Where is Grace Kelly, and Will She Let You Go?

Jimmy Stewart is my favorite actor, and probably my favorite iconic American. Whether I am watching him in You Can't Take It With You, Bend of the River or Rear Window, I know that I am getting an actor who gives the impression of being an authentic character and a regular guy. I view his George Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life as the prototype of the person I consistently fail to be, but my model nonetheless. I want to love and to care, and to be loved and be cared for.

But it's his costar Grace Kelly who is on my mind today, and who is all done up and profiled in May's Vanity Fair. She floats in Rear Window, and despite being a male and indifferent to my own clothing, I can't help but see her clothes as an object of affection. You are pulled in by the elegance. Then again, I understand the drift in several of Stewart's films, where women can turn you around, hold you back, change your focus or dream, or lead in you directions you had no intention of going in and with possible regrets.

Women often fight that idea, that if you get serious with them, then your trip around the world (literally and figuratively) becomes comically moot. (You never explain to them that half the adventure of foreign lands is meeting mysterious foreign women, or suddenly deciding to stay and becoming the total opposite of what made them want you in the first place).

Females who want you to love them will propose themes along the lines of the "power of two": that anything you can do, the two of you could do it better, and that she would joy in your journey. Of course if you pose the hypothetical-- is it okay to spend my last $200 on pitching my screenplay in Hollywood or should I use that for buying groceries for our starving three year old--well, pauses and reframings ensue. There is a vague sense of unpleasant closure when either sex faces the permanence of relationship, which is why so many of us eventually bust out to toward the mirage of freedom.

Every woman hopes to be your Grace Kelly, but very few really qualify, and even then you wonder if what you are getting is well worth all the infinite possibilities of everything that you might have to give up. Women might argue that they face the same sort of choice, but then they are never usually the ones arguing to leave you behind to see the world, or moving to New York City to start some new totally unnecessary social networking startup.

Let's not go on and upset the readers. Let's enjoy Grace, via Laura Jacobs in Vanity Fair, and leave our musings about women unsubstantiated.