Live, Love, Laugh – Especially Laugh
A Geezer’s Notebook, By Jim Foster
Now this was a difficult column to write because I was writing it on October 15 and it is now November 10. The American election was five days ago and at this moment I have no idea who won and at this point you are in the same boat. Like a normal human being I hope it would be the Harris/Walz ticket but we all know that normal and Americans can never be used in the same sentence. We can hope, predict, pray, read and listen to the sage words of political pundits, but we might just as well check the prognostications of Nostradamus, or read the entrails of birds since they are just about as accurate.
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I realize this column might be offensive to some people since I am mildly making fun of possibly the most famous architectural works of art in the world, the Taj Mahal in India. Actually I’m not doing that; I am merely saying the man who built it could have saved himself a few bucks (in today’s prices, $77.8 million) if he had toned down his great love just a tad and taken a cold shower.
Shah Jahan commissioned this wonderful tribute to his wife,
Mumtaz Mahal in 1631 after she died bearing their 14th child. I have
no doubt theirs is one of the great love stories of the ages and that he loved
her dearly. I am merely suggesting he did so a bit too often.
I would think Mumtaz was probably getting a little tired of all this devotion
after the first ten or eleven trips to the maternity ward and would rather he
took his passion downtown or risked having to wear glasses. He could have done
anything he wanted just as long as he left her alone.
There have been so many great loves throughout history beginning with Adam and Eve. When you think about it, theirs wasn’t exactly a great love. Of course not, there was nobody else. Pretty slim pickings when you think about it. I don’t know how they did it with God popping in any old time He felt like it, plus there was the snake. Adam would always be looking over his shoulder to see who, or what, was watching. It would be like honeymooning with the wedding party in the next motel room and the best man has a key.
I’m sure there were many romances throughout history that really happened, Shah Jahan and Mumtaz Mahal of course, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, Donald and Stormy, Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter, Elizabeth Taylor and Conrad Hilton, Michael Wilding, Mike Todd, Eddie Fisher, Richard Burton, Richard again, John Warner, and finally, Larry Fortensky. At least we know Liz wasn’t frigid.
Some romances we thought would last forever. Jennifer Aniston and Bradley Pitt seemed to be destined to be together until they were called to that great celestial home in the sky, but alas Angelina Jolie wearing a pair of short shorts bent over in front of Bradley and the Aniston-Pitt journey to the great unknown was put on hold until he saw how this new one worked out. As we all know now it didn’t so we will have wait and see how his current entanglement fares. In the meantime Jennifer will just have to slather herself from head to toe in Aveeno and wait.
Most of us have been wrong so many times about the great love stories coming out of Hollywood we are becoming just a bit skeptical whenever we read about the romances and steamy couplings of the stars. Yet I will continue to believe the heroes and heroines I worship are and always have been forever stalwart and pure. To me Doris Day, Audrey Hepburn and Julie Andrews will always be sweet and virginal untouched by male hands.
Clint Eastwood, Gary Cooper and Yul Brynner are forever brave men and true, cowboys who would beat a villain senseless with their fists or shoot him between the eyes like a true hero of the wild west, not pansy types who would whip out a guitar and sing them to sleep like a couple of bozos from the 40s whose names I cannot bear to speak. Well, Roy and Gene if you insist.
But for real romances we have to look to the world of fiction. Here lovers abound, Helen of Troy and Paris who started the Trojan War, Cleopatra and Mark Antony* (with a side fling with Julius Caesar), Tristan and Isolde, Arthur and Guinivere (with a side fling with Sir Lancelot) (side flinging seems quite popular in love stories) Robin and Maid Marion, and of course, Romeo and Juliet, or as I read not long ago, a play about a dalliance between a 13-year-old girl and a 17-year-old boy that resulted in 6 deaths.
Shakespeare knew a lot about women and romance. His gals were never prim and proper ladies who were subservient to men. My favourite heroine was Lady Macbeth. She ran the show and took crap from nobody. If she wanted it, she wanted it now and Macbeth knew it. When she was in the mood and shouted he headed right to the bedroom. You don’t cross a woman with a knife.
* okay, they could have been real but I have yet to meet someone who actually knew them
(Image Supplied)
