parismarisamadonna

Roar – Katy Perry 2013

If you ever had the pleasure of my actual physical company, you would know that I take up quite a lot of space. My Germanic heritage, mixed up with a lethal addiction to cheese and wine have afforded me a rather Valkyrian physiology; broad hips, sturdy thighs, thick ankles, an ample bosom ripped from the prow of a pirate ship and a whole 173 centimetres of skeleton coated with pinkish freckled flesh. When I walk into a room, it is with purpose, with intent and with a flurry of blonded curls that move to their very own rhythm, syncopated and staccato, often pushed behind ears that hold a pair of fire-engine red seeing glasses. Add the scarlet Doctor Marten boots, the gigantic red handbag and a habit of stumbling over just about anything (even flat surfaces) and you’ve got yourself the physical equivalent of costume jewellery; shiny and eye-catching, not very expensive and rather inappropriate before sunset.

Funnily enough, my physical presence is relatively unremarkable compared to the colossal gawp that sounds across humanity once I begin to speak.

I’m rather loud, I usually say exactly what I think, I swear like a fishwife (I even invent new swear words to further extend my vulgar vocabulary; c--tstard and C--ty McC--terston being my words du jour) and I am very expressive. I couldn’t lie if my life depended on it and even if I tried, my eyes, almost as large as my mouth, would betray me. I wave my hands around a lot and accentuate my words with extravagant gestures. My words, never restricted to the singular, pour forth in gushes of fury or frenzy or frustration or feeling. I use adjectives too frequently, I LOVE (or hate) everything, and everyone; I’m rarely indifferent and if I was, I wouldn’t be bothered to waste energy to discuss it.

You see, I am, what is referred to as, emo-wait for it-tional.

Over the course of my adult life, this word has been flung at me with the same venom that one might use to describe someone as racist, or homophobic, or Tony Abbott. Being emotional makes other people uncomfortable, sort of like when someone farts at a party and everyone looks at the ground or the ceiling in an attempt to pretend it isn’t there. In my experience, people are more at ease being farted on than seeing someone cry.

My Ruby Slippers.

 

Being emotional is worse than being stupid.

In my experience smart people tolerate dumb people without injury. In fact, surrounding oneself with intellectual vacuums is an effective method of appearing to be clever, think Kim Jong-Un. Equally, if everyone in your entourage has the intellectual capacity of a drunken gnat, they’ll be content to conduct the most menial of tasks, repetitively, without questioning the efficiency or productivity of what they’re doing. Sort of like bees; there’s a Queen, who knows what its all about, and about 1000 other bees who are either banging her to make baby bees, or buzzing around the countryside collecting her food. Queen Bee, smart, other bees, dumb. 

But no one walks up to a stupid person and says “I find it really difficult to be around you; your stupidity offends me and makes others wary of you.” We just accept the fact that some people are smarter than others and go about our business.

Being emotional is worse when you are a woman.

As a man, being emotional means screaming at the football, which is OK, because it is football. Or crying when your bride appears at the end of the aisle, which is OK, because it’s your wedding day. Or being silent when you’re pissed off, which is OK, because you’re pissed off. An emotional man who expresses his emotion freely and openly in the company of someone who is not his life partner is so rare that we came up with a word for it, and that word is gay. Whether or not the man is actually homosexual, emotional expression in a male is so uncharacteristic that it must be a symptom of something else, like homosexuality…or worse still, femininity.

Emotion in women was once named Hysteria, from the Greek for uterus, hystera. Men who wore smart ties and had certificates accrediting their expertise in medicine decided that being crazy must be the biological outcome of being female, so the two have been linked forever. Ironically, the vibrator was invented to cure Hysteria, so maybe Hysteria was simply the result of generations of men who couldn’t identify a clitoris and play with it long enough to induce a female orgasm. 

We also know that women are emotional when their hormones change; pre-menstrual, post-menstrual, any time of the menses menstrual, we can cry at a picture of a puppy, shout into the void because we didn’t crack an egg correctly, we can giggle like hyenas on crack. Women won the lottery when it comes to hormones; the exact balance between oestrogen and progesterone occurs for about 2 hours every 28 days, the rest of the time, we’re emo-wait for it-tional.

An emotional woman is normal, women have hormones rendering them the weaker sex and emotion is weakness. Even the stupid people know it.

To that, C--nty McC--terston, I say that you can take your f**kstick and run into the hills before shoving it up your left nostril.

