Penelope Cruz and Roads Untraveled
Today is the birthday of President James Monroe, Harper Lee (80 years old), Saddam Hussein (69 years old – a simple farm boy who went to law school and grew up to be a ruthless, homicidal dictator), the food pyramid (14 years old), and Maryland’s statehood. It is the anniversary of Mussolini’s execution, and Romano Prodi isn’t having an easy day either.
Penelope Cruz has much to be thankful for on her 32nd birthday, for she must be following the news of Katie Holmes’s weird, public betrothal to the Church of Scientology and must surely be sending her gratitude to whatever it was – good sense, a talkative gut, a wise parent perhaps – that kept her from embarking on Tom’s Cruise.
If you believe the industry talk, or the word of Cruise’s recently-parted publicist, the Katie Holmes pregnancy and childbirth were completely staged. The publicist lost her position not because of her performance or a dispute with Tom. It’s just that Tom has decided that his entire staff should be Scientologist, so he cleaned house and replaced several people.
Whatever happened, Miss Cruz is better off having no part in it. Her
birthday inspires me to reflect on relationships I am better off without, roads that one traveled for a time and veered away, as it happens, shortly before the road was consumed in a sinkhole. Perhaps you have one or two of those, worth remembering with a sigh of relief. It might be a lover, a vacation on Catalina you had to cancel and it rained anway, or an energy company that rejected your job application only to be consumed in an insider-trading scandal.
How many bullets have you dodged?
April 28th, 2006 at 6:57 pm
If I’m taking it as you mean it, what a unique way to say “count you blessings and don’t dwell on your sorrows.” It seems to be a sad fact of human nature than too many of us dwell on those few bullets that have hit home, when in fact most of them have missed. Another one of those “I wish I’d written that” moments.