch a movie when you know what's going on. I never cry at movies but tears were streaming down my face during the scene where Victor Laszlo leads the Marseillaise -- all of them on their feet, drowning out the (boo! hiss!) Germans. "It's pretty corny," Elwood said afterward, and I leapt instantly to its defense. "No," I said, "Bogart does the hard-boiled thing so convincingly for the first half of the movie that you have no idea where he's going if you see that film in 1942. That ending is a total surprise in 1942 -- not hokey at all."
I am wondering what my 1987 self would think about her 2012 life. I think she would be more surprised by the middle of the Jamie-Elwood story than by the ending of Casablanca: I had no idea that Casablanca was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. If you had told me then that Elwood and I would be married with five kids, that we would live in this snug yellow house in this particular town -- I don't think I would have believed you for a minute. I was thinking tonight about our July anniversary, when he pulled me in close and said, "You are seriously the best thing that ever happened to me" -- and in that context I didn't mind at all that he still thinks Ingrid Bergman is pretty easy on the eyes.
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