Let’s forget your conservative missionary and try looking at the world from a reverse cowgirl’s perspective.

Being emotional makes people who are not comfortable with their emotions uncomfortable, like the fart at the party. The farter feels relief from enormous pressure by releasing his intestinal gases upon the unsuspecting party guests. For those of us who are passionate, expressing emotions provides a similar level of calm. If we were meant to keep emotions inside we wouldn’t have tear ducts, or hands that can make a fist or clitorises or mouths or ears.

Tears, squeals, shouts, kisses, high-fives and growls; all of it is unpredictable and spontaneous. Emotion, or as I prefer to call it passion, cannot be measured, or accounted for, or scheduled; every single person feels every single thing differently. Being emotional is one of the few tangible signs of your own unique personality and to some, any expression of individuality can be terrifying. No tall poppies or mavericks or crazy ones here.

Passion and enthusiasm and fire and rage and love and hate are what make us human. If we aren’t emotional, we are bees; fornicating or hunting pollen so we can make more honey, even if when there is already more than enough.

Sitting in front of someone and crying as you tell them how much you love them is not emotional, it is human. Crying, wiping away your tears then getting back to the washing the dishes requires courage, it is anything but weakness. I can’t imagine any human act braver than being honest about how you feel and then being strong enough to accept the consequences.

So in 2014 I’m lacing up my boots and shouting it to the hilltops, I’m going to scream into the chasms below and every single other human can like me or lump me. I love being the way I am. I do take everything personally… and why the fuckstickle shouldn’t I? 

I’m a person.

 

Sexual Healing – Marvin Gaye 1982

(All of the links to specific images are NSFW) 

 

Maybe you’ve heard about this show called Masters of Sex? Maybe you have a fulfilling, active life and watching successive hours of television just can’t be jammed into your busy schedule. 

Me, I’ve had a lot of free time over the last couple of weeks. After I caught up on Survivor, HIMYM, TBBT and my weekly dose of lactose coated Glee, I sought recommendations from friends as to what could take up 6 hours without requiring too much from my exacerbated neurons. Thanks to my Tequila Sister, I dedicated two full days to The Only Way Is Essex, which will get it’s own spécial dédicace this week while the Smartarse suggested Masters of Sex. What magic, what bliss; a whole 4 days filled with a mix of bad accents, fake tans and electrode monitored female orgasms. 

Masters of Sex, like pretty much anything worth watching these days, is a TV series produced by an American Cable TV channel, in this case, Showtime. It stars Michael Sheen (Twilight’s nastiest vampire) and Lizzy Caplan (Bachelorette’s nastiest bridesmaid) as Dr William Masters and Mrs Virginia Johnson the first people to medically study the human sexual response. All translates from geeky-science-ese to “watch a lot of people masturbate and have orgasms while recording their neurological and cardiovascular activity to ascertain what makes people come”. Which in any language, makes for a very compelling little TV show. Even more compelling, Bill and Virginia, were real people, it all really happened.

The show could be loosely described as Mad Men mixed up with Game of Thrones; a costume drama set in the 1950’s, superbly acted, featuring complex interpersonal relationships, retina-scarring blood and guts, punctuated with people shagging every ten or so minutes. What’s not to love?

More interesting to me is the idea of studying orgasms; the actual science-y bit of the show is fascinating. They talk about Freud, they have a room full of fancy machines that trace out brain waves and heart rates, they practice on prostitutes and there is enough sexual tension between Lizzy & Michael to power a small village. And did I mention people shag a lot?

Juiced up on 1.21 gigawatts of my own sexual tension, I paced a ditch into the floorboards of my flat, I scrubbed and polished every flat surface, I cried and I laughed until finally, powered by the need to quell my frustration, I went to an Art Gallery.

One of the Seine facing clocks at Orsay

 

The Musée d’Orsay in Paris, a former railway station and home to most of the paintings ever painted by a French Impressionist, is the current home of an exhibition dedicated to the naked male form, Masculin/Masculin.  An entire floor of paintings, sculptures and photographs of naked men (nudes for the initiated) spanning the years from 1800 to the present day…and it is art…will someone take my money?!

The temporary exhibition traces the history of artistic expression of male nudes through various themes, the Hero (my personal favourite), The Athlete, Man in Nature, Man in Pain, Man as an Object of Desire, etc.  There was Lucien Freud, David, Rodin and a duo of French artists I’d never heard of called Pierre et Gilles.

