Remember the Actress Sheree North?

I don't imagine many people do and that's a wicked shame.

She was a lovely, lithe dancer and actress in films of the 1950s and 60s and, after that, television.

The Amazing Bob and I were watching an episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show yesterday. It was the one where North is the new girlfriend of the irascible, grumpy Lou Grant (Ed Asner). He's just mad for her, to the point that he dons a bright yellow and black horizontal striped turtle neck with an emerald green velvet suit jacket. He thinks he's fabulously hip and now. Sheree affectionately allows, to Mary, that it's like dating a bumble bee.

Sheree's character, Charlene, is a lounge singer/piano player. She's warm, funny and has had an adventurous life -- sung with big bands, lived in Korea during the war and married a few times. All this is very exciting to Lou until Ted and Murray start needling him about dating a woman with so much *wink, wink* experience.

The focus was on how many men she'd potentially slept with versus all the cool shit she'd done and seen.

Story line summary at IMDb: 

Lou's prospective new girlfriend is a lounge singer with a shady past.

For god's sake! Would ANYone describe a man who'd been married a few times as 'having a shady past?' No. For a man to be described as such he would have had to be involved in something illegal -- gunrunning, drugs or, say, banking.

While watching the show with TAB, I got a big stab of the sad. I was propelled back in time to high school when the mothers of my male friends and boyfriends drew lines in the sand. You can date/be friends with that skank or you can have me as your mother but NOT both. Seriously. And these were all supposedly devout christian women. Obviously no one told them to research what it means to be a real, honest to jeebus, Christian.

Imagine this -- I was 16 and 17. Too damn young to have any kind of a shady past yet I'm verboten? Did I have a big glowing neon sign on my forehead that blinked Future Virginity Thief ? Somehow I missed that when I gazed in the mirror, in search of fresh zits.

Then there was the imbecile I dated just after moving to Boston. I'd graduated college, finished three seasons with a traveling carnival and was looking forward to just settling down and starting my new life. By settling down I do NOT mean finding a husband. Nope, nein. I wanted to find a job, paint, see some great bands, go to some fun parties and have a regular but def not serious date -- you know, do the things other 23 year olds do. Girls Just Wanna Have Fun and all.

 

Imbecile Bert was an MIT student. One who'd either listened closely to his christianist mother's warnings about predatory girls who were out after rich MIT boys or he was just flat out brimming with his own magnified self worth. Probably both.

After a few months he became scarce. I hunted him down to ask 'what up.'  He went through this molto earnest, somber bullshit about how he couldn't see me anymore because I wouldn't make a good...wait for it...this one's amazing... corporate wife. What the everlasting fuck? He seriously said this...TO ME of all people! Sure, since I was a wee bairn, I wanted to grow up to be a respectable corporate wife, a polite arm piece, a bearer of corporate offspring. Oh, if it's not too much of an inconvenience, I'd like a little time to do a bit of decoupage and crewelwork. //snark-o-rama!//

He brought up our income inequalities (mind you, he wasn't working yet but yes, when he did get a job, as an MIT grad, he'd make more in his first year than I'd make in the next ten) and suggested that I was after his earning potential. He seemed to have missed that I wasn't focused on big bucks -- that was probably lost in the glare of his megawatt ego.

I was completely blown away. I'd thought this guy would be a convenient, if dull, steady date for gallery openings and concerts. I figured he'd be a regular shag. He thought I was after a diamond ring. We were both so very hugely mistaken.

Is this still the attitude out there? That we can't have the big exciting, adventurous lives and, if we do, we're considered soiled? The more interesting we are, the less value we have?

I do NOT want my grands to grow up with this kind of snot twaddle!