Ready for my Close-up

The closer and closer we get to moving into our new house the more and more I've been desperately combing design websites trying to develop a decorative flair.  It is one of my greatest fears that I won't be able to do justice to the awesomeness of our new house with my penny pinching, utilitarian ways, that my aesthetic timidity and financial self-denial (self-loathing?) will rear their ugly heads, and that we'll live surrounded by particle board and hotel-grade art FOREVER.  So, on The Morah's recommendation, I checked out Design Sponge today and found that site's "Living In" feature that marries design, commerce, and a shocking number of my favorite movies.

People, you have no idea how far up my alley this little feature is.  But you're about to.

For example, do you know that my current haircut is loosely based on Jean Seberg's in Breathless, a movie I've seen multiple times but can never remember.  Why can't I remember it?  Because I'm too busy looking at it to listen to it or pay attention to it properly.  My mind can recreate each of Seberg's outfits, gestures, and mannerisms, but I can hardly ever remember a single thread of the plot unless the movie is playing immediately in front of me.  So, I literally gasped when I came across the "Living In: Breathless" edition.

No, I'm no Jean Seberg.  But neither are you, so we're even there.

And those of you who have known me since high school will remember my reliance on a stubborn center part long after it was considered fashionable.  Hopefully that, plus my current over-reliance on opaque tights regardless of the season will be judged softly when I plead this:  Love means never having to admit that you look nothing like Ali MacGraw and never, ever will.

And I never even got into Harvard.  Not once.

But the movie honored by Design Sponge that slapped me silly with a nostalgia that would have made Proust choke on his madelines was the 1995 gem Party Girl starring a then-unknown and -unirritating Parker Posey.

H-h-h-hello!

I had this poster, which I'm almost certain I stole from the video store where I worked, on my wall all through high school.  I would "rent" the movie at least once every two weeks from work and watch it after a late night Saturday shift.  I tried desperately to layer long-sleeved t-shirts as the poster suggested, but found that my limited elbow-bending capacity made the look too uncomfortable to endure.  I wondered what, exactly, falafel and baba ganoush were.  And I still to this day crib the line about something or another making "my unborn baby grow gills."  

Make no mistake, this is not a great film.  But it is about a beautiful and sassy young woman living in New York and pursuing a dream of becoming a fabulous - fabulous! - librarian, which fascinated and delighted my small-town smart-girl imagination.

So, thank you Design Sponge for helping me while away a pleasant morning "living in" some of my favorite movies.  I'd call it a time-waster, but it was a true pleasure poking through these archives and reliving my love of these films.  And now, unstylishly, uncinematically, I have some boxes to pack.