Movie Star Fantasies

Today is my wedding anniversary. I decided, in its honor, to post a more formal piece I wrote when my husband and I were first engaged…

Life has a funny way of weaving itself together, with mirrored ribbons reflecting themes over and over again, flashing mirages of past experiences, unexpected reminders of things long gone.

Take for example my love. My partner. My fiancé.

He and I paralleled each other for a long time before our paths crossed. We lived in the same part of the same city for five years. We attended the same college on similar schedules for four years. But we didn’t meet until last spring, at a friend’s get together.

After spending a few months with him, I realized that he looked very familiar. I searched my mind to try and place him, to try and remember how I knew his face. I thought back to my childhood and sifted through my memories.

I remembered going to Sun Video Rental with my father when I was a kid. My parents didn’t have a television and we didn’t go to theatres. Both were outlawed in our religious community. But, once a year, when my mother needed some quiet and space to clean and cook for the holiday of Passover, my dad would take out a few movies from Sun Video Rental on Murray Avenue. He would bring one of the children with him to choose what we would see. My brothers and sisters would fight over this treat, to get to spend time with him, to get to go to this normally forbidden place. I was often chosen.

We called my father “Tatte”, Yiddish for father. He was a short dark man, with a close beard, that already then, in my childhood memory, was more grey then black. His smooth and shiny forehead extended to his black velvet fedora, which he wore over a large black yarmulke. His glasses were a thick barrier between you and his bottomless eyes. He always wore a dark suit and a white shirt.

At Sun Video Rental, he would pull out a film from the shelf, furrow his brow and read the back. I’d look longingly at the forbidden bright pinks and purples of the Disney movie covers while he pondered – ‘Abbot and Costello’ or ‘Shipwrecked’?

Because we saw movies so infrequently, when we were allowed to watch them, we were completely sucked in to the experience. We would gather on the carpet in front of the VCR in the attic and stare hypnotized by the screen, rewinding and rewatching the stories again and again, from breakfast till bath time.

It was in the world of movies, that I met my first love. His name was Davie Balfour.
Davie was the main character in ‘Kidnapped’, a movie we rented when I was eight. He was Scottish, blond, with a somber, determined face. He ran over the highlands escaping the bad guys. He was beautiful and I loved him.

After the movie was returned, I lay in bed at night, fantasizing that there would suddenly be a knock on the front door. My mother would open it, and it would by Davie, in a black fedora hat and a dark suit. My mother would welcome him in, and he would tell my family that he was actually Jewish, and that after being a famous actor, he had decided to become religious, and now he had come to our home, because he wanted to marry me.

Somehow, in my dreamy vision of Davie in my living room, this made sense. In reality, improbably Jewish movie star Davie could never go about marrying me this way. In our community, marriages are arranged in an elaborate system of parental investigation followed by staged meetings between the couple, leading to a proposal, and a marriage, a few weeks later.

That daydream I had as a young girl was my first act of revolution, at least in my imagination, bending the rules to get what I wanted.

As I entered my teens, I bent the rules more often, in reality as well as my thoughts. This was not tolerated. My adolescent rebellion was responded to with swift exclusion and retribution. After centuries of persecution, the fear of the outsider is so great in the religious Jewish community, they respond to mutation with brutal anti-bodies that turn on their own flesh, and attack.

In the years that followed, I wandered down the path Scottish movie star Davie called me from, until I found myself here, an independent, assimilated, secular woman universes away from the world I was raised in.

One evening remembering that faint girlish dream of Davie, the love of my childhood fantasies, I googled the movie “Kidnapped”, on my laptop

There, on the screen was James MacArthur, the Davie of my childhood dreams. His square jaw, blue eyes and thick blonde curls identical to those of my love, my fiancé.

So the man I began with returns as the man I will end with, a circular dénouement. The chimera of the first rule breaking of my mind has come knocking on my door, to claim me and to be my love.