A straight guy I know, who has become a close (platonic) friend, really doesn’t get me. For one thing, he thinks my hair is too short, and he hates when I use more than three syllable words, because I sound too in-tel-luc-tu-al. When I was updating my online dating profile, he advised against listing War and Peace as my favorite book. “It’s a turn off,” he said. I don’t take his advice, but it gets under my skin, into that cold, dark place where I’m sure I would have found true love, if only I was….different.
Which brings me to the late, great Wendy Wasserstein. She died a few years ago at the tender age of 55, and the theater world mourned. Her birthday is Sunday. Through her many plays and essays, Wasserstein was so adept at capturing smart, ambitious women who found their romantic lives coming up short. After years of trying, she became a mother when she was 48 (and wrote a beautiful piece [1] about it in The New Yorker).
Here’s a fragment from her 1988 Pulitzer-prize winning play The Heidi Chronicles [2], in which Scoop explains to Heidi (a girlfriend he could never commit to) why he’s marrying Lisa:
SCOOP
Do I love her…? She’s the best that I can do.
Is she an A+ like you? No. But I don’t want to
come home to an A+. A- maybe, but not A+.