kate bosworth has made my day
I was reading my wonderful friends list and this entry is hilarious. It's quotes from Kate Bosworth's interview in GQ this month. The whole article is posted below under the cut so you can all laugh with me. I am seriously thinking this girl has to have a coke habit or some kinda drug addiction... cause she's not just dumb she's like... weird. and the way she phrases things implies to me that shes talking rather fast.
we can usually smell our own... though i hope to god i never sound this stupid. you all can let me know if i do...
Typed by Gemini-Girl at IMDB:
You just met Kate Bosworth, and already you want to protect her. She is butterfly-thin and she smells like gardenias, and her long blond hair tickles the small of her back. She’s gorgeous in a clean sort of way, all sheen and glow and innocence, with wide eyes that don’t match; one is hazel, the other blue. It could be an alluring imperfection, the symbol of something someday, but for now it’s just quirky. She chews Juicy Fruit gum. She repeatedly applies lip gloss. She has perfect posture, holds herself with the kind of poise that suggests charm school. Her current role as Sandra Dee opposite Kevin Spacey’s Bobby Darin in Beyond the Sea might be eerily apt. You hope not. You hope with surprising urgency that celebrity will treat her kindly.
“This is Lila,” she says of her dog. “Isn’t she a pretty girl? She’s like seven months old. I know! She’s amazing. Thank you. Thank you. I think maybe part greyhound and part beagle maybe? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I got her in Morocco.”
She got the dog off the streets of Morocco when she was living there last summer with her supremely famous boyfriend, Orlando Bloom, while he was shooting Ridley Scott’s upcoming Kingdom of Heaven. But she doesn’t put it like that.
She keeps leaving the boyfriend out of the story until she can’t anymore because the story doesn’t quite add up without him in it. This keeps happening. She nearly did backflips trying to avoid saying that she and Orlando are now living in the same house. It’s the evasiveness that makes you worry about her, like maybe there’s a team of coaches somewhere telling her how she’s supposed to talk. Is this any way to live? Can’t she just get a normal boyfriend?
The Orlando factor is significant. People are watching. People care about this relationship. It is not a good kind of caring. His adoring fans think she’s not good enough for him; her adoring fans take exactly the opposite position. On the Kate Bosworth Forum, the One and Only Community for All Kate Fans, someone posted a photo of her smoking a cigarette, and everyone blamed him for making her do it. They think she’s getting skinny, and the reason could be the stress of him. Someone posted a series of photos of her walking three steps behind him, like he thinks he’s in Afghanistan or some freaking place and she’s a piece of property. The fans themselves admit that they have no idea what they are talking about. They just want to protect her. This is what she brings out.
She is 21 years old, and she is sipping Rooibos, an African red tea that her nutritionist told her is good for her. She used to drink coffee, but her nutritionist told her that it was not good for her body. That kind of stuff she takes to heart. She started drinking a lot of water. It was, like, a sign of how dehydrated her body was? She believes in health. She loves this tea place, Elixir, on Melrose, where there is a lot of bamboo and you can bring your dog.
“No, no, Lila girl!” Lila is chewing on the leg of a bamboo chair. “She still scavenges, she still has that mentality. She was, like, living off scraps when I found her. I was just vacationing in Morocco. I was just over there hanging out, and I saw her. She was underneath a bush trying to find some shade. She was really young, like a month and a half, maybe, I don’t know. Tiny. I just picked her up and brought her back to the hotel and bathed her, and I was just like, ‘You are going to be my baby, I know you are.’ And she is. She’s such a good girl.”
Orlando, she says, is an animal lover, and so he didn’t complain at all when she brought Lila into their lives. He was totally for it. She goes on and on about this. But then she backtracks again. “We, um, well, we have two dogs. The other one’s name is Sidi. It means ‘lord.’ Lila means ‘lady.’ So it’s Lord and Lady. He’s from Morocco, too.”
You are showing some confusion. She got another dog off the streets of Morocco? She is volunteering her personal pet inventory in a most roundabout way.
