It was a perfect rainy, Sunday afternoon. Alexis, my eldest daughter, and I met my sister J.J. at the theatre to indulge in a 'chick flick', Sex in the City.
Fashionistas beware, this movie is filled with dripping estrogen and men who left the testosterone at the door of political correctness. This is a flick about chicks who prance it, dance it, sing it and live it. This is a story about women who fearlessly talk about everything and anything, especially if it is 'taboo'.
I was never a follower of the series. This movie changed all that.
It's clever. It's witty. It's pure indulgence.
It's about the fashion. The syles. The trendy places. The over-the-top spending. The label-flaunting, the packaging.
Ahhh, the packaging.
Sex in the City packages sex in a pair of Mahnolo Blahnik sky-high heels with every woman's dream of a walk in closet with glass doors and a plush rug soft enough to make love on.... did I say love?
Because in the end, like the Cinderella story Carrie Bradshaw, the main character reads to her girlfriend's daughter, Sex in the City, is all about love, and finding happy endings that lead to new beginnings.
The movie is simple and clever. Very clever all rolled up in a beautiful white fur, or stuffed into a Gucci bag sitting on the credenza.
What's most clever about it, however, is not the fashion, the stunning designs, the colours, the clever repartee.
It's about the friendships. Four women who met twenty years before who have lived the high life, and the sometimes dry life, of New York City and managed to have their friendship survive, in spite of stupid things they've done to each other, stupid things they done with each other, and stupid things they've done because of each other and because of men.
As I sat beside my daughter with my sister on the other side of her, I thought about friendship and family, of ties that bind and ties that can never be broken.
In the end, I admired their friendship but wondered about the families of these women on the screen. Who were their mothers, fathers, siblings? Where were they when Carrie almost got married. Two hundred and fifty people turned up, but never the mention of a family. Where were they when Charlotte gave birth? Oh look, there's Miranda's nanny when her marriage breaks up, but where's her mother? Who does she call when the baby's sick?
In my life, my friendships are vital. They knit together my life independent of my family. They tell the story of my growing years, my struggling times, my sorrowful tears.
But family? Family is always there. Family doesn't read the designer labels or wear sky-high heels. Family can be counted on, to tell me when my heels get too high for my britches, to call me on my fashion faux pas, to dress me down when I'm out of line, and to deck me out when I'm off kilter.
Family doesn't care about what I'm wearing. Family cares only that I carry the colours of our lives woven together with a loose enough weave that I can knit a couple of friends in here, purl a few in there.
Family is my coat of many colours, my coat of arms.
I've got friends. I love them dearly. Sitting in a darkened theatre, my daughter between my sister and me, I was grateful for the joy of family, the blessed circle of love which can never be broken - no matter how far I roam, or how distant we become.
Friends will marry, move away. Friends will break-up and with them take the relationship to other places.
But family will never disappear. I was born into my family. I can never let it go.
It was a perfect rainy Sunday afternoon. A movie about friends viewed from the safety of the circle of my family.
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