Unless you've been under a rock for the last 48 hours, you'll know that yesterday, the hugely talented Nora Ephron died. (Incidentally, I really shouldn't have to link that name. Everyone should know who she is. But just in case you need a reminder... there it is.)
The internet has been full of tributes for this amazing woman - everyone from Meryl Streep to Meg Ryan to Mindy Kaling has praised not only her talent, but also the fact that she was a wonderful person and friend to many. Many people I know have, via Facebook, twitter, their own blogs paid tribute to a woman they have never met, but who somehow touched their lives. It speaks volumes that so many people feel the need to do this.
Personally, my admiration for her Nora Ephron's talents began as an eighteen year old, when I first saw "When Harry Met Sally". It is a movie that I can watch over, and over, and over... and every time I learn something new. I was (and still am) a hopeless romantic, but also an independent, curious, funny, quirky, intelligent young woman, who always had the feeling of being out-of-place with my peers. Somehow Nora made me feel ok with that, even when those around me belittled me for my unwillingness to conform to their notions of how I "should" be. My love affair with her portrayal of interesting women I could relate to continued with "Sleepless in Seattle", her many essays and contributions to The New Yorker and of course, the now quite dated, but still brilliant "You've Got Mail".
I openly credit Nora Ephron with being a major factor in my on-going love affair with New York City. It is a central character in three of her films and boy, did she know how to show it off at it's best.
From one of the earliest scenes in "When Harry Met Sally", when Sally drops Harry off at the Washington Square Arch, to the final scene in "You've Got Mail", when Joe meets Kathleen at the 91st St Garden in Riverside Park; Nora showed her New York City - a place of hopes, dreams, creativity and love - and one with which I fell headlong into love.
My first trip to New York City, in 1995, was a pilgrimage to all the places Nora had introduced me to on the big screen. Washington Square Park, The Empire State Building, Katz's Deli... all were visited and various pieces of movie dialogue were repeated over in my head as I did a little inner jig of joy that I was in such a city. It was a long way from the boring suburbia of sleepy little Adelaide, I can tell you.
Probably my most vivid memory was of my first visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Nowadays I can spend hours scouring every last inch of the place, but back then, in all honesty, I had one sole purpose for going there. I wanted to go to the Sackler Wing, walk alongside the Temple of Dendur and re-enact the scene from WHMS where Harry informs Sally that "for the rest of the day, we are going to talk like this... waiter there is too much pepper on my paprikash, but I would be proud to partake of your pecan piiiieeee". Since I was travelling solo, this scene was re-enacted solely in my head, but I'm sure the facial expressions I was pulling and the fact I was shifting positions to play both the Harry AND Sally roles, was a dead giveaway to my fellow museum-goers.
I was still a little green in those days, so wasn't game enough to go to Katz's Deli and re-enact the fake orgasm scene. I did however, spend a joyful few hours at the Shakespeare & Co bookstore on 79th and Broadway, where I kept looking to see if any cute men were "staring at me in Personal Growth". (Sadly, that didn't happen)
One of the many people to pay tribute to Nora Ephron in the last couple of days was her friend, Ariel Levy. She wrote:
"One of the reasons you can watch "Sleepless in Seattle" or "When Harry Met Sally" over and over again is because not only are they funny, they are profoundly reassuring. Ephron's voice was funny, frank, self-effacing but never self-pitying, and utterly intimate."
I find it endlessly reassuring to sit down for a couple of hours and watch either of those films (or "You've Got Mail"). I know exactly what's going to be said, but each time I hear the words, or see a familiar location pop up on the screen, I am at once calmed, reassured, energised and filled with joy that I have gone through situations similar to these characters and moreover, been to the places they're at. As Meg Ryan, the heroine of all three of those films wrote:
"We pictured ourselves inside her dreams and they became ours. All wisdom, wit and sparkle lights, what a treat she was, what a bless. I marvel again and again, what a life... to have created a simple happiness in people, to have added to the sum of delight in the world."
Last year, when I celebrated my fortieth birthday in NYC, we had lunch at the Loeb Boathouse. My birthday companions mostly remembered it from an episode of Sex & The City, but I remember it from that hilarious scene in WHMS where, upon hearing of Sally's breakup with Joe, Marie pulls out a card index box and starts leafing through to find a suitable replacement boyfriend for her. "He's married? [folds corner of the card and puts it back] Hmmmm..."
That day, I pictured myself in that scene. My friends who would rack their brains and contact lists to attempt to find me a man. How it would play out, as we sat at our table overlooking the lake. And it filled me with delight.
As I've moved more and more towards writing the last few years, I've looked to Nora Ephron's work as a standard to which I aspire. Her writing was natural, intelligent, funny and observant and her characters were interesting, well rounded and just quirky enough to identify with. They also (primarily) had one over-riding quality which I think the world sorely needs right now... they were hopeful. Hopeful that the world could be made better. Hopeful that love was out there. Hopeful that the good guy (or girl) would win out in the end. Some people might think this is a terribly naive way of viewing the world, but I think this is the way the world needs to become. We all need to be more curious, more compassionate and more open to love.
I've always thought that I'd like my life to mirror that of a Nora Ephron character. Or a combination of characters. But in some ways I think I already do, and that's not so much because I try to be like a particular character, but because Nora wrote them as real people. People like us. We all know a Sally, or a Marie or a Harry or a Joe (F-O-X). We all are one of them.
That was her gift, and what an amazing one it was.
So thank you, Nora Ephron. Thank you for gifting the world with your work. This small-town girl, for one, is truly grateful. If it wasn't for you, I might still be there.
x
No comments:
Post a Comment