Last time I wrote about the death of Robert Redford and of how I had been a big fan during my late teenage years. I even shared an old photo of the large poster I had of him on my bedroom wall. The time before that, I wrote about having spent a lot of time this summer reconnecting with very old friends, and of how it had been such a joy reminiscing about those things that made us friends in the first place. This week I discovered the sequel series to one of my favourite ever shows on telly, Sex and the City, featuring Carrie Bradshaw and her pals, and all three subjects have somehow converged to create this post.
The day I heard Robert Redford had died I was due to visit a friend for the evening as her husband was away and she had the house to herself. A film, a few snacks and a couple of supermarket cocktails is how we usually roll (we’re cheap dates), but this time I made the special request to watch The Way We Were, my favourite Robert Redford weepie. It also starred Barbra Streisand and covered the period from when their characters, Hubbell Gardiner and Katie Morosky, first met at college right through to the years they lived together in a beach house in Malibu, him writing for the Hollywood film industry and her primarily a housewife, albeit one with very strong political views.
Barbra Streisand doesn’t sing in that one but she did record the theme song of the same name, The Way We Were, where the lyrics detail the troubled relationship her character had with with the aforementioned Hubbell Gardiner.
The very final scene of the film, however, jumps forward many years to New York [spoiler alert: they are no longer together] where Katie and Hubbell meet by chance in front of the Plaza Hotel – Katie is campaigning to Ban the Bomb. It’s a difficult encounter (“Your girl is lovely, Hubbell.”) as they have so much history and still probably love each other, but they both have new lives and partners, and have to ultimately part with a tender, bittersweet farewell. This scene always makes me break down in tears but because of the meds I’ve been on since being ill, I have lost the ability to cry – I had to make do with just being really sad instead. Here is a clip of that scene:
Ironically I had never watched The Way We Were all the way through until it was referenced in an episode from the original series of Sex and the City. It became one of my favourite scenes when Carrie finally realises that her failed relationship with Big (the nickname her ex-boyfriend was given because he was supposed to be The Big One, the one she married) was down to the same reason that it didn’t work out for Robert Redford and Barbra Streisand in The Way We Were. The world is made up of “complicated girls” with wild curly hair (Carrie and Barbra) and “simple girls”, the ones with tame straight hair. Big and Hubbell chose the simple girls.
Even before Redford’s death, I had already been thinking about Hubbell Relationships ahead of my recent trip to The Granite City, my old stomping ground. My trip was purely to meet up with as many old friends as I could and it was really successful – even after more than 45 years apart, the meet-ups I had with old school friends were joyous affairs, with so much to reminisce about.
One person I would have loved to meet up with is mentioned around here often as he is kind of “My Hubbell”. We shared a love for ’70s/’80s music so he pops up in my posts as the s/bf (school boyfriend), again as the s/bf (student boyfriend) and sometimes the BOTT (the boyfriend of the time), when we were in our 20s. Many of us have a Hubbell, and there is no-one from those days I would have more to reminisce about with, but it just isn’t possible. We didn’t particularly part on bad terms, but it became obvious, again like with Hubbell and Katie, that we weren’t “going to make it”. I’m not particularly complicated and certainly don’t have wild curly hair like Carrie Bradshaw but the situation at the end was quite complicated, so there has been very little communication in nearly 40 years. I know Mr WIAA would get on well with him, as they are very alike, but bar bumping into each other outside the New York Plaza, probably not going to happen.
Do you have a Hubbell or a Katie, someone you shared so much with but then never saw again, or did you stay “friends”? I would love to hear about it in the comments boxes.
There have been lots of film clips in this post and not much music, but just the way it’s turned out. I feel I have to add the lyrics to The Way We Were despite them being a tad oversentimental (you don’t say!). The song was written by Alan Bergman, Marilyn Bergman, and Marvin Hamlisch, and it won two Academy Awards. The single was also a commercial success becoming 1974’s most successful recording in the United States placed at number one on the Billboard Year-End Hot 100. In the UK we are probably all more familiar with the Gladys Knight & The Pips version, also from 1974, where she did a bit of a mash-up with the song Try To Remember.