“Right, so Orlando found Sidi. I wasn’t there yet. When I got to Morocco he just had . . . this dog! A week later, I found Lila. It’s just like that moment, you know, you don’t really discuss it. It’s a no-brainer, really. We’re both animal lovers, like intensely? So it’s not like, I mean, it’s a no-brainer.”
Save her. Help her stop talking about this.
She is not supposed to talk about Orlando, whether because of the publicists or because of him or because of her or because of some combination that sealed that deal. The fact of the matter is, you can’t be the Julia Roberts of your generation if you’re out there doing a J. Lo with your famous boyfriend - who himself has a career to protect, a fantasy to project. You can’t mature into a dignified Susan Sarandon or a dignified Cate Blanchett or a dignified Julianne Moore unless you manage this fame thing very carefully. It’s about talent, of course, and drive and intelligence and beauty - these she has in abundance. But it’s also about keeping your personal life private - pull the blinds, lock the doors, don’t parade around in your underwear, and don’t slouch. It’s about dignity.
Would she at least like to say how long she and Orlando have been together?
“You know, I really don’t feel comfortable getting into that. I just kind of feel weird about . . . it’s been a while. You can look it up in Us Weekly.”
The tabloids say they’ve been together for about two years and that he recently gave her a five-carat diamond engagement ring. But ask her about marriage and she explodes into giggles, as if it is the first time she has ever even thought about such a crazy thing.
“God, I’m hot from that tea. Woo. All the sudden, I’m like, woo, warm! That actually happens to me if I have a hot drink? Yeah, yeah. It’s so weird, I’m so sensitive to that. I’m the same with blushing as well. I can blush at the drop of a hat. It’s really embarrassing. I’m not one of those people that can hide it.”
Even she is sometimes caught off guard by how young she is, what a whirlwind this has been. She never wanted to be an actor. When she was 13, the only child of doting parents living in Connecticut, she went to an open audition in New York for The Horse Whisperer, using a Christmas-card photo as her head shot and a resume that included little beyond singing at some county fairs. She thought it would be fun, mostly because of the horses. She was a champion equestrian, winning ribbons with Waldo, a huge Thoroughbred, 17.2 hands, the first love of her life she still dreams about. To everyone’s surprise, she got a part in the movie, playing Scarlett Johansson’s best friend.
“It was amazing. I was riding every day. I was riding the black stallion they used in Black Beauty. So it was like, for me as a 13 year old, I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is Black Beauty! This is so cool!’”
And so it was through her love of horses that she fell in love with acting. The Horse Whisperer came out in 1998, when she was in high school. She landed a few more roles, including the bratty sister in The Newcomers and the football captain’s girlfriend in Remember the Titans. In her senior year, she got accepted to Princeton. She decided to defer admission and give Hollywood her best shot, and so while all her friends were settling into freshman dorms, she moved to an apartment in L.A. It was not an easy transition.
“I’m really not an apartment person. I just was like, ‘Oh God, I’m like 18, why do I have an apartment?’ Paying rent, having my own key. I was just like, ‘Okay, I’m so on my own now.’”
Two months after moving to L.A., she landed Blue Crush and had to go to Hawaii and wear bikinis and surf on cue. That was easier. That was a blast. The movie came out in 2002 and was so beautifully shot that everyone forgave its wafer-thin script, and out of it Kate Bosworth won herself a following, most especially among young men.
A perfect blond with a perfect body riding awesome waves. Fansites were born. Scripts came her way. She deferred Princeton again. She went brunet and starred in Wonderland, a dark indie movie in which she got herself pimped and beaten up and in a bathroom had sex with Val Kilmer playing an over-endowed porn star. Her range caught the attention of serious directors and producers. She deferred Princeton again. In 2004 she showed a comic side in Win a Date with Tad Hamilton! and then she got the call from Kevin Spacey, who was looking for someone to play Sandra Dee.
“I’m not going to Princeton,” she says. “It was like this huge pressure constantly on me. I just decided to just move on from that. I’m going to take classes in California. Probably psychology. Oh, my God, I love psychology! I took a psychology course, it was an elective in high school, and I literally loved it so much, just like, kind of understanding how the mind works, why people have learned behaviors, and why they are the way they are. It creates a sympathy.”
