The Lowe-White Affair

I'm not one of those super-bitter divorced people. There are pictures of my ex-wife all over my house, for example. Part of the reason is that I made a conscious (if, at the time, very difficult) decision that I wouldn't want to raise my kids in a house where they felt like the union that had produced them was in any way shameful for them, or painful to me. Plus the precise scissor work that would be required to cut her out of all my pictures and eh... I've just never been crafty.

Lots of divorced people like to picture their exes bursting into flames, which I admit, I do. But when I do it, it's after she's already passed on, many many years from now, from something painless. Several years before me, but still, you know, the rest of it.

I've worked very hard to view my divorce in terms of the positive aspects, as in the freedoms and opportunities it afforded me and the burdens it's spared me. I'm no longer limited to eating only in chain restaurants when I go out to eat, for example. When I grill steak, I'm allowed to serve it to my children before it's been cooked well into the gray shoe-leather stage. And sex with single women in our marital bed, I mean, I can't even... let's just say I'm glad I waited.

One of my favorite things about no longer being married is that it was just today, totally by accident and on facebook, that it was pointed out to me that the Academy Awards are on this Sunday evening. I got so excited. Not because the Oscars are coming but just in the knowledge that I had been able to get this deep into the year, this close to the event, having made zero plans to account for them in my schedule in any remotely conceivable way.

The next thing I'm going to tell you is that when the awards are on, I will be in the stands at a professional ice-hockey game, but now I'm worried that I'm going to start sending the wrong message out there. Like somehow I've chosen ice hockey to butch it up in the most desperately overcompensating manner that I'm going to accidentally come across as misogynistic or homophobic. It isn't actually that I don't care about the Oscars. I'm a floundering, unlettered but compulsive consumer of films, outpaced only by my reflex swallowing of all film-related hype shot in my direction. And neither is it true that I'm not interested at all in who is wearing what dress of whatever sartorial, botanical or ornithological shape. I have friends who build up their whole year to the fashion parade and commentary thereon, all of which I await with shuddering anticipation. But what I really really really don't want to do is see any of it live. Not a second of it. Not one anti-enlightening red-carpet interview. Not a monologue joke. Not a dance number. Not a Very Special Thematic Presentation. Not a single shot of a person in the audience about to lose in her/his category. And definitely--most definitively--not a single uttered line of pre-scripted "dialogue" between presenters.* The moment Sarah Jessica Parker walks out there on the apparently randomly selected arm of Jake Gyllenhaal: inside, I die. Because I know they don't want to say what they're about to say. And I desperately do not want them to say it. Every time it's like hostages sent out of a building to read the demands of their captors.

It's not that I'm too manly for the Oscars. It's that I'm not man enough. I don't have the steel to weather the curling, withering cringe.

And the hockey tickets weren't even my idea. They were a gift. From my mommy.

And also, the book I just started reading? Jane Austen's Persuasion. If you need more non-macho bona fides, I'm going to have to bake you a souffle. Which I can also do.




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*Anything with Will Ferrell begrudgingly excepted. You have proven yourself, sir.