Page Match: Ann With a Tee vs. Anne of Green Cables

I Heart Howlite Necklace

 Mesa Medallion Necklace

Triple Horn Unicorn Necklace

Olivia Octopus Necklace 

There are a lot of Ann's out there in pop culture, some great and some questionable.  But the best and brightest to me is Anne from L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables.  This starry-eyed, red-headed orphan's boundless imagination and sunny sweet spirit won her the hearts of everyone on Prince Edward Island.  My aunt gave me the boxed set one year for Christmas.  (See below; and yes, in volume one, Anne is defaced -- literally, by peeling paper in her facial region.  If that doesn't say much-loved, obsessively-read childhood favorite, then I don't know what does.)  As soon as I started reading the first book, I was hooked.  Anne's charming personality -- and Montgomery's heart-breakingly beautiful prose -- cast a fairy tale spell over what was an otherwise ordinary Canadian town.  That world and its everyday magic was what inspired me to start keeping a journal.  I was so eager to capture everything, to jot down every sun-dappled street, cherished new dress, and wonderfully weird thought until it became something better than it was in my mind.  This went double for the bad stuff -- once I put my worries on the page, they always seemed suddenly smaller.  So, I loved Anne for her colorfulness and her courage.  Also because she insisted that people spell her name with its proper "e."  Which I found especially funny because I always got annoyed when people inserted a superfluous "e" in Tracy.

So, if the "great" Ann is Anne of Green Gables, then who's the "questionable" one?  Why, women's fashion retailer Ann Taylor (and for the sake of this post, its more affordable offshoot, Ann Taylor Loft).  For those who don't know, this chain is a bastion of sensibly stylish apparel for no-nonsense women and as such has been the butt of many a movie and TV show joke:

This is 40: Leslie Mann's Debbie laments turning the big 4-oh by whining, "I don't want to start shopping at Chico's and Ann Taylor!"  'Nuf said.

"Girls": Season 1: A job interviewer gives Marnie's suit the stink eye and asks, "Where does one even buy an outfit like that?," to which Marnie flatly replies, "Ann Taylor."  A few seasons later: Shoshanna interviews for a job at Ann Taylor (corporate office, no sweater folding for this one) and it's going gangbusters until she passes because she wants something bigger and better.  Her bravado leads to a dead-end job in Japan, which kind of makes Ann the one that got away in this story.  Moving on.

What's Your Number?: Anna Faris's recently fired Ally uses an Ann Taylor gift card to buy a new interview suit (Ms. Taylor, it seems, always has a seat at the job hustling table).  However, unlike with Shoshanna, it's the Ann Taylor avenue that's the dead end because Ally's true destiny is making clay figurines.  Score one for team crafty!

Instant Family: Rose Byrne's Ellie deals with a foster daughter who tests her by making a crack about her old lady sweater, causing an outraged Ellie to protest, "This is from Ann Taylor!"  Sorry, Ellie, but the kid knows her stuff.

So there you have it. Ann Taylor, bastion of boring, er, sensibly stylish apparel.  A hip and free-wheeling fashionista such as myself wouldn't be caught dead wearing so much as a pair of socks from there, right?  Well, almost.

I actually have three Ann Taylor Loft garments in my wardrobe: two tops (above) that I bought eons ago and a cardigan (also above) that I picked up at an outlet in Nashville last year.  The tops aren't even Ann Taylor brand, but rather the cute and bucolic-sounding Daisy and Clover.  My favorite thing about them is that they're flattering -- so take that, sensible!  My favorite thing about the cardi is the sperm whales.  Upon seeing it out for the photo, the husband asked, "Did you put the octopus necklace with the sperm whale sweater because of their iconic yin and yang battle for the sea?"  To which I replied, "Shell, yeah."  (And yes, he really talks like that, which just goes to show we were made for each other.)

So, if that's it for Ann, then what's up with this hunter-hued sweater?  Straight out of Arizona Jeans country, this classic dream weaver serves as a backdrop for my Triple Horn Unicorn Necklace to represent -- who else? -- our girl Anne of Green Gables.  Because nothing says whimsy and wonder like one (or three) of these mystical beasts.  I've always loved unicorns (obvi).  And I think that lots of other girls and women (and/or boys and men, hey, I'm not here to judge) do too because they represent both childhood comfort and the sometimes uncomfortable idea of the fantastic and far-out unknown.

Anne with an "e," blink once if you agree.  What's that?  I have to replace volume one first because you can't blink and also might be coming down with age-related macular degeneration?  Fair enough.  I'll put in a word with Santa.  And also maybe that aunt.