Many of her references are high school-related, as if she somehow yearns for the old cafeteria and the Diet Coke and even the boring math teacher. Or as if there is a piece of her there she may have left behind. The most influential person in her life is her mother. The second is her father. Ary and Corinna, her best friends from high school, are still her best friends. She misses Waldo. She misses falling off him and getting right back up. Everything was so much simpler then, everything was tangible and true - nothing to hide, just ride your horse and hang out with your friends and you don’t have to worry about anybody with a camera catching you smoke and you don’t have to factor in a million people gossiping about your boyfriend. It seems she isn’t finished being who she was before all this, isn’t quite finished at all.
She has recently discovered Buddhism. “It’s just a really incredible state of mind. It’s just a beautiful place to try to be at. It’s basically about constantly growing and making yourself a better person and focusing on what you want for yourself and the world and really putting it our there? It’s amazing. Because if you, like, have everybody taking ten minutes a day and really focusing on, like, positivity and a better world and a better self, like, imagine all that, just all that positivity going out there? So, I don’t know. That’s been good for me.”
Is this something Orlando introduced her to? “Um, I’d really rather not, I can’t. I would rather . . .”
Oh don’t make her go there.
“I will say this. I’ve never grown so much in my life than since I’ve been with Orlando. He’s 27. He’s got a lot of wisdom.”
She pours herself more tea. David Schwimmer is at the next table, gabbing with a red-haired woman and looking upset.
Kate’s cell phone rings. “Hello? Oh, hi, beautiful! Yeah, I still have a little cough, but it’s going away. I think I got it in Toronto, because my mom has the same thing. Friday at one? Perfect! Thank you, sweetie. Bye!”
She hangs up. “My nutritionist,” she says. “She’s amazing. It’s amazing what you can cure through, like, I don’t know, herbal remedies? You know, because if you think about it, we didn’t always have antibiotics. That’s been a cool discovery for me as well. When you first go in to see a nutritionist, like, you find everything wrong with you. And you’re like, ‘Oh, my God, I’m in such a bad situation.’ But it’s really amazing. I, like, loved studying anatomy in high school. It was, like, the hardest class I’ve ever taken. I remember doing a research paper on how the brain sends the signal from, like, one muscle fiber to move, and there’s, like, millions to move just like that? It was so amazing. I could never be a doctor, but it was, like, really fascinating. So I think that’s kind of, like, why I love just listening to my nutritionist, because it’s, like, she really gets it, you know, even more so than, like, modern medicine. Taking care of yourself, it’s so important. Because you have one body. You know?”
You do. But mostly you are wondering what would happen if she went to Princeton.
She drives a black Audi Quattro. She does not care to understand all the controls, especially the screen with the navigation system that also works the CD changer, which she loads up once and forgets about. She has no interest in technology. She does not own a computer, has never text-messaged anyone, and has no e-mail account.
She turns the music up. “This is Postal Service. They’re great. God, I like such a huge array of music. God, everything from, like, old-school Rolling Stones, Beatles, to Coldplay to Ben Harper to Jack Johnson, Ryan Adams, and then I think Beyonce is wicked. I think she’s just the strongest, coolest female on the planet. I think Eminem is really talented, so it’s like, yeah, I have a wide range. I do.
“What do you think, Lila girl? What do you think, Lila, hey? You’re gonna go see the doggies, right?”
This brings Lila from the backseat up to the front, which was formerly yours and yours alone. Now she is in your lap. She’s a good dog. She smells like . . . dog. She has a sleek coat. If she sits, her toenails don’t dig quite so hard into your thighs, so this is what you are encouraging.
“That’s her seat. She used to get, like, really carsick. She used to throw up every time. But she grew out of it. She’s fine in the car. She’s a good girl.”
She’s taking Lila to the dog park, the place she visits at least once a day and has come to regard as a personal retreat. She likes to go there and just forget everything and watch Lila run free.
