I love the West Wing. The TV show, not the seat of power of the most powerful nation on earth. Bravo runs reruns of WW and I DVR them. I love to watch a couple at a time each afternoon - made easier by being able to blast past those pesky commercials. The writing, especially in the earlier seasons when it was being written by whom we know now was a coked up Aaron Sorkin, is amazing. Sometimes, a reference in the show sends me to Google to find out what the heck they're talking about, and I love that. For me, the sign of a well written anything is something that challenges you to expand your horizons, makes you pull out your dictionary or Google in order to fully understand whatever you've just experienced.
But I digress.
The thing that is most appealing to me about WW is the romantic notion that that's how things really are when you work there. You know, impossibly beautiful people who are impossibly smart, witty, and well spoken. A President who is not only erudite but endowed with the wisdom of Solomon. Seemingly insurmountable world problems are miraculously solved in one, maybe two, episodes. Ah, the unreal world. I hope the Obama West Wing is smart, witty, well spoken, erudite, and wise, and it only takes them a couple of episodes to get this scary economy under control.
So what does this column have to do with relationships? Well, you might remember a previous column in which I bemoaned the fact that a lot of people live The Soap Opera Life, meaning they think love is all about soft focus employment and sex. And I still thought that behind a vaseline smeared lens was the wrong way to go about a relationship because life should be looked at under bright lights. All that goo could obscure life's sharp edges and give you a nasty cut.
But then, our new President and his wife danced in front of a zillion people and looked as comfortable with each other as if they were dancing in the kitchen of their home, and I had a change of heart. They had a soft focus bubble around them, but inside the bubble there was a clarity between them that put their feelings for each other into sharp focus. They looked like a young couple in love, not a couple whose only tie was political. And it made me hope that that ability to be clear with each other during soft focus moments will give our new President the power to be razor sharp when he needs to be.
And now, I'm going to put this column to bed and go find a soft focus moment of my own.
