Blythe Danner, American Actress
Quickly, quickly, I need to note that Blythe Danner is not a twit; she's the mother of a twit, though, through no fault of her own. With my worldview of life as chaos, I consider twits to be born, not made. And here I refer to her daughter, Gwyneth Paltrow, whom I consider a wide spectrum twit and launcher of a deeply offensive self-serving blog called GOOP.com. GOOP has yoga/decorating/vegetarian/fashion/kabbalah advice for those with globs of money and zero self-awareness. I imagine nearly everyone on the planet can live their lives in some manageable fashion without either GOOP or Gwyneth, and will probably do so. I do, however, have the sinking feeling that both GOOP and Gwyneth will have some expensive ideas for The Holiday.
It's impossible for me to imagine Blythe launching anything like GOOP or, for that matter, giving birth to Gwyneth, although by all accounts she loves her dearly.
I went to school with Blythe, when I attended Bard College. She was several years ahead of me and looked only slightly like the picture above. I wish I could find a picture of the way she looked at Bard, but haven't been able to. Her dirty-blonde hair hung well below her butt in a ragged coiling dryish mass and she wore incredibly baggy jeans rolled up on her shins, coupled with a t-shirt and no make-up. Her skin always looked healthy but chapped. By appearances, she was a kick-ass bohemian and a hard-working one at that. For her senior project she appeared in a play, the name of which I never learned, but I do know that a bunch of agents came up from the city to see her. Even then she was enough of a celebrity that whenever she passed by, someone would nudge me in the ribs, and whisper, "That's Blythe Danner."
I was interested in observing Blythe because she was like a lot of the students I ran into at Bard: a busy, very young professional. Her dad, however, was a bank executive, and so, like me, she also belonged to a seeming minority at Bard: kids with parents who worked in offices. Most of the students I bumped into had parents who worked in daytime soap operas, were fortune-tellers, poets, or hard-core communists. If these parents had fights with their kids, it was usually because they felt their children didn't care enough about the proletariat or the Socialist Party.
But my point here is that Blythe labored like a stevedore and deserved every break she got. Her twit-daughter, on the other hand, seems to feel that those who aren't communing daily with their aromatherapist are, well, somehow lacking. In any role I've ever seen Blythe take on, she always displays a kind of intelligent grittiness that I've never, ever seen in Gwyneth. Somehow Blythe got a snootful of reality and her daughter never did.
Of course the times were different then. Hard-nosed realism was more prized; bohemia wasn't a life-style choice, it was something that just took form around certain people. We may be getting back to something akin to those times, a chancy place I call Edge City.
It produced one good actress, at least. And I've noticed something else.
Easy times never make much worth having.
It's impossible for me to imagine Blythe launching anything like GOOP or, for that matter, giving birth to Gwyneth, although by all accounts she loves her dearly.
I went to school with Blythe, when I attended Bard College. She was several years ahead of me and looked only slightly like the picture above. I wish I could find a picture of the way she looked at Bard, but haven't been able to. Her dirty-blonde hair hung well below her butt in a ragged coiling dryish mass and she wore incredibly baggy jeans rolled up on her shins, coupled with a t-shirt and no make-up. Her skin always looked healthy but chapped. By appearances, she was a kick-ass bohemian and a hard-working one at that. For her senior project she appeared in a play, the name of which I never learned, but I do know that a bunch of agents came up from the city to see her. Even then she was enough of a celebrity that whenever she passed by, someone would nudge me in the ribs, and whisper, "That's Blythe Danner."
I was interested in observing Blythe because she was like a lot of the students I ran into at Bard: a busy, very young professional. Her dad, however, was a bank executive, and so, like me, she also belonged to a seeming minority at Bard: kids with parents who worked in offices. Most of the students I bumped into had parents who worked in daytime soap operas, were fortune-tellers, poets, or hard-core communists. If these parents had fights with their kids, it was usually because they felt their children didn't care enough about the proletariat or the Socialist Party.
But my point here is that Blythe labored like a stevedore and deserved every break she got. Her twit-daughter, on the other hand, seems to feel that those who aren't communing daily with their aromatherapist are, well, somehow lacking. In any role I've ever seen Blythe take on, she always displays a kind of intelligent grittiness that I've never, ever seen in Gwyneth. Somehow Blythe got a snootful of reality and her daughter never did.
Of course the times were different then. Hard-nosed realism was more prized; bohemia wasn't a life-style choice, it was something that just took form around certain people. We may be getting back to something akin to those times, a chancy place I call Edge City.
It produced one good actress, at least. And I've noticed something else.
Easy times never make much worth having.
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