“Oh, my God, now look at this traffic. Yeah, L.A. It’s so ridiculous. To go, like, three miles. There was just a study done actually, I saw it on Regis and Kelly, I can’t remember how many hours a year a person uses being in their car in L.A., but it’s, like, a lot of time. You know? I was like, ‘Oh God.’
“L.A. is a weird place sometimes, isn’t it? It so is. They say it takes about there years in L.A. to get, like, used to it. It’s sort of like when Dorothy wakes up in Wizard of Oz. It seems really glossy and beautiful, but somehow it’s almost a little too, like, too . . . nice, in a weird way? I don’t know. Sometimes you want the black and the white instead of the color, you know? That’s how I feel sometimes.
“It’s so weird how life works out. I never would have imagined all of this. Like, never. When I was a little kid, I wanted to be a waitress on roller skates.”
The traffic clears and she floors it. Combined with the dog smell and the sharp curves up the winding road, it is in every way an experience in holding on. She seems much too tiny a person to make a car do quite all this.
Lila steps on the controls of the navigation system and the music stops. Kate can’t figure out how to get it playing again. She zooms along for a while in silence.
She says she never gets to ride anymore. When was the last time she was even on a horse? She misses jumping. All that power underneath you, the syncopation, the collaboration. Other girls had pictures of movie stars on their walls. She had horses.
“I never expected or desired to be famous. For me, it’s not about the fame, actually. I just want to be able to jump into a completely different role and then do a completely other different role, you know? Like, at first I didn’t know if I wanted to play Sandra Dee. I didn’t want to play this Goody Two-Shoes girl, but Kevin told me what was interesting was that she had that image, but behind closed doors and underneath it all she was so dark and sad and she was so fragile. I liked the idea that she kind of faked out the entire world. Even now, people are like, ‘Wasn’t she just the sweetest thing?’ Well, yeah, but she had a lot more going on. She was so young as well. She was even younger than me. She was this big box-office draw, like a hyped version of what I’m going through. I could feel sympathy for her in that people always want to put somebody in a box and create an image. It’s an image, you know? There’s so many different layers to a person, and she had so many things going on that she couldn’t talk about. Like, she had to put on a happy face every single time. Yeah, yeah. What makes me most sad and is most amazing is that she met, like, the love of her life, she met Bobby, and he kind of took over and made sure everything was, you know, taken care of. Then, when he died, she was stuck - she didn’t know anything, and she kind of retreated into a shell, and I think that’s what makes me most sad. That’s sort of how I feel. Like, it’s the reason why I can be so sad about it, because I know I’m not like that, I know what it’s like to be living my life on my own and enjoying it, learning things, growing.”
It’s nearing dusk when she finally pulls up to the dog park. Lila is drooling with excitement. Kate gathers her and clips on her leash, keeping her posture eerily erect. There is not a strand of hair out of place as she glides down the steps to the park, leaving behind a welcome whiff of gardenia.
She lets the dog go.
“Look at her! Look at her! Isn’t that the cutest thing? I mean literally, I love coming here. Isn’t it amazing? Isn’t it a great energy? It’s like doggie heaven, I told you!
“Oh look, she’s peeing! It’s like your own kid. It’s like, ‘Oh, he burped.’ You know? You know? It’s so ridiculous. You know? You do, you feel like a proud parent. I’m so glad you could come with me, actually. Because it’s a fun thing, isn’t it? There are some regulars here. It’s like dropping your kid off at day care. You get to know the owners.”
A guy with a Great Dane walks up, says hello. “Hey, where’s Sidi today?” he says.
She looks down. She looks away. Sidi is Orlando’s dog. “He’s at work with the boy.”
“The boy?” the guy says. For a moment, he looks like he thinks that she has a son he didn’t know about. “The boy?”
“The boyfriend,” she says timidly. “You know . . .”
Oh, don’t make her do this.
She changes the subject.
“Great Danes are just, like, so great, aren’t they? They’re just, like, big dogs! I know! Yeah, yeah, Great Danes are great. Oh, my God, they just so are.”
