Once, getting-to-know-you came first

The Boston Herald

BEVERLY BECKHAM

They told me I wouldn't like the movie. Too corny, the 21-year-old said. Too predictable, the 15-year-old added.

They had been disappointed so I assumed I would be, too. But I wasn't. I loved "Forever Young." It was a trip into yesterday, a love story, not a sex story, corny and predictable, yes, but who cares? It was tender instead of lewd. Imagine that in the 1990s!

Prior to the movie, I'd overheard a conversation. A girl, no more than 20, home from college for Christmas, was telling some friends about a guy she'd picked up at a New Year's Eve party. They were strangers who met around 11 p.m. and were bed partners a few hours later.

The girl was matter-of-factly relating the specifics of this encounter at a restaurant to - I assume - a group of her friends. She could have been sharing a recipe, a joke, a stain removal tip, she did it so casually. She wasn't hiding a thing. Not one of her friends acted shocked or judgemental at all. This was just something that happened. "I can't even remember his name," she told them, and laughed.

Her friends laughed, too.

In the movie, the leading man and woman were in love. Remember in love? Getting to know you, getting to know all about you? Going to a movie. Holding hands. Getting something to eat. Realizing - over a hamburger and fries - that you were having a good time, that this person you were with was funny and sweet, and kind of nice-looking, too?

Remember - before bucket seats and seat belts - sidling over close to him, but not too close, not in the middle but not stuck to the door, either. Wondering if he would kiss you and what you would do if he did?

Remember waiting for him to call. Hoping. Wishing. And then waiting to see him again and hoping, wishing, that he'd still like you and you'd still like him?

"I can't even remember his name," a girl had said. And then laughed.

In the movie, the man grieved for the woman he loved. Grieved. Such an old-fashioned word. Is the feeling old-fashioned, too? Do men grieve for women anymore, or women for men? Or is everyone replaceable? Interchangeable? How do you grieve for someone you don't know, someone you just met? What can you possibly feel for a stranger?

In the movie they had known each other for years. They'd grown up together. "I don't have one single memory without her," he told his best friend.

"I can't even remember his name," a girl had said.

Today, sex is the turn-on. Not love. It's sex and only sex on TV, in movies, magazines, and song. No time for getting to know you anymore. No need for love songs. You meet. You kiss. You like it. You have sex. Even the term is cold. We had sex. Pass the ketchup, please. "I can't even remember his name."

"Forever Young" was flawed. It was predictable and corny and totally unrealistic. But it was a joy to watch two people care about one another. He was a test pilot for the military and she was a writer for some magazine. They were adults but he still stammered when he was around her and she still looked at him as if she were seeing him for the first time. When he decided to ask her to marry him, he was so nervous that the words grew shy and hid in his throat.

Then fate threw a curve ball and it looked as if love would be killed like every other living thing on this planet. But it was love, not just sex. The real McCoy. What Shakespeare wrote about: "Love is not love/ Which alters when it alteration finds,/ Or bends with the remover to remove:/ O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,/ That looks on tempests and is never shaken."

And it survived on the big screen in such a big way that the contrast between what was make-believe and what was real, what I'd overheard just few hours before, begged to be told.

She looked like a hundred other girls, the one who couldn't remember his name. Nice hair, teeth, skin. Pretty, privileged.

But underprivileged, too. Undervalued. Undermined. And so completely and sadly unaware.