Monday, June 16, 2008
Even Brigitte Bardot's getting old
Ben Beagle
The aging, semi-hysterical retired reporter rides shotgun with the greatest station wagon driver of them all down the rocky road of life. Mondays and Wednesdays, steady as she goes.
Recent columns
Well, pal, what else are you gonna do but cry when you find out that Brigitte Bardot is in her 70s?
God save the mark, as we said, more frequently than you would believe, in Radford.
We didn't know what it meant, but it had a nice sound to it and saying it just made you feel better somehow. And it impressed the cheerleaders.
This was some time before old Brigitte, and we were deeply in love with June Allyson and Joan Fontaine and Ruth Roman and Jane Russell and others.
As I now understand it, we wouldn't have cottoned to Brigitte anyway.
As I read on the Internet recently:
"She embodied a natural yet innocent sexuality that was a precursor to the sexual liberation movement of the 1960s."
As far as I know, there was no sexual liberation in the 1940s and, if so, the principal would have gotten right on it.
Staying out of the obituaries
In the 1960s I was struggling with a mortgage and three kids, a dog that had seizures and a car that heated up dangerously every time we drove up Bent Mountain. I guess I missed that liberation movement.
But I didn't miss Brigitte going around with next-to-nothing on.
Because of the way time continues to wound us -- as in the case of Brigitte's longevity -- I have been known to say at the reading of the obits at breakfast that people I used to know are "dropping like flies."
Which gets me some of the best dirty looks the female gender is capable of -- and that's saying a lot if you know as much as I do about the female gender and dirty looks.
There is every reason to believe that I may be dirty-looked to my grave.
As in: "Ben Beagle was dirty-looked to his grave on Thursday. Arrangements are pending."
C'est la vie
None of the above is meant to suggest that Old Brigitte is about to go over to the Other Side, but that time is a thief and there comes a time when everybody has to at least try to understand Medicare. And deductibles and things like that.
And I have told my dog Max and his cousins, Cleo and Merlin, that Brigitte has been an animal rightist for a long time.
And I have come to understand that there are better ways of referring to human mortality in terms of "dropping like flies" but I still think that's a pretty good way of putting it.
At least, that's what we used to say really a whole lot in Radford.