Afterward, she watches the sun drop over the horizon, Lila panting at her feet. “That’s the other great thing about having a dog. You know? People look at the dog instead of you.”
we can usually smell our own... though i hope to god i never sound this stupid. you all can let me know if i do...
Typed by Gemini-Girl at IMDB:
You just met Kate Bosworth, and already you want to protect her. She is butterfly-thin and she smells like gardenias, and her long blond hair tickles the small of her back. She’s gorgeous in a clean sort of way, all sheen and glow and innocence, with wide eyes that don’t match; one is hazel, the other blue. It could be an alluring imperfection, the symbol of something someday, but for now it’s just quirky. She chews Juicy Fruit gum. She repeatedly applies lip gloss. She has perfect posture, holds herself with the kind of poise that suggests charm school. Her current role as Sandra Dee opposite Kevin Spacey’s Bobby Darin in Beyond the Sea might be eerily apt. You hope not. You hope with surprising urgency that celebrity will treat her kindly.
“This is Lila,” she says of her dog. “Isn’t she a pretty girl? She’s like seven months old. I know! She’s amazing. Thank you. Thank you. I think maybe part greyhound and part beagle maybe? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I got her in Morocco.”
She got the dog off the streets of Morocco when she was living there last summer with her supremely famous boyfriend, Orlando Bloom, while he was shooting Ridley Scott’s upcoming Kingdom of Heaven. But she doesn’t put it like that.
She keeps leaving the boyfriend out of the story until she can’t anymore because the story doesn’t quite add up without him in it. This keeps happening. She nearly did backflips trying to avoid saying that she and Orlando are now living in the same house. It’s the evasiveness that makes you worry about her, like maybe there’s a team of coaches somewhere telling her how she’s supposed to talk. Is this any way to live? Can’t she just get a normal boyfriend?
The Orlando factor is significant. People are watching. People care about this relationship. It is not a good kind of caring. His adoring fans think she’s not good enough for him; her adoring fans take exactly the opposite position. On the Kate Bosworth Forum, the One and Only Community for All Kate Fans, someone posted a photo of her smoking a cigarette, and everyone blamed him for making her do it. They think she’s getting skinny, and the reason could be the stress of him. Someone posted a series of photos of her walking three steps behind him, like he thinks he’s in Afghanistan or some freaking place and she’s a piece of property. The fans themselves admit that they have no idea what they are talking about. They just want to protect her. This is what she brings out.
She is 21 years old, and she is sipping Rooibos, an African red tea that her nutritionist told her is good for her. She used to drink coffee, but her nutritionist told her that it was not good for her body. That kind of stuff she takes to heart. She started drinking a lot of water. It was, like, a sign of how dehydrated her body was? She believes in health. She loves this tea place, Elixir, on Melrose, where there is a lot of bamboo and you can bring your dog.
“No, no, Lila girl!” Lila is chewing on the leg of a bamboo chair. “She still scavenges, she still has that mentality. She was, like, living off scraps when I found her. I was just vacationing in Morocco. I was just over there hanging out, and I saw her. She was underneath a bush trying to find some shade. She was really young, like a month and a half, maybe, I don’t know. Tiny. I just picked her up and brought her back to the hotel and bathed her, and I was just like, ‘You are going to be my baby, I know you are.’ And she is. She’s such a good girl.”
Orlando, she says, is an animal lover, and so he didn’t complain at all when she brought Lila into their lives. He was totally for it. She goes on and on about this. But then she backtracks again. “We, um, well, we have two dogs. The other one’s name is Sidi. It means ‘lord.’ Lila means ‘lady.’ So it’s Lord and Lady. He’s from Morocco, too.”
You are showing some confusion. She got another dog off the streets of Morocco? She is volunteering her personal pet inventory in a most roundabout way.
“Right, so Orlando found Sidi. I wasn’t there yet. When I got to Morocco he just had . . . this dog! A week later, I found Lila. It’s just like that moment, you know, you don’t really discuss it. It’s a no-brainer, really. We’re both animal lovers, like intensely? So it’s not like, I mean, it’s a no-brainer.”
