What Would Joan Do?

Joan Crawford is in trouble. She’s just discovered her husband is having an affair, and plans to kill her. But does Joan panic? Does she go to the police? Absolutely not. Joan puts on a fabulous negligee, gets in bed, and has a cigarette, so she can think properly.
It’s Saturday night, and my roommate George and I found ourselves with no plans for the evening. The current object of George’s affection is out of town, and I’ve put a call out to the boy I have a crush on, but so far he hasn’t called back. We decided to turn our phones off, raid the liquor cabinet, and watch black and white movies in our jammies. Our current selection is the thriller Sudden Fear, which we knew would be awesome when the opening credits listed “Miss Crawford’s Hats by Felix, Inc.”

We love a movie with good hats.
Joan’s out of bed now, at her writing desk, carefully outlining how to kill her husband before he kills her, and as a bonus, frame his mistress for the crime.
“You ever notice in old movies everybody has a writing desk?” I note. “Even if you’re living in a tin shack in Hoboville, you’ll still have a writing desk.”
“Well sure,” says George. “The first place to look for dirt is a writing desk. It’s where people keep the safe combinations and incriminating photos.”
“And it’s where everyone creates their diabolical plans. I don’t do enough diabolical planning at my writing desk.”
I suppose everyone needed a writing desk in those days because people still wrote letters. Now we send text messages, and nobody really needs a texting desk. It’s a shame, too, because I think a lot of the charm of watching Ms. Crawford carefully writing out her scheme would be lost if she was punching it into her Blackberry.
As Joan artfully manipulates her sinister husband, I keep casting glances at my phone.
“I saw that,” says George. “I thought it was off.”
“It’s on silent. I didn’t want to miss him if he calls. He said he wanted to get together this weekend.”
George gives me a look, so I switch the phone off and turn my attention back to watching our heroine emerge triumphant.
The next morning, I send a text message to the crush, just a quick one to say hi and inquire about his plans for the day. He doesn’t respond. George joins me on the porch with coffee in hand, finding me staring at the phone, willing it to do something.
“You’re getting awfully close to pathetic territory here, darling,” says George. “How many unanswered messages have you left?”
“One voicemail. Two texts.”
“Topher,” he says gently. “If you were watching this in a movie, would you say this is the behavior of a self-assured individual with a lot to offer a quality man, or the desperate acts of a sad creature whose personal happiness is for some reason entirely dependent on the approval of others? Ask yourself: What would Joan do?”
That answer is, of course, quite simple. Joan would pity the poor soul who missed the chance to spend time in her company. She would forget the man entirely and go buy herself a new hat. If he came to his senses later, she might give him another chance, but he’d have to work twice as hard. I’m not following her example at all. I’m acting like the loosely-defined mousy secondary character the leading man would eventually come to his senses and abandon for someone like Joan.

This will not do.
I open my phone and delete the crush’s number, thus eliminating the temptation to call him again. It feels so good, I scroll through and delete the phone numbers of every guy who never returned my call. It’s a lot more names than I expected. Now I won’t be confronted by a list of failed possibilities every time I look at my phone book. Feeling confident and renewed, I walk into the house and sit at my writing desk, the best possible place to plot my next move.

Strengthening My Resolve

My grandmother on my mother’s side, the widowed commander of a brood of six children, was presented with the daily task of staying afloat on a very limited budget. She rose to the challenge admirably, stretching every morsel of food and inch of fabric to cover the demands of her family. Her resourcefulness truly had a chance to shine every December, when she created low-cost alternatives to the usual holiday fare.
As a tribute to my late grandmother, my Mama still prepares her “unbaked fruit cake”, a sticky-sweet mishmash of condensed milk, vanilla wafers, and candied fruit, formed into a loaf and left to harden on the counter for several weeks.
There are no words to sufficiently describe how horrible it is. It barely qualifies as food. The polite but unfortunate relations who have attempted ingesting this concoction have either lost teeth or experienced instantaneous insulin shock.
My sister Shannon and I have spent years reminding Mama that the only reason our grandmother prepared this monstrosity is because she was poor. Had the option of preparing actual fruitcake been financially viable, she would have gleefully done so. Perhaps a more fitting tribute to our grandmother would be baking the fancy fruitcake that eluded her all those years.
Mama remains unmoved by our entreaties, declaring unbaked fruitcake a sacred family tradition, whether any of us like it or not.
While I was in Mississippi avoiding the fruitcake last week, I was faced with a note in my own handwriting:
This will be the year I get in shape. I will find a boyfriend. I will stop wasting money. I will learn sign language.
This is not a list of my resolutions for 2007. It was my list for 2006. I wouldn’t have even remembered the damn thing if I hadn’t had the bright idea last December of placing it in an envelope and leaving it at my parents’ house. The version of me that found the wicked little document twelve months later is single, carrying fifteen extra pounds, broke, and decidedly not proficient in communicating with my hands.
I don’t know why I bother with resolutions at the beginning of every year. “Get in shape” has been on my to-do since Clinton was in the White House, but its inclusion appears to be insufficient motivation to actually do anything about it. “Find a boyfriend” is a pronouncement that fails to acknowledge I cannot bend attractive men to my will, despite my best efforts. “Stop wasting money” is violated every time I step into a bar, and that sign language thing was strictly because I had a crush on a hot deaf guy and thought it might improve my odds. Turns out he could read lips, and he still wasn’t interested.
And yet I make the damn list every year. I suppose it’s tradition.
Perhaps Mama and I would be well-advised to pause and consider what “tradition” really is. It’s intended to be an activity you actually enjoy repeating, like my buddy George and me watching “Brothers & Sisters” every week, or going to karaoke at Mary’s on Tuesday nights. Annually preparing a brick of cookie crumbs and neon green cherries, or making a list of your perceived faults, is not tradition. It’s just making the same mistake over and over and not learning anything.
There are plenty of lessons, in retrospect, I learned in 2006- the result of all the unexpected challenges and rewards that come up over the course of a year. But how the hell was I supposed to anticipate any of that on January first? For good or bad, the year was what it was. Sometimes the results were fantastic, and sometimes it was an unbaked fruitcake: The best mix of what I had to work with at the time, with the hope of something better later. I don’t expect 2007 will be any different in that regard.
So I’m gonna start the year with a new tradition: I will look forward to whatever mysteries the year has in store, and my only resolution is not to resolve anything at all.