Their work, mostly from the last ten years, reminded me of Renaissance Raphael  pe-jazzled with a bit of David La Chapelle. One image in particular features on the exhibition poster, and another, Vive La France, was my personal favourite of the whole exhibition. Naked or nude, their play on the red, white and blue of the tricolore and the cultural kaleidoscope of modern France was, to me anyway, beautiful.

Pierre et Gilles's Mercury is on the left

 

Pacing around the rooms, I teared up more than once (always happens), I learned about how Nazis used male nudes to propagate the notion of the perfect Aryan male, I learned about why Greeks and Romans fancied nude man marble more than they fancied nude women statues and I learned that a leather strap, dagger, leaf or drape will cover any manner of penis. I was perplexed to discover that, generally speaking, female nudes of any era give you full nipple and vagina action while the manly variety prefer to keep their modesty hidden behind a strategically placed scabbard.

I wonder how big of a scabbard would be required to hide a Kim Kardashian? Or simultaneously hide all the Kardashians?

Well this week, we learned that Kim don’t need no scabbard; she has a perfectly sized Kanye to cover up her lady bits while she rides her motorbike, without clothes (which is very irresponsible for a new mother who should be protecting herself with, at the very least, a crash helmet), as the latest Windows screensaver scrolls past behind her.

A week later, the world is still spinning as we collectively attempt to decipher the hidden significance of what will go down in history as the most appalling music video ever made. Are Kimye highlighting the plight of the endangered wild horse and bald eagle? Are the rolling clouds a comment on climate change? Did the tourism authority of Yosemite National Park sponsor the video? Are they both so much cleverer than the rest of us that we just can’t figure out the metaphysical subtext? Is she wearing SPF 30+? And what the actual f**k with the bouncing? We know you aren’t really in a national park Kimye; you don’t leave your house without a paparazzo or seven to document your every move.*

You might have read this far down the page and wondered, have two full days of TOWIE dulled the fabric of her mind to the point that she can write about a witty cable TV series, a properly official art exhibition and a couple that reality TV spewed onto our collective consciousness and still have a point?

Inconceivable! … well actually no, here it is.

 

Musée d'Orsay's main hall

 

I’ve spent a good part of this week questioning my own values concerning erotica and sexual imagery.  What is sexually explicit? What is erotic? What is demeaning to a man, or to a woman, and what is not? What distinguishes the male nude and the female nude? What is nude and what is naked? Who on this earth (or Mars or Venus) wants to see a Kardashian nude, naked or otherwise?

Masters of Sex is, quite simply, brilliant. Understanding the origins of an orgasm empowered our bra-burning sisters of the sexual revolution to ask for what they wanted, and get it. Without the groundbreaking work of Masters and Johnson, we may all still be faking it or feigning headaches so we can get back to watching the Pride and Prejudice in peace. While the sex is often graphic, I find the images of obstetric surgery far more uncomfortable to watch. More importantly, the sex has a point; the sex scenes are essential to the telling of the story. 

The Art Gallery filled with ten-foot tall paintings of naked men didn’t offend me at all; in fact it barely registered on my own imaginary Masters & Johnson electrograph. I’m not sure why, but I suspect that as soon as you throw a Roman God allegory at a painting, nakedness, nudeness and pornography evaporate. A golden helmet, a pair of winged boots or a sword disgorging a dragon renders a bare chest and butt cheeks invisible. Besides, I was actually inside the Musée d’Orsay, so I knew I was studiously observing artistic bottoms and penises, rather than ogling smutty bums and dicks.  

A naked woman sitting astride a motorbike while her male companion is dressed, who then overtly pouts at the camera as she auto-caresses her shoulders; the sheer obviousness of a naked KK is not in any way, shape or form erotic, it is not sexual, it is not titillating, it is misplaced, it is facile and it is silly. This week I’ve learned that I’m more offended by silly than I am by naked. I could care less about boobs, bums or bits; as the spectator, I ask only to be treated with respect and intelligence.

A final observation.

