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Tuesday, July 18, 2006

I must have finally grown up
Posted by Jill | 11:49 AM
Being a young adult in the dating world wasn't easy for a short, pudgy Jewish girl from New Jersey. By the time I was fifteen, I had already had a list a mile long of girls I went to school with that I wish I looked like. By the time I was 24, I knew I wasn't on the A-list and would never be. Why not? Because in 1979, the Standard of Ultimate Beauty, the Ultimate Other, the Ultimate Shiksa, was Christie Brinkley.

Christie Brinkley was everything I wasn't. She was the archetypal California Girl of song -- tall, thin, pert little nose, great teeth, great body, pretty face, blond, outdoorsy, tan, and a model. She was the most intimidating creature I'd ever seen. Oh sure, there was Jean Shrimpton in the 1960's, who was the most spectacularly beautiful creature on earth, and later on there was Twiggy, but those models were like space aliens dropped among us to show us clothes we'd never be able to wear. What made Christie Brinkley different is that she smiled. She looked accessible. She looked like a real girl, albeit one a hell of a lot more attractive than most of us. So what made her intimidating? She wasn't a short, pudgy Jewish girl from Jersey with sloped shoulders that couldn't even keep a bra strap up.

I remember when Christie Brinkley was married to Billy Joel and became pregnant, we used to joke about how we hoped the baby had his looks and her brains. We got half our wish, and that was the beginning of the Ordinary Girls' Revenge on Christie Brinkley.

This morning after I clicked the input button on the TV remote to return to broadcast TV from a DVR recording of Rodney Yee's Power Yota, I ran across a tawdry tale on the former news show Today. It seems that Christie Brinkley's husband (her third or fourth, I can't remember) has been slipping the sausage to a nineteen-year-old since before said girl even graduated from high school. This walking embodiment of the dumbass nature of the male midlife crisis is married to Christie Fucking Brinkley, and he's out boffing a nineteen-year-old, buying her cars and other gifts. Now, said bimbette is singing like a canary, playing the naive little girl for the camera and getting ready to sue.

And interestingly, this nineteen-year-old bimbette is being referred to in the press as a "naïve girl" -- when a 14-year-old Iraqi girl who was raped and murdered by American soldiers is referred to as a "young woman."

I guess that as far as the press is concerned, if you're American and you fuck a married man, you're naïve -- but if you're an Iraqi, at home, minding your own business, you asked for it.

Now one could say that if Christie Brinkley, who still looks amazing at 52, can't hang onto a guy, what on earth does that say for the rest of us? Or is it more a question of the kind of guys someone who looks like Christie Brinkley attracts?

I have to admit, I watched this trainwreck of a segment, appalled that Today led into the 8:00 hour with a story like this while 300 people are dead in Indonesia from a tsunami, a suicide bomber detonated explosives into a crowd of laborers in southern Iraq, killing at least 53 people, and Congress is getting ready to pour more gasoline on the fire in the Middle East by coming up with a resolution of blanket support for Israel in this mess.

But a strange thing happened. Here was the blonde, slim, perfect nemesis of my twenties, caught up in as ugly and sordid a marital scandal as we've seen recently -- and I couldn't even feel any schädenfreude. I guess no matter how beautiful we were or weren't in our youth, no matter how good we may or may not still look, once we women hit 50, the playing field feels a whole lot more level than it did in the old days. I'm not sure what's worse; knowing that your husband is not only a cheat but also a sleazebag; or having your family drama played out in the tabloids and on television.

I actually felt sorry for her. I guess I'm really a grown-up now.
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