thirtysomething

last night i passed over the opportunity for a night of revelry downtown with shani and curled up on the futon to watch a double bill showing on tvo's saturday night at the movies. it has been many years since those saturday nights as a teenager, when i would stay up till two in the morning watching snam, fascinated not only by the movies (which none of my friends even knew existed) but also by elwy yost's interviews with aging stars. it might have been here that i first saw greer garson in mrs. miniver. last night i took a little nostalgia trip, popped myself a big bowl of popcorn, grabbed my pillow and blanket and after a hot bath settled in for a double bill of random harvest and mrs. miniver, and once again, i was fascinated by the woman who won an academy award in 1942 for playing the long-suffering, strong and plucky british matron of the latter title.

curious to find out more about greer garson, i started to google between screenings while yost conducted his interview. i have become quite the intrepid googler of all things classic hollywood, and i managed to turn up some interesting information about the woman who became famous for marrying the actor who played her son in mrs. miniver, a man 15 years her junior (shani! take note!).

not only did garson take a degree from the university of london in french and 18th-century literature (1926), harbouring dreams of becoming an academic, but she also worked for years at a british advertising agency before she was discovered by louis b. mayer in 1937; she was 33. she didn't appear in her first feature-length film till 1939 ( goodbye, mr. chips, at the age of 35) and she won her only academy award for the role of kay miniver in 1943 at the age of 39.


as evidenced by my morbid fascination with garson's thirtysomething career, i've been thinking a lot about my own age lately. many of those who know me laugh when i say that i feel old and that i've not done much with my life up until this point (what happened to that novel that i was going to write before i turned thirty? and that round the world trip i was going to take? and that recital at the met i was going to give?). in a year and a bit, the academic gods and the members of my committee willing, i'll be dr. smith -- that's something, i suppose, though staying in school has never really seemed all that much of an accomplishment when i compare it to things others i know have done. it's always felt a little too much like stasis.

i suppose what impacted me most the other night wasn't so much the scene where garson, as kay miniver fends off a wounded gun-wielding german pilot in her kitchen, or as paula ridgeway waltzes with the british prime minister though those are certainly thrilling. it was the realization that there actually is life after thirty, both professional and personal. in the muddle that is my romantic life (ack. what a mess!) i've always been comforted by the fact that katharine hepburn didn't even meet spencer tracy until she was 33 -- yes, yes, i know; she didn't fall in love with a raging alcoholic who demanded a lot of her emotional and physical energy until after she had forged a career for herself both in hollywood and on broadway, surmounting the challenges facing an independant and strong-minded woman in a masculinist culture, but allow me my silly and slightly delusional romantic fantasies! that little myth has helped me to live my life in a way that keeps me from being one of those scary women with a pith helmet and a man-sized butterfly net. last night, i realized that if i work hard at doing what i love, i can write my own definitions of success, including the age by which i think i should have achieved certain goals. i sat down today and took stock of what my life will look like a year from now. here's a list of a few things i'll (hopefully) have done:

*written the draft of a book manuscript (somehow, thinking of my dissertation like this makes it feel like something substantial; in one of her later roles, garson was famed for saying "if that's life, i'll take the library!")
*raced at the FISA World Masters Games
*travelled to Paris

the list doesn't add up to 7 academy award nominations and accolades from the queen mum and sir winston churchill for much-needed morale boosting during WWII, but somehow these few things make 30 seem a little less like failure.