Gustave Courbet painted the Origin of the World in 1866. Today, it occupies the only place on an entire wall, centre-stage, as you enter one of the halls dedicated to his oeuvre on the ground floor at Orsay. The day I was there, so were half of Paris’s junior high schools. Adolescent males were pushing against each other, against me and against a couple of little old Americans, to cop an eye of the giant vagina wall. The painting has attracted a fair amount of criticism and equal amounts of praise; no one can truly decide if it is art or erotica. I’m not about to be that person, but I will assert that it hangs on display in France’s second most visited art museum not too far from Monet’s Waterlilies, Whistler’s Mother or Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. This image is not hidden behind a cigarette stained velvet curtain in Pigalle.

Among the final images displayed in the Masculin/Masculin exhibition is The Origin of War by Orlan.  As soon as I saw it, I recognised the reference to Courbet and laughed. This particular image, an intricately detailed study of a flaccid penis, was arguably the most explicit of all the sexual imagery I was faced with this week …and it made me laugh.

 

 

*It is worth noting that despite my endless days spent doing not much of anything; I have not resorted to watching KUWTK. TOWIE, at the very least, is British, so it is marginally more highbrow than anything fabricated in Los Angeles, at least as far as scripted reality goes…which is about as far as the distance between my right hand and a glass of Pinot Noir after 5pm on a Friday.

Hard Out Here – Lily Allen 2013

 

Note - tongue inside mouth 

 

About 2 months ago, I wrote Teenage Dream. Within a week, it became the most read post I’d ever written. I was complaining about something very close to my heart and over two thousand people read it, shared it, commented on it and even told their friends about it.

So now I’m going to talk about the same thing but hopefully with a little bit more positivity. Let’s all tell our friends, get them to read it and get them to talk about it. I think this is vitally important and everyone, both those with vaginas and those without, should stand up, look lively and start shaking their dimply thighs in the name of change.

 

 

I don’t see my life as harder than every single other earthling’s, far from it; I have some sort of financial security, I have 2 arms and 2 legs and the insides are holding together despite years and years of marination and fumigation.  But there is one thing about me that makes my life just a little bit more difficult than some of yours. It isn’t something I did, something I said or something I thought, in fact I have absolutely no control over it. It is the undeniable truth that I am a woman and being a woman is just a little bit more difficult, just a little bit messier, just a little bit more of an uphill battle than it often is for a man. 

Harder still, as I arm myself for battle, I am bereft of positive female role models who do stuff and say stuff and think stuff and put stuff out there into the public arena that make me proud of being blessed with a pair of (slightly uneven and again, dimply) boobs.

I am some sort of a feminist. It is hard to admit that out loud after having spent last weekend trundling across the United Kingdom to see Mr Darcy, not the most obvious of feminist icons and bonnet dramas are smugly viewed as the realm of the weak and submissive. But I really am; I think that women should be given the same rights to creative expression and freedom of speech as their men folk. We should have the same opportunities, the same pay and the same expectations. I am not talking about the heinous violent crimes against women that occur in countries far and wide or that fact that in some places, women are bought and sold as possessions; I can’t solve all the problems of the world in 1000 words and I don’t yet know enough about it all to try (but give me a month and I’ll have a go). I am talking about the fact that women just aren’t allowed to do the same stuff as men without copping a mouthful of abuse and judgement for being unladylike, for being premenstrual, or my personal favourite, for being (patronising hand on the shoulder and sad eyes) emotional.

When men slap each other about and jump in the air and cheer after playing a particularly robust game of rugby do the women of the world fold their arms, shake their head and stare collectively upon the semen carriers and sigh…you are all such boofheads? We don’t, and we don’t because we celebrate that the men are strong, that they just spent 80 minutes running into each other without snapping their spinal column and we admire them for it. We jump and cheer and shout and scream and our boobs might even wobble a bit as we do.

When men (read, most men in England), dress up in their mothers’ dresses, raid her make up case and make fun in pantomimes and Comic Relief TV specials or even make a very lucrative living out of it (Eddie Izzard, Barry Humphries), some might make a few sly remarks, some might even disapprove, but largely, they are afforded the freedom to express themselves as they wish and make a tonne of money in the process.

I’ve been having a bit of a rough trot of it lately, so to calm my nerves, I’ve been seeking refuge in the working person’s crèche that is YouTube. I’ve been watching this…about eight times a day…every day for two weeks...it soothes me. This video has gone viral, everyone’s talking about it, everyone’s writing about it and I wondered why. After wiping the drool off our chins, I chatted to some colleagues about Tom’s spectacular moves; we agreed that it is too rare to see a man really let go like this and have a proper, joyful, lips pushed out, dance. Tom Hiddleston, serious act-OR of stage and screen, idol to boys everywhere as the baddest brother of Asgard, is an out and proud dancer...and no one cares.

