I'm Being Born and I Am Dying

Met with my book group tonight for a screening of Orlando (book written by Virginia Woolf, movie starring Tilda Swinton). It was great. Except for the massive technical difficulties at first, the night went off famously. I'd forgotten how great that movie was - how perfectly Tilda embodies the character, the emotion of Orlando. And how friggin tongue-in-cheek perfect the scene w/ Billy Zane was, full of mist, dark horse, dark hair. Oh, yeah, and how completely ridiculous the ending is with that gold lame angel. Where the hell did that come from?

The first time I watched Orlando was at Colby, after we set several pieces in a longer dance work to songs from the soundtrack. The ending was set to "Coming" - a haunting piece that talks about life, death, rebirth. Or, more eloquently, "life is not a whatnot and its none of your goddamn business."

After tonight's movie, we all decided we'd had such a good time we should do this again next Monday. If men can have Monday night football, we can have MadFemmePride movie night. After we're even going to go for some beers. I laughed a lot - even though I barely know most of the people. And I found myself looking forward to next week.

Funny, to think that if this night had been scheduled two weeks ago, I probably wouldn't have gone. Would have needed to get home. Watch How I Met Your Mother. Figure out what to do for dinner. Be a dutiful wife, er, um, girlfriend. And I wonder - to the point of sobbing myself to sleep - why I have no friends in town.

I'm actually looking forward to next week. We're going to watch "Another Kind of Marriage," an account of Vita Sackville West's lover before she met Virginia Woolf. (What can I say, gals in the groups are obsessed with V.W.) And, for previews, we're going to screen an 18-minute stag film that one of the gals bought at an estate sale. I warned everyone: soon we're going to get labelled as "those crazy lesbos that watch porn in the Harvard Science Buildings." You know what? I don't care.