Save her. Help her stop talking about this.
She is not supposed to talk about Orlando, whether because of the publicists or because of him or because of her or because of some combination that sealed that deal. The fact of the matter is, you can’t be the Julia Roberts of your generation if you’re out there doing a J. Lo with your famous boyfriend - who himself has a career to protect, a fantasy to project. You can’t mature into a dignified Susan Sarandon or a dignified Cate Blanchett or a dignified Julianne Moore unless you manage this fame thing very carefully. It’s about talent, of course, and drive and intelligence and beauty - these she has in abundance. But it’s also about keeping your personal life private - pull the blinds, lock the doors, don’t parade around in your underwear, and don’t slouch. It’s about dignity.
Would she at least like to say how long she and Orlando have been together?
“You know, I really don’t feel comfortable getting into that. I just kind of feel weird about . . . it’s been a while. You can look it up in Us Weekly.”
The tabloids say they’ve been together for about two years and that he recently gave her a five-carat diamond engagement ring. But ask her about marriage and she explodes into giggles, as if it is the first time she has ever even thought about such a crazy thing.
“God, I’m hot from that tea. Woo. All the sudden, I’m like, woo, warm! That actually happens to me if I have a hot drink? Yeah, yeah. It’s so weird, I’m so sensitive to that. I’m the same with blushing as well. I can blush at the drop of a hat. It’s really embarrassing. I’m not one of those people that can hide it.”
Even she is sometimes caught off guard by how young she is, what a whirlwind this has been. She never wanted to be an actor. When she was 13, the only child of doting parents living in Connecticut, she went to an open audition in New York for The Horse Whisperer, using a Christmas-card photo as her head shot and a resume that included little beyond singing at some county fairs. She thought it would be fun, mostly because of the horses. She was a champion equestrian, winning ribbons with Waldo, a huge Thoroughbred, 17.2 hands, the first love of her life she still dreams about. To everyone’s surprise, she got a part in the movie, playing Scarlett Johansson’s best friend.
“It was amazing. I was riding every day. I was riding the black stallion they used in Black Beauty. So it was like, for me as a 13 year old, I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is Black Beauty! This is so cool!’”
And so it was through her love of horses that she fell in love with acting. The Horse Whisperer came out in 1998, when she was in high school. She landed a few more roles, including the bratty sister in The Newcomers and the football captain’s girlfriend in Remember the Titans. In her senior year, she got accepted to Princeton. She decided to defer admission and give Hollywood her best shot, and so while all her friends were settling into freshman dorms, she moved to an apartment in L.A. It was not an easy transition.
“I’m really not an apartment person. I just was like, ‘Oh God, I’m like 18, why do I have an apartment?’ Paying rent, having my own key. I was just like, ‘Okay, I’m so on my own now.’”
Two months after moving to L.A., she landed Blue Crush and had to go to Hawaii and wear bikinis and surf on cue. That was easier. That was a blast. The movie came out in 2002 and was so beautifully shot that everyone forgave its wafer-thin script, and out of it Kate Bosworth won herself a following, most especially among young men.
A perfect blond with a perfect body riding awesome waves. Fansites were born. Scripts came her way. She deferred Princeton again. She went brunet and starred in Wonderland, a dark indie movie in which she got herself pimped and beaten up and in a bathroom had sex with Val Kilmer playing an over-endowed porn star. Her range caught the attention of serious directors and producers. She deferred Princeton again. In 2004 she showed a comic side in Win a Date with Tad Hamilton! and then she got the call from Kevin Spacey, who was looking for someone to play Sandra Dee.
“I’m not going to Princeton,” she says. “It was like this huge pressure constantly on me. I just decided to just move on from that. I’m going to take classes in California. Probably psychology. Oh, my God, I love psychology! I took a psychology course, it was an elective in high school, and I literally loved it so much, just like, kind of understanding how the mind works, why people have learned behaviors, and why they are the way they are. It creates a sympathy.”