David Beckham, serious athlete, ten-foot tall in his undies, normal. Jay Z, serious musician, singing about a homosexual fashion designer, yawn. Jennifer Aniston and Jennifer Lawrence cut off their hair, front-page news on the Guardian. Lily Allen sings about wobbly boobs and cellulite, the Internet is broken hashtag WTF! 

Women are primed from birth to be attractive and make babies. Little girls play with dolls, dressing them up or putting them to bed while pretending to be tiny mothers. A woman’s clothing is designed to render her physically powerless (heels), accentuate our assets (bras) or serve no functional purpose at all (most items sold at Topshop). Men sing about us in songs as though we might be colourful objects to play with, to consume or to discard. If we are really lucky, one fine day, a man will get down on one knee and promise to love and protect us. He will ensure he earns enough money to buy us a roof and to feed our offspring. He’ll have nights out the boys and refer to us as “The Missus”. Before we get married, he’ll organise a Stag Do (strong, pointy, hard) while we’ll get a Hen Do (feeble, caged, pecky, ruled over by a Cock). We’ll feel wanted and special. He might get a bit on the side, we won’t necessarily mind because we are safe and warm and the welfare of our children is more important.

After all, if we choose to be something else, we’ll be marked as a Bitch.

I’ve been called a Bitch more times than I can count. I’ve been called odd, different, out of the box, aggressive, shouty, eccentric, maverick. I’ve even stared into the mirror and called myself most of these names through a veil of emotional tears.

This week, I finally felt as though someone had read my mind, had said what I wanted to say, had given me a voice. Importantly, she is married, she has two babies and she is mates with Karl Lagerfield, who famously doesn’t like rounded ladies. She has a brain and she and her song have made my life a little less shit...her and off course Loki thrusting his hips.

Women today need more Lily’s, more positivity, more variety, more intelligence, more boobs and fewer tits. We need more women celebrating women being whatever we want to be, however we want to be it. We need more discourse about Lily and her ilk and a little less time spent ogling or debating the cultural merits of anything that Terry Richardson has ejaculated onto the ether. We need to be each other’s strongest supporters rather than giving two flying f**ks in hell about the length of a Jennifer’s hair.

We need to be each other’s own role models because it is Hard Out Here for a Bitch.

Jane Says – Jane’s Addiction 1987

Stress does some really funny things to people. Stress can make you stark raving mad; dissolving your earthly layers as you dance naked in the streets and fling your excrement at walls. Stress can descend over your psyche as a stupor; the stupefied no longer doted with the capacity to process any emotion, any action or even inhalation, you stare vacantly into the space ahead of you and imagine the horizon opening like a gigantic mouth as it sucks you into the abyss beyond. Stress destroys the wellbeing of individuals, of their families, of their friends and in my case, of their livers. So you, and my liver, might be pleased to know that the world has righted itself and would appear to be spinning again just as it always had been. 

We are each unique and individual and special, so we each have our unique, individual and special ways of coping as stress, like the curtain of a winter flu, takes hold over your capacity to function as a normal person. Some run, some cook, some shop, some redecorate, some are violent and some reach for the bottom shelf of the DVD cabinet, the shelf known as the Bonnet Drama shelf. Curling into the warmth of my bed, my own little Island on top of La Butte, I stare into the English countryside that emanates from the screen above my toes and I slip into a state of meditative fixation.

The Gift Shop..and I own every single one.

 

Darcy at the Netherfield Ball; the eyes, that sly smirk, that jaw-framing collar, the britches, the chestnut hair that drapes across his almond eyes…yes, I’ve seen it a few times.

I can’t adequately describe the bubble of fuggy calm that envelops me as I stop being the girl in the metro whose face is being pushed into an armpit. The river of relief as the wretched girl who tripped, again, on her way up the grimy metro stairs, vanishes as Darcy dances. Well when he does that dance-ish^ type thing where he stands up on his toes and walks back and forth while holding Lizzie’s hand. 

A sort of surreal coming home..

 

I’ve gotten so good at living in my Regency Reality Reverser that I can conjure up Colin in my mind, no DVD required. I sit at my desk, staring into a computer screen, and he stares back at me. I wonder what he would say if ever he met me. Would I be truly accomplished? Would he think I was lovely, just as I am?* I know it is really sad, perhaps a bit depressing, but it is certainly doing less damage than necking a bottle of Shiraz every night…and I have no plans to buy a cat.

