I can't! I'm Sandra Dee!

One of my favorite bloggers is Anne:Straight from the Hip, out in Los Angeles. I got to know her work when she was based here in Baltimore, but she competely switched coasts a couple of years ago and wound up out in the land of "palm trees, swimming pools and movie stars." Our loss is Los Angeles's gain, and I wish her all the best out there.



I was thinking of writing about the weather today, because Anne writes that the three-day heat wave out there is ending, and we are just getting ready for one here! Whereas last week we had shivering high temperatures in the 50s, by this Sunday we will be sweltering in the upper 80s. And from the 80s, it's just a short hop to the 90s, and then you have chaos in the streets and vital services break down. It's all part of the great mystery of life: all winter long, I hear the keening and the chafing, the yearning for warmth. So then as as soon as Nature sends heat, people break their necks to turn on the air conditioning. It's like when you go to the diner, because all day you've been hankering for spaghetti 'n' meatballs, and then you sit down and order the breakfast special (two eggs, two pancakes, bacon and sausage.)



Hungry now?



My first big boyhood crush was on Sandra Dee, who married Bobby Darin just to make me feel bad I mean because she loved him so much. They were the "it" couple of the early 60s, until Darin's ego became so overgrown that it was given its own zip code, leaving no room for the model/actress/goddess born Alexandra Cymboliak Zuck in Bayonne. New Jersey in 1942. Of course, these boyhood crushes don't last forever, but it was still sad about a dozen years ago when a friend moved to LA and reported that the broken-down, messed-up woman who lived in the next apartment "used to be an actress or something" and her name was "like Sandra Dee or something."



Or something. She was something, for sure! Such a vision, a symbol of beauty and purity that the Broadway show and movie teased her image with "Look At Me, I'm Sandra Dee," the song about the plastic "lousy-with-virgini-teeeeeeeeeeeee" ethos to which so many subscribed in the early 60s, only to have their subscriptions lapse by the end of the decade. But our friend said Sandra borrowed her blender to make mai-tais, returned the blender - broken, backed her battered Rolls-Royce into the dumpster, and looked a fright.



Which is why I stay here in B'more, where my memories reside. The truth of what happened to all of our crushes is way too sad to see bouncing off dumpsters and slugging down poorly-mixed mai-tais.