I live in New York. I am a comedian, writer and actor. My day job is blogging for VH1.com. I write about the silly things celebrities and pop stars do, so you know...God's work.
You may have seen my writing on many other reputable websites (The Huffington Post, Hello Giggles, xojane.com, The Hairpin, Splitsider, The FW, etc.). I also write crazy blogs about Game of Thrones, Magneto and Jeff Goldblum.
I don't want to talk about anything with you except Star Trek Into Darkness.
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
…what the [feminist] movement is about, she says, is options. She is right, of course. At its best, that is exactly what the movement is about. But it just doesn’t work out that way. Because the hardest thing for us to accept is the right to those options. I hear myself saying those words: What this movement is about is options. I say it to friends who are frustrated, or housebound, or guilty, or child-laden, and what I am really thinking is, If you really got it together, the option you would choose is mine.
Nora Ephron, “On Never Having Been a Prom Queen”, Crazy Salad
I read this about a month ago and can’t stop thinking about this quote and how even though it’s about how women involved in feminism in 1970s couldn’t see eye to eye, it’s really this refrain that haunts us.
“If you really got it together, the option you would choose is mine.”
I have spent a great deal of my life discovering that my ambitions and fantasies - which I once thought of as totally unique - turn out to be cliches, so it was not a surprise to me to find out that there were other young women who came to New York with as bad a Dorothy Parker problem as I had. I wonder, though, whether any of that still goes on. Whatever illusions I managed to maintain about the Parker myth were given a good sharp smack several years ago…
And so there is the legend, and there is not much of it left. One no longer wants to be the only woman at the table. One does not want to spend nights with a group of people who believe that the smartly chosen rejoinder is what anything is about. One does not even want to be published in The New Yorker. But before one looked too hard at it, it was a lovely myth, and I have trouble giving it up. Most of all, I’m sorry it wasn’t true.
Nora Ephron, “Dorothy Parker”
I have been underlining so much from Crazy Salad in the last week, and so I look like a crazy woman on the subway, but this was the quote I really wanted to share with tumblr.
I’m ashamed to admit I was totally the victim and not the heroine of this recent episode in my life.
But in my defense, it’s really scary when the elevator you’re on keeps dropping and rising and dropping and rising and you can’t tell what floor you’re on or which poorly labeled button to push to reach the mechanic. Also, I never once actually asked, “Where are my tic tacs? Argh!” I just sarcastically tweeted it.
Nora Ephron Gave Me My Dreams | Huffington Post
I expanded upon my last post for HuffPo and now I think I’ve grieved enough. I’ll post a cat wearing a hat next.
I’m taking the news of Nora Ephron’s passing unusually hard.
All I can think about is how I wish I could thank her. She wrote what I believe to be the Holy Trinity of late 20th Century Romantic Comedies (When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail).
In addition to starring Meg Ryan and fetishizing New York City, all three films present a dream of love that I’ve always considered to be the sweetest of dreams.
In Nora Ephron’s universe, marriage was never a goal. Sex was never used to bring a career woman down. Romance was not a way for a woman to transform herself from something schlubby into something valuable. Her heroines were never marked for their looks and her heroes were never marked for their wealth. In Nora Ephron’s films, love is just the best kind of friendship. It’s about recognizing the value of another person’s thoughts, ideas, jokes and dreams and having them recognize yours in turn.
True love is two people who appreciate one another.
I can’t think of another writer who scribes it as such, and who writes about it with such wit, warmth and hope. She was always idealistic, but never completely unrealistic, which made the dreams she spun in her films all the more wonderful.
I’m so so so sad that we’ve lost such a powerful and brilliant woman, but thankful that she gave so many young men and women so many dreams.
My class went to college in the era when you got a masters degrees in teaching because it was “something to fall back on” in the worst case scenario, the worst case scenario being that no one married you and you actually had to go to work. As this same classmate said at our reunion, “Our education was a dress rehearsal for a life we never led.” Isn’t that the saddest line? We weren’t meant to have futures, we were meant to marry them. We weren’t’ meant to have politics, or careers that mattered, or opinions, or lives; we were meant to marry them. If you wanted to be an architect, you married an architect.
….What I’m saying is, don’t delude yourself that the powerful cultural values that wrecked the lives of so many of my classmates have vanished from the earth. Don’t let the New York Times article about the brilliant success of Wellesley graduates in the business world fool you — there’s still a glass ceiling. Don’t let the number of women in the work force trick you — there are still lots of magazines devoted almost exclusively to making perfect casseroles and turning various things into tents.
Don’t underestimate how much antagonism there is toward women and how many people wish we could turn the clock back. One of the things people always say to you if you get upset is, don’t take it personally, but listen hard to what’s going on and, please, I beg you, take it personally. Understand: every attack on Hillary Clinton for not knowing her place is an attack on you. Underneath almost all those attacks are the words: get back, get back to where you once belonged. When Elizabeth Dole pretends that she isn’t serious about her career, that is an attack on you. The acquittal of O.J. Simpson is an attack on you. Any move to limit abortion rights is an attack on you — whether or not you believe in abortion. The fact that Clarence Thomas is sitting on the Supreme Court today is an attack on you.
Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim. Because you don’t have the alibi my class had — this is one of the great achievements and mixed blessings you inherit: unlike us, you can’t say nobody told you there were other options. Your education is a dress rehearsal for a life that is yours to lead. Twenty-five years from now, you won’t have as easy a time making excuses as my class did. You won’t be able to blame the deans, or the culture, or anyone else: you will have no one to blame but yourselves. Whoa.
So what are you going to do? This is the season when a clutch of successful women — who have it all — give speeches to women like you and say, to be perfectly honest, you can’t have it all. Maybe young women don’t wonder whether they can have it all any longer, but in case of you are wondering, of course you can have it all. What are you going to do? Everything, is my guess. It will be a little messy, but embrace the mess. It will be complicated, but rejoice in the complications. It will not be anything like what you think it will be like, but surprises are good for you. And don’t be frightened: you can always change your mind. I know: I’ve had four careers and three husbands.
Writing in New York that same year, Ephron described her first year in the city, cycling through apartments and roommates and jobs. She had wanted to return to New York since she’d left as a 5-year-old. “I thought it was going to be the most exciting, magical, fraught-with-possibility place that you could ever live in; a place where if you really wanted something, you might be able to get it; a place where I’d be surrounded by people I was dying to be with. And I turned out to be right.” She wasn’t just good at endings, she was good at it all.
Nora Ephron, 1941-2012 (via meredithbklyn)
Right now, I’m tipsy (yes! World!) from a great night of cheap food and good drink with brilliant friends and (soon-to-be) famous comedians. Until recently, there were few women who gave me concrete hope that a good girl with a sharp brain could find joy and love and happiness in New York. Those women were Nora Ephron, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler.
Only Nora indulged the dream as reality. Only Nora came first.
Nora was a genius. Nora was an inspiration.
Nora Ephron is one of the people I owe my life’s few happinesses to.
Anyone who enjoys cheap wine can be my friend.
New York Magazine: What's your drink?
Nora Ephron: A glass of California red, preferably something that tastes like cherries. Or a kir with ice on the side. Great wine is wasted on me.
