From "Golden" to "Sparkling" Girls

It seems we are forgetting why the television and movie industries were created. Like attending a live football or baseball match, it brings people together to witness and share an experience that exhilarates, entertains and lifts us out of everyday banalities. From the aural shock of Chaucer's Tales to the visual theatrical plays of Shakespeare and to today's screen offerings, people have been either amused or appalled by this media throughout the ages. For sure, there is a wide variety that caters to all tastes, cultures and education.

Today, I read with sadness the passing of "Golden Girl" Blanche Devereaux, aka Rue McClanahan. This actress played a sexually liberated woman in a popular TV series who enjoyed life to the full despite her advancing years. A woman in her sixties openly flirtatious and promiscuous was quite a revelation in the '80s! It was raucous fun with well delivered dialogue. Blanche was teased by her fellow housemate when told "your life's an open blouse".

Now we have the "Sparkling Girls" of the noughties.  The four glamorous ladies from "Sex and the City" have just been attracting hordes of young ladies to their local cinemas for almost three hours of giggles and uncensored enjoyment. Most of the audience were able to identify with the lives of these New York ladies in some form or other, whether as a lover or whether as a mother - they were just staying alive! (Words reminiscent of another iconic New York movie from the seventies, Saturday Night Fever).

So it was in a crowded cinema last Friday, I joined in the collective, fun-loving psyche of a New York audience. How can you NOT enjoy a talented Liza Minelli doing a wriggling rendition of a Beyonce number or a star Karaoke performance of a liberating female song or outrageous gags that make us all reticently smile widely. Yes, call it ghastly (at least in fashion terms) and demeaning (if you really want to feel threatened by such frivolity) but please, all you critics out there, stop telling people not to go and see it! Do I detect envy at its huge popularity and success? The series and the movie has wrapped New York City in an enticing, transparent chiffon gown with bows and ribbons. It draws in the tourists much the same way as the guards at Buckingham Palace with their traditional red tunics and bearskins.

Like "Mamma Mia", this movie is pure entertainment, musically, visually and sentimentally.

Oh, and for those of us who live in this world of conspicuous consumption and western values, the moral of the story is to find a way to be content with what you have and not to keep looking for eternal "sparkle", even and especially when you have made your own dreams come true.