It would have been the 41st birthday of Stephanie who, having died at 30, never manifested anything close to a middle-aged self. It's impossible to think of her middle-aged; she'll always be the gentle, sweet girl with the killer body and (as another admirer dubbed them) "museum-quality tits" (not obvious in this picture). Remembering her today made me think of the line in "Masculin-Feminin" where the young people go to a movie and, as heard in the narration:
We often went to the movies. The screen lit up and we trembled... But more often than not, Madeleine and I were disappointed. The pictures were dated, they flickered. And Marilyn Monroe had aged terribly. It made us sad. This wasn't the film we'd dreamed of. This wasn't the total film that each of us had carried within himself... the film we wanted to make, or, more secretly, no doubt, that we wanted to live.Marilyn Monroe had aged? Yes, we got to see Marilyn in early middle age, and frankly I thought she looked fantastic. Take a look at her in "The Misfits." For his part, Jean-Pierre Leaud, star of "Masculin-Feminin," has aged much worse -- just do a Google Image search for him. Shocking. But few of us ever get old gracefully, at least as far as our bodies and appearance go, me included. Stephanie, with her violent death in a car crash at 30, was spared that, and lives always in memories as the young, gorgeous, sexually permissive San Francisco chick. How lucky I am to have had her in my life, and in my memories now.
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