So one Saturday night, in a moment of sleep-deprived exasperation, with maybe a dash of libation, I decided to visit Chawton. I did more than just decide, I added together the points of every frequent flyer programme I could scrounge together, used them all up, booked it and paid for it.

F**k You Stress; Jane and I are taking back the night!

 

A village home in Chawton...Thatching is the new Slate

 

Chawton is the location of the home that Jane Austen lived in up until a few months before her death. The house and garden has more recently been transformed into a museum dedicated to her short, spinster-y life and her exceptional oeuvre. The trust recently fought, and won, a claim to have a ring once owned by Jane, but purchased by American Idol winning popstar Kelly Clarkson, remain in the UK.

Sometime in the summer I read that as one of the many activities across the UK to honour the 200 years of Pride and Prejudice, the house was hosting an exhibition of costumes used in the 1995 series featuring the one and only Mr Firth. Yes, the actual outfit worn by the actual Colin, when he played the actual Darcy, was actually only about 500 actual kilometres away from me! It seemed like the perfect reason for a weekend in the English countryside, the perfect excuse to visit a museum I had always wanted to visit and the perfect way to fill the second of two consecutive 3-day French weekends.

 

She was a Sagittarius...

 

I’ve written many times before about my love of all things Jane and all things Darcy. The watching and reading of bonnet dramas is often associated with single, lonely, cat-owning women as a sad and sorry way to escape the reality of their lives. I’m not so sure.

Generally speaking, I am not lonely, I am usually very busy dashing from here to there having aperos and cafes and dejs and weekends here there and everywhere. While I am single, I’m not entirely unhappy about that. In fact, I recently walked away from an event that might have made me double. Finally, I don’t own a cat, but I’ll avow, I am trying to escape.

Darcy and Elizabeth next to Jane's writing table.

 

I’d like to escape from the place where a man will use his backpack as a weapon of mass metro destruction as he forces himself into the last remaining space, to the place where a man will not only allow a lady to enter a train first, but hold her hand and consciously assist her to step inside. He’ll compliment her dress, rather than try to remove it. He wears coats and cravats and things that have been ironed, none of which is emblazoned with the monikers of Messrs Abercrombie or Lauren. He asks for leave to court her rather than get her drunk to give her anal and he knows how to kiss.

I’d like to escape to a place where food is not wrapped in paper and scoffed between conference calls, but presented by gloved footmen, arranged upon gleaming salvers and appreciated during hours at table in conversation with companions who have more to tell you than the sale on at H&M. I’d like to spend time appreciating the food that was thoughtfully prepared and actively participating in witty repartee rather than updating my Facebook status between bites. I’d also like to escape to a place where I could eat all that food without gaining a gram.

I’d like to escape to a place where there are letters; letters written with care and attention, written from the heart with purpose, written upon wax sealed paper rather than the constant vomit of pixelated drivel I am forced to digest at all hours of the day and night. I’d like to live in the place where spelling and grammar is not only commonplace, but also an expectation. I want to live in a place where communication is intentional and honest, not a tool of torture and indoctrination.

 

The place, the table, the genius..I have at least one.

 

I know they didn’t have flushing toilets, their women didn’t work outside the home, a trip meant visiting the next village and that I would not have expected to live past 40, but Jane did. Jane was the daughter of the village rector and she wrote. She didn’t live to see much of her success, but she was exceptional. So here it is written, with intention, and hopefully no spelling errors. I might not succeed, but I’ll try as hard as I bloody can to become truly accomplished, just like Jane.

My first step on this journey was to visit the museum. Now I know very well you should not touch anything, hell, I don’t even take photos in art galleries! But I need a bit of luck to get me going. I just could not resist the urge to put my hand in the place that has inspired me, that has kept me sane, that I’ve dreamed of since 1995.

 

My very own Excalibur.

 

Yes indeed, I stuck my hand in Darcy’s crotch, behind the flap, and prayed for the strength and resolve to put Bridget behind me and become Jane; a red-booted Jane who doesn’t need to escape into fictional worlds, because I intend to make it real for myself.

 

 

^We should ask Dancing with the Stars to do that dance routine instead of their ridiculous Game of Thones numbers

*Yes, borrowed that bit from the other, more contemporary Darcy