This is the next post in an essay collection tentatively titled “Ten Movies that Shook My World”
On one Friday the 13th, even the divine Miss Elizabeth Bennet as played by Greer Garson could not salvage a doomed first big job in New York City
New York City awoke bitterly cold on Friday, December 13th, rolled over and hit snooze. I was sprinting for the E train when the first leather button popped off my corduroy wrap skirt en route to the American Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens. I didn’t see it as an omen. But by mid-afternoon, when I was wrestling with my panty hose in a freezing bathroom stall, first peeing and then hiding, I realized I should have been more superstitious.
“Pitiful,” I grumbled to myself, both because I hated having to wear panty hose and because it was gradually dawning on me that I was a complete failure at my first big-league job in New York City. It was my ‘Devil Wears Prada’ moment before the book or the movie even existed.
Interrupting my pity party was the sound that chilled me like Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart: the determined progress of the director’s pumps in the hall. I prayed that the urgent cadence of Italian heels on concrete would pass the Women’s Room on the way to the Public Affairs Office. [Read more…]