Signs

The movie I wrote about last week, Four Months, Three Weeks, Two Days might classify as the worst date movie ever. If you want to kill the possibility of sex, that's the show to see. Also on the docket are treats like Leaving Las Vegas and Kids. I knew someone who did that double-dip on a second date and lived to regret it. "That fucking sucked, Michelle," my friend said with a shudder. "And he wore sweats. Sweats!" My friend did not have it in her heart to forgive a poor fashion choice. My favorite movie combination was with the dude that raped me -- Fatal Attraction and The Accused. These movies fell on holidays -- New Year's Eve and Thanksgiving and while both hold up even now as excellent acting and storytelling, they are sad and horrible documents of the eighties, reflecting a culture that considered a promiscuous financially poor single mother as deserving a gang rape or single career woman as evil victimizer (I will not be ignored -- got to admit, I love that line) who tries to break up families when a man strays for a weekend. There seemed to be no good fate for woman as opposed to earth mother, radiant wife, beautiful housekeeper. As my friend Hank used to say, Give me a bucket.

But back to the rapist, the first movie I ever saw with him was Rambo. I believe in signs and damned if that wasn't one. Poor Rambo was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder as I soon would be. He lived in a hostile and cruel world and couldn't bury the past. I didn't get it at the time, of course. We never do. The video played in my parents' living room, not far from where the rape would take place. It wasn't a jungle, of course. But it had a certain creepiness factor -- a tombstone for my great grandmother that never got used, masks from New Guinea that stared from the walls, an authentic boomerang that my mother used to beat me with as a child. I wouldn't call it haunted, but a lot of other people did as if they could see the future in the things that were already there.

Michelle's Spell of the Day
"I don't care if I die as long as someone picks up my gun and keeps shooting." Che Guevara

Cocktail Hour
Drinking blog suggestion: Check out my wonderful friend Jodi's new blog that promises glamour (which is so totally Jodi!) and frivolity, the J Spot, at http://thejspotjodi.blogspot.com/

Benedictions and Maledictions
Happy Tuesday!