Embracing the light

“Every year we look forward to the longest day but we never do anything to celebrate it.” That’s a paraphrase from The Great Gatsby (sorry, don’t have my copy next to me right now). Since it is the solstice, I do ask that everyone light a candle and curse the darkness. No one will, but there is a poetry to the thought.

Anyway, enough with the literary references and on to the most pressing issue of the day: Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes got engaged over the weekend. The fact that they are engaged doesn’t bother me. It might bother Chris Klein, though at the end of the day saying you lost a girl to Tom Cruise probably isn’t that bad of a deal. What pisses me off is how he did it. He proposed to her at the top of the Eiffel Tower. Which is sweet and romantic and has been my plan for the past seven years. For a long time now I’ve harbored this secret desire that when I finally meet the right girl and everything is perfect we’d vacation in Paris and on one beautiful night I’d ask her to marry me and we would have the best engagement story ever. Guess what? Now if I did that everyone would say, “That’s neat. Isn’t that what Tom Cruise did?” So thanks Tom, seven years of planning down the drain. Asshole.

I feel slightly better that he had water sprayed in his face at a movie premiere by a group of British comedians. I love the fact that he was righteously indignant about the entire affair because who would allow us puny mortals to play a prank on the almighty Tom Cruise. In fact, the guys were arrested for it because apparently spraying water on a movie star is a felony or something. Look, if you want to be famous and go on television and make a fool out of yourself and become the biggest news story of the summer you have to expect that at some point the joke is going to be on you. Get over it.

I did catch a brief glimpse of the interview with the other story of the summer: the runaway bride. She still looks… well, she still looks disturbing. Like her eyelids are superglued open or something. She has a book and a movie deal, which makes me feel even worse that my pitches haven’t been picked up. I mean, what is her story “I ran off, hung out in Vegas, no one knew where I was and I made up a story that I was kidnapped.” That’s a great story of human courage and inspiring acts. If her fiancé hasn’t taken off yet he definitely is the front runner for this year’s Darwin award.

(One side note tonight. Check out www.suntimes.com this week. They are doing a week long celebration of the greatest Chicago movie ever made “The Blues Brothers”, in honor of the movie’s twenty fifth anniversary. First of all, it is the best movie to ever give a sense of what type of town Chicago is, a lot may have changed over the years but that is definitely the town I grew up in. Second of all, they are actually going to the sights where the movie was filmed and seeing what is still standing. Check it out.)