R.I.P., Burt Reynolds

How can I not commemorate the passing of Burt Reynolds? I cannot begin to count the number of times I've watched all or part of Smokey and the Bandit. Literally dozens of times--including once at the Barn Drive-in on Merritt Island (long gone in favor of a strip mall) on a double-feature with a Jerry Reed vehicle, High Ballin'. It was a classic on many levels. (And let's not forget Hooper, which was the most action-packed mid-life crisis ever filmed.)

I liked Burt Reynolds; yes, he was out of my league and I knew it, but he had a very engaging charisma. That kind of charm could grin at the camera and cause hot flashes throughout the theater. You just knew that even if you weren't romantically involved, he'd be terrific company on a long roadtrip or hanging out drinking beers and shooting pool. 

They don't make 'em like that any more.

Literally--Burt Reynolds belonged to the last generation of men who was "allowed" to be a natural male. He predated the trend of "manscaping". Go look at *that* picture of him from Cosmopolitan magazine at the bottom of the page. Go ahead, I'll wait. 

That's a man who never waxed anything in his life. He is exactly as God made him, and perfectly okay with that. If his nudity or blatant masculinity makes the viewer uncomfortable, it may be because the arbiters of  aesthetics have since  decreed that men must be pruned to be acceptable and somehow convinced audiences of the same. After all, these stars have spent months working out for their roles, let's not blur that six-pack with something so crass as body hair! And yet, following that dictum has lead to a certain homogeneity among actors of today. 

They've pretty. They're buff. They've removed their natural foliage (well, perhaps a tasteful strip below the navel) to show off their hard-won musculature--but to prove that there's a Y chromosome in there somewhere, they're permitted a little stubble or a beard. Stamp them out with a cookie-cutter, Hollywood! They're practically clones of each other.

Compare these guys with the icons of the 1970's--Burt Reynolds, Tom Selleck, Robert Redford to name a few. Robert Redford was clean-cut without being overly barbered, and Tom and Burt had those delightful mustaches. (Let's not forget Tom's frequent co-star, Sam Elliott, who is still a Damn Fine Looking Man. No cloning possible.) These guys all share that charisma thing I mentioned earlier. That comes from being comfortable in their own skin, not trying to meet some artificial standard of maleness.

Am I saying that none of today's actors have no appeal? Hmm...there are certainly members of the younger generation whom I find attractive despite their adherence to the code of manscaping. Still, I think it's a lot more difficult to stand out as an individual these days. (Especially with so many of them named Chris--what's up with that? The only one we had back in the day was Kristofferson, who was known more for his musical talent, although he had a respectable film career.) It makes me wonder which of them may stand the test of time--in forty years, when their generation (currently 30-somethings) starts dying off, who are we going to remember and sigh wistfully? Who is going to make the cut, who'll be remembered for that appeal that makes guys wish they were him and women want, if not him, someone like him?

Goodbye, Burt. You showed 'em how it was done. Give my best to Jerry!

http://blogs.mprnews.org/newscut/2018/09/the-unmentionables-burt-reynolds-in-cosmo/

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And besides, the wench is dead....

 I certainly have the beginnings of a book from my family tree. At least, there are enough details emerging--between what I've been told and what GK has turned up to play connect-the-dots. The events I'm thinking of all happened close to a century ago--all the principals are long dead, so fictionalizing , throwing in a heaping helping of "what if" to what's fact and family myth should make for an interesting yarn. ("They" say that one's first book is usually autobiographical, but I don't plan to go to that extreme.)

I'm not even talking about the historical stuff I mentioned, the first generation in Boston can wait. My grandparents, on the other hand? Fair game! On one side, you have the immigrant experience of my dad's folks, Norwegian Lutherans who spent most of my dad's childhood in South Dakota. Dad told me he'd been scouted by a major league baseball team, but he was underage and his father refused to sign the permission slip because he would have had to play ball on Sundays. Apparently that made him something of an angry young man, because GK thinks she's found evidence of him as an inmate at some correctional facility. Oooh, the plot thickens! He never breathed a word about that!   can imagine my dad picking a fight and getting taken in for drunk and disorderly-he was around nineteen at the time--if it had been ten years later, I know he was working to help start up unions...he mentioned being in the middle of labor riots in the 1930's. 

On mom's side, the sea-captain's descendant apparently married shortly after WWI, produced my mom a couple years later AND THEN (I never heard about this from her) had a baby daughter who died at six months. (Crib death? Childhood illness pre-antibiotics and vaccines? Something more sinister?) They divorced OR grandmother died (we're still investigating) and my mom ended up in an orphanage. Grandfather remarried, possibly a wicked stepmother, because although she also had several half-sibs (another surprise), Mom didn't live with him but ended up living with his mother and his sisters in law by the time she was in 8th grade. (Another newsflash--I always called those ladies my great-aunts, and believed that they were spinster sisters...come to find out they were widows of my grandfather's brothers. And yet they lived together for the rest of their lives, which almost begs a lesbian subplot.)

I *do* know how my folks met--she was the baby-sitter/nanny for my dad's oldest nephew. (She was 19, he was 30. A little cradle-robbing, but she wasn't totally jailbait.)  I know that they were married on Christmas Day, 1941, by my grandfather the minister. There was a snowstorm, one of the sheep had lambed, and they had to bring it into the house and bottle-feed it. It's like something from the Hallmark Channel--it practically writes itself....

I think it's going to be a lot of fun, once I've gotten some more detail. There's an old song that says, "I know the WAC's recruited old maids for the war, but Mummy isn't one of those--I've known her all these years!". That's how I feel about this project. I'm sure my take on things isn't going to be  what actually happened, but I'm intrigued that so much has already surfaced that I had NO CLUE about. Memories were fragmentary or white-washed. The tales I got so long after the fact don't begin to tell the stories I'm sensing. Is it such a leap that I feel I have to tell those stories myself? Even if it's only my imagination interpreting the bits and pieces--it's sort of a reverse Rashomon; instead of being the objective truth or the biographical truth, it's my subjective fictional truth. Does that make sense?  

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