Until next time…
The Way We Were Lyrics
(Song by Alan Bergman, Marilyn Bergman/Marvin Hamlisch)
Mem’ries light the corners of my mind
Misty water-colored memories of the way we were
Scattered pictures of the smiles we left behind
Smiles we gave to one another for the way we were
Can it be that it was all so simple then
Or has time re-written every line?
If we had the chance to do it all again
Tell me, would we? Could we?
Mem’ries may be beautiful and yet
What’s too painful to remember
We simply choose to forget
So it’s the laughter we will remember
Whenever we remember the way we were
The way we were
What's It All About? 
I watched many episodes of SATC. How does the sequel series compare with the original?
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It’s called And Just Like That… (the reason becomes obvious if you watch it) and it picks up the story where it left off after the original SATC series and subsequent films. The are all now in their mid 50s so the storylines are quite different and despite it not getting great reviews I’m loving it as I always wanted to know how things turned out for them. Of course the women don’t look a day older (the pressure to look young on film is intense) but the men definitely do. We found it on Amazon Prime but it might be on one of the services you get over there.
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I notice your young man had wild curly hair, so maybe you were the Hubbell in that relationship.
On the subject of curly hair, I never understood why being told as a child that eating your toast crusts would give you curly hair was considered an incentive. Not an anti-curly sentiment but there are no obvious benefits unlike e.g. carrots giving you night vision.
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You know what Ernie, I think you’ve cracked it after all these years. Yes, I was Hubbell, going to work for large oil companies and he was the politically minded Katie going to work in education. I was the “simple girl” with naturally straight hair (although I was trying to fool myself by having it permed back then). It was never going to work.
Ironically, although Mr WIAA is now follically challenged, he used to have wild curly hair in his teenage years. Fortunately by the time I met him it was shortly cropped.
So many weird things our mums told us when we were young but you are right, it seems a high intake of fresh vegetables can only be a good thing for our health, so the carrot thing had legs.
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Believe it or not, when I was younger, I had lots of curls, and the boys in my soccer club briefly called me Jimi. At that time, I had a short-lived on-off relationship with a girl who also had curls. Unfortunately, she then moved to the other end of Germany, and I lost contact with her.
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Hi Walter – we need photographic proof! Two people with wild curly hair – if the SATC girls’ hypothesis is true it was always going to be a challenging pairing. Sorry you lost touch with her.
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I am looking forward to seeing evidence of both Walter and Mr WIAA’s youthful curliness at Blogcon 26 (if not sooner).
I have never been similarly afflicted but my hair used to go out sideways at 90 degrees to my head when it hit the top of my ears. I used to think that at some point the weight would make it collapse downwards but it never did.
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I was Hubbell, and had a Katie. Sigh. Life, eh?
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It is life isn’t it. Fortunately I came round to realising early on that it obviously wasn’t meant to be so moved on, but it felt at first as if I’d lost a limb.
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Another super post Alyson, love it – and the photos! So interesting to see the style changes even in just a span of 8 years. We seem to manage to go through lots of phases/looks in our youth and it’s only when you reflect on them later that you realise none of them can have been that long lived and yet it felt like they were at the time. I guess it’s all about the length of time in proportion to how long we’d been alive, as with so many things.
On the curly hair front, I think really wild curls are absolutely lovely on both men and women. As a teenager before I met him Mr SDS had an amazing head full of long dark and very wavy locks, more like corkscrew ringlets really (I’ve seen the photos), and was apparently the envy of many a girl in his college days. Of course it all came off in punk times, although was never capable of being spiked up (he went for the Mick Jones look instead!)
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Bit worried about sharing those photos but they are mine, taken in a public place, and won’t be there for long but added to the context of the post. Hope my anonymity holds up!
Yes I noticed that about the hairstyle changes and in between those years I had short hair, a girl mullet, perms of all styles, and various colours (the blonde bits went lime green after school when I was working in a hotel in the country where the water was peaty). Since starting this blog nearly ten years ago I’ve only had two styles and nothing new in over eight years. The worry about damaging your aging hair means there will never be another perm and colouring is no longer something I do.
Yes, I love curls in hair and would have loved to have Carrie Bradshaw’s barnet! I like the sound of Mr SDS’s ringlets. Sadly Mr WIAA just had a big bush of frizzy hair primarily there to cover his ears which stuck out! Once he got them fixed he got his hair cut short over his ears and suddenly he was very popular with the girls so it can go either way.
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