"In Glorious Black and White"

Some days I just don't feel like color. I prefer the soft flicker of black and white. A world where everyone's skin is flawless porcelain, and tuxedos and ballgowns are perfectly appropriate attire for lounging around at home, especially when one's home is a grand ancestral estate or a veritable Art Deco sculpture with doors and windows and steppe-like staircases.

I don't just crave old movies, I need them. I need, for a brief time in this hectic, ugly, contrary, egomaniacal world, to focus my eyes on this magical Hollywood kingdom where our favorite personalities are kings and queens, where men call women "doll-face," and women's earlobes drip with jewelry, and their lips with delightful sarcasm. It is a world where every person knows exactly who he or she is, and where the endings are almost always happy. And why shouldn't they be? After half a lifetime (read: an hour-plus) of struggles (they have problems, too, they just look more glamorous dealing with them), misunderstandings, witticisms, hurt feelings, hi-jinks, triumphs, embarrassments, pitfalls, and pratfalls, these people whom we've grown to love finally get their well-earned rewards. And we do love them. After all, they're family -- they've become family. And over the years, the actors who portray them have become cousins, brothers, aunts, best friends to us.

Bette Davis. Bette Davis is my rebellious Aunt Bette. My wise, self-sacrificing, strong-willed, stalwart, empowered, and empowering diva of an aunt. Norma Shearer. Now, she's my big sister -- warm and scintillating, and sometimes a little smug, with her tremulous voice holding a thousand tears, like a reservoir, or perhaps more accurately, a dam. Margaret O'Brien is my little sister. Old-souled, tender, pure-of-heart, sad-eyed Margaret O'Brien. Greer Garson, with her genteel ways and subdued, purring alto tones, is my confidante -- you can take her anywhere and talk to her about anything. And Clark Gable? Who is he? ...Need you ask?

In a world where people -- both in person and under the cowardly cover of social media -- unleash their cruelty, their frustrations, their tactless tirades upon those of a gentler, softer nature who have, to quote Big Sis Norma in THE WOMEN, "had... years to grow claws," and yet, who hate having to bring them out, Classic Hollywood is a refuge. There, captured through the best use of media, people have manners, call each other "Mister" and "Miss," band together in times of trouble, and beat such bad guys with the might of their own goodness.

While I'm perfectly aware that I am romanticizing them and it, I'm okay with that. We have to harness beauty wherever we can find it, in whatever form, for however long. It is the only weapon we have that causes no harm. It tears through the mire and neutralizes the haters, and brings us some joy and equilibrium. Because in the end, the battle is won in your head and in your heart. If those are well guarded, if you are armed with your own convictions and remain unchanged by others' hideous spirits, that is all you need. As long as there is a place for beauty -- in all its forms -- in your life, that is enough and, to paraphrase Spencer Tracy/Matt Drayton, "that is everything."