Movie Moment: This is 40

This isn't forty, but a random Brigantine sunset that I've decided to use in lieu of a movie poster because, as a reformed blogger, I no longer post purloined pictures.  (That having been said, I'm still not a reformed moviegoer, having smuggled Christmas-gifted chocolate-covered potato chips into the theater last night.)  Besides being beautiful, this sunset has that contemplative aura that accompanies all such photographs of natural phenomena.  Which makes it the perfect entree to a post about movie musing.

Judd Apatow's self-proclaimed "sort of sequel" to Knocked Up, This is 40 is the story of Pete (Paul Rudd) and Debbie (Leslie Mann), the always-caustic but once upwardly mobile couple with whom we first became acquainted in the background of Ben and Alison's baby drama.  A far cry from the affluent family that once sheltered Alison in its guest house, the troubled twosome and their two daughters weather financial problems complicated by relationship problems complicated by parent problems complicated by parenting problems complicated by the problems that come with the big 40.  The results are often more cutting than comic, straddling the murky middle ground between Apatow's raucous Knocked Up and his bleak Funny People. Even so, This is 40 emerges as the more satisfying and multi-faceted movie.

Debbie runs a clothing boutique from which she suspects her employees are stealing, and Pete has left the safe world of Sony to start his own (struggling) retro rock label.  But unlike the authors of idealistic destinies that run rampant in other kinds of movies, Pete and Debbie pay the price for their entrepreneurial existence and are so maxed out that they're in danger of losing their house.  It is this conflict, as well as finding time to be a couple in addition to parents, that is at the heart of this dark comedy, not the lure of infidelity, as in similarly genred but far less trenchant flicks such as The Change-Up and Hall Pass.          

As a thirty-year-old, not-quite-yet-married woman without kids, I won't pretend to be on intimate terms with Debbie's issues.  But I can say that they seemed real and disturbing and that despite my discomfort in witnessing them, I appreciated being exposed to a love story that was not sugar-coated.  Unlike your garden variety romantic comedy, This is 40 is about all the stuff that happens - and keeps happening - after the dust clears from the fairy tale wedding.  

Now that I've gotten all the serious stuff out of the way, I'd like to give a shout-out to Paul Rudd's hair.  It looks better than ever, even if his dad (a reprehensible mooch played by Albert Brooks) tells him to cut it.      

Movie Moment: The Change-Up

If ever there was a movie made up of equal parts sleaze and schmaltz, then it's The Change-Up. A weird way to begin a post I know, but that's what comes to mind. Although the identity switching comedy is as old as the hills (Freaky Friday, anyone?), it remains intriguing. After all, who wouldn't want to trade places with someone else for a while, if only to find out what that person's life is like? It was this thinking (along with my love of stupid comedies, which, incidentally, requires almost no thinking) that lured me into the theater.

The Change-Up centers around best buds Dave (Jason Bateman), a family man on the fast track to law partner, and Mitch (Ryan Reynolds), a playboy out-of-work actor. Their moment of reckoning comes when they pee in a public fountain one drunken night while confessing jealousy for each other's lives. The lightning crashes, the lights go out, and before they know it, they've swapped bodies.

Workaholic Dave realizes how much he misses having the time and privacy to do things like Rollerblade and use the bathroom uninterrupted. But he also learns that Mitch's life isn't all fun and games, eventually appreciating just how good he has it and how much he's been neglecting his family. Likewise, Mitch laps up the full-time attention of "people who care about his day," and the perks of an always-full fridge. Still, balancing work and family is tough for this perpetual slacker, and he longs for his freedom.

Ground-breaking it's not. But it is interesting in an introspective, "what does it all mean?" kind of way. Not that I imagine that that's the movie's message, or that it even has a message. I caught an interview in which Reynolds and Bateman were quipping that The Change-Up has lots of levels, and that you have to look deep - real deep - to get them all. To be sure, the gratuitous nudity, F-bombs, and just plain gross-out bathroom shenanigans lent the story a B-movie quality that undercut its discordant and often desperate sappiness (and made me look away - far, far away). But then, like most moviegoers, I know that the quality of movies takes a nosedive come August, the glitter of the June and July blockbusters already in the dustpan to be resurrected into DVDs and the winter holiday features still months away.

All criticism aside, it was entertaining to watch Bateman and Reynolds be catapulted into caricatures of the respectively priggish and wise-guy types they typically play only to be reeled back in to portray polar opposites. I wasn't laughing hysterically along with my fellow theater-goers, but I didn't long for my $10.00 back either.