Many of her references are high school-related, as if she somehow yearns for the old cafeteria and the Diet Coke and even the boring math teacher. Or as if there is a piece of her there she may have left behind. The most influential person in her life is her mother. The second is her father. Ary and Corinna, her best friends from high school, are still her best friends. She misses Waldo. She misses falling off him and getting right back up. Everything was so much simpler then, everything was tangible and true - nothing to hide, just ride your horse and hang out with your friends and you don’t have to worry about anybody with a camera catching you smoke and you don’t have to factor in a million people gossiping about your boyfriend. It seems she isn’t finished being who she was before all this, isn’t quite finished at all.
She has recently discovered Buddhism. “It’s just a really incredible state of mind. It’s just a beautiful place to try to be at. It’s basically about constantly growing and making yourself a better person and focusing on what you want for yourself and the world and really putting it our there? It’s amazing. Because if you, like, have everybody taking ten minutes a day and really focusing on, like, positivity and a better world and a better self, like, imagine all that, just all that positivity going out there? So, I don’t know. That’s been good for me.”
Is this something Orlando introduced her to? “Um, I’d really rather not, I can’t. I would rather . . .”
Oh don’t make her go there.
“I will say this. I’ve never grown so much in my life than since I’ve been with Orlando. He’s 27. He’s got a lot of wisdom.”
She pours herself more tea. David Schwimmer is at the next table, gabbing with a red-haired woman and looking upset.
Kate’s cell phone rings. “Hello? Oh, hi, beautiful! Yeah, I still have a little cough, but it’s going away. I think I got it in Toronto, because my mom has the same thing. Friday at one? Perfect! Thank you, sweetie. Bye!”
She hangs up. “My nutritionist,” she says. “She’s amazing. It’s amazing what you can cure through, like, I don’t know, herbal remedies? You know, because if you think about it, we didn’t always have antibiotics. That’s been a cool discovery for me as well. When you first go in to see a nutritionist, like, you find everything wrong with you. And you’re like, ‘Oh, my God, I’m in such a bad situation.’ But it’s really amazing. I, like, loved studying anatomy in high school. It was, like, the hardest class I’ve ever taken. I remember doing a research paper on how the brain sends the signal from, like, one muscle fiber to move, and there’s, like, millions to move just like that? It was so amazing. I could never be a doctor, but it was, like, really fascinating. So I think that’s kind of, like, why I love just listening to my nutritionist, because it’s, like, she really gets it, you know, even more so than, like, modern medicine. Taking care of yourself, it’s so important. Because you have one body. You know?”
You do. But mostly you are wondering what would happen if she went to Princeton.
She drives a black Audi Quattro. She does not care to understand all the controls, especially the screen with the navigation system that also works the CD changer, which she loads up once and forgets about. She has no interest in technology. She does not own a computer, has never text-messaged anyone, and has no e-mail account.
She turns the music up. “This is Postal Service. They’re great. God, I like such a huge array of music. God, everything from, like, old-school Rolling Stones, Beatles, to Coldplay to Ben Harper to Jack Johnson, Ryan Adams, and then I think Beyonce is wicked. I think she’s just the strongest, coolest female on the planet. I think Eminem is really talented, so it’s like, yeah, I have a wide range. I do.
“What do you think, Lila girl? What do you think, Lila, hey? You’re gonna go see the doggies, right?”
This brings Lila from the backseat up to the front, which was formerly yours and yours alone. Now she is in your lap. She’s a good dog. She smells like . . . dog. She has a sleek coat. If she sits, her toenails don’t dig quite so hard into your thighs, so this is what you are encouraging.
“That’s her seat. She used to get, like, really carsick. She used to throw up every time. But she grew out of it. She’s fine in the car. She’s a good girl.”
She’s taking Lila to the dog park, the place she visits at least once a day and has come to regard as a personal retreat. She likes to go there and just forget everything and watch Lila run free.
“Oh, my God, now look at this traffic. Yeah, L.A. It’s so ridiculous. To go, like, three miles. There was just a study done actually, I saw it on Regis and Kelly, I can’t remember how many hours a year a person uses being in their car in L.A., but it’s, like, a lot of time. You know? I was like, ‘Oh God.’
“L.A. is a weird place sometimes, isn’t it? It so is. They say it takes about there years in L.A. to get, like, used to it. It’s sort of like when Dorothy wakes up in Wizard of Oz. It seems really glossy and beautiful, but somehow it’s almost a little too, like, too . . . nice, in a weird way? I don’t know. Sometimes you want the black and the white instead of the color, you know? That’s how I feel sometimes.
“It’s so weird how life works out. I never would have imagined all of this. Like, never. When I was a little kid, I wanted to be a waitress on roller skates.”
The traffic clears and she floors it. Combined with the dog smell and the sharp curves up the winding road, it is in every way an experience in holding on. She seems much too tiny a person to make a car do quite all this.
Lila steps on the controls of the navigation system and the music stops. Kate can’t figure out how to get it playing again. She zooms along for a while in silence.
She says she never gets to ride anymore. When was the last time she was even on a horse? She misses jumping. All that power underneath you, the syncopation, the collaboration. Other girls had pictures of movie stars on their walls. She had horses.
“I never expected or desired to be famous. For me, it’s not about the fame, actually. I just want to be able to jump into a completely different role and then do a completely other different role, you know? Like, at first I didn’t know if I wanted to play Sandra Dee. I didn’t want to play this Goody Two-Shoes girl, but Kevin told me what was interesting was that she had that image, but behind closed doors and underneath it all she was so dark and sad and she was so fragile. I liked the idea that she kind of faked out the entire world. Even now, people are like, ‘Wasn’t she just the sweetest thing?’ Well, yeah, but she had a lot more going on. She was so young as well. She was even younger than me. She was this big box-office draw, like a hyped version of what I’m going through. I could feel sympathy for her in that people always want to put somebody in a box and create an image. It’s an image, you know? There’s so many different layers to a person, and she had so many things going on that she couldn’t talk about. Like, she had to put on a happy face every single time. Yeah, yeah. What makes me most sad and is most amazing is that she met, like, the love of her life, she met Bobby, and he kind of took over and made sure everything was, you know, taken care of. Then, when he died, she was stuck - she didn’t know anything, and she kind of retreated into a shell, and I think that’s what makes me most sad. That’s sort of how I feel. Like, it’s the reason why I can be so sad about it, because I know I’m not like that, I know what it’s like to be living my life on my own and enjoying it, learning things, growing.”
It’s nearing dusk when she finally pulls up to the dog park. Lila is drooling with excitement. Kate gathers her and clips on her leash, keeping her posture eerily erect. There is not a strand of hair out of place as she glides down the steps to the park, leaving behind a welcome whiff of gardenia.
She lets the dog go.
“Look at her! Look at her! Isn’t that the cutest thing? I mean literally, I love coming here. Isn’t it amazing? Isn’t it a great energy? It’s like doggie heaven, I told you!
“Oh look, she’s peeing! It’s like your own kid. It’s like, ‘Oh, he burped.’ You know? You know? It’s so ridiculous. You know? You do, you feel like a proud parent. I’m so glad you could come with me, actually. Because it’s a fun thing, isn’t it? There are some regulars here. It’s like dropping your kid off at day care. You get to know the owners.”
A guy with a Great Dane walks up, says hello. “Hey, where’s Sidi today?” he says.
She looks down. She looks away. Sidi is Orlando’s dog. “He’s at work with the boy.”
“The boy?” the guy says. For a moment, he looks like he thinks that she has a son he didn’t know about. “The boy?”
“The boyfriend,” she says timidly. “You know . . .”
Oh, don’t make her do this.
She changes the subject.
“Great Danes are just, like, so great, aren’t they? They’re just, like, big dogs! I know! Yeah, yeah, Great Danes are great. Oh, my God, they just so are.”
Afterward, she watches the sun drop over the horizon, Lila panting at her feet. “That’s the other great thing about having a dog. You know? People look at the dog instead of you.”