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: Silver Linings Playbook

I didn't think I was going to like Silver Linings Playbook.  But I always go to the movies on my birthday, and that was the only one out that I hadn't seen (or would consider seeing).  Also, I'd already gotten the idea to photograph my silver clothes and accessories to post with the review, and I wasn't about to abandon that pipe dream.

Football and ballroom dancing, strung together by the threads of grief and mental illness, shouldn't have made for a cohesive story, much less a moving one.  Also, I've never really liked Bradley Cooper on account that I think he's cocky.  Yet despite all of this, I was hooked.

We meet Pat Solitano (Cooper) as he is being sprung from a Baltimore mental institution by his mother.  Although the courts have discouraged the release of the bipolar Pat, who nearly beat his wife's lover to a pulp, they have allowed him to re-enter the world on the condition that he lives with his parents, namely said concerned mother and a just-laid-off Eagles fan fanatic of a father (Robert De Niro) who has plenty of problems of his own.

Still obsessed with his high school English teacher wife, Pat insists that his mother stop at the library on their way home (Philly, haven of hardasses and Eagles enthusiasts) so he can check out all the books on her syllabus.  Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms tops the list, and Pat devours it only to hurl it out the (closed) window in the middle of the night and storm into his parents' bedroom to rant about the sad ending and the unfairness of life and the refusal of Hemingway and all his ilk to give an already-suffering world just one measly silver lining.  It's an impassioned and funny scene (and one I appreciated, having never been a Hemingway fan) that shows just how much Pat is hurting.  It is this vulnerability, despite his violence, that makes him so sympathetic.

No second chance saga is complete without a love interest, and Pat finds his in Tiffany, a new widow and recovering nymphomaniac.  Not that he readily admits his attraction.  Tiffany gives him a run for his money in the hard words department, and he initially resists her friendship on the grounds that he wants to reconcile with his wife.  But Tiffany ambushes him one time too many on one of his trash-bag-clad (all the better to sweat in) runs, and after several unfiltered, in-your-face exchanges, he finds himself agreeing to be her partner in - of all things - a ballroom dancing competition.

Character-driven and introspective, Silver Linings is about two damaged people trying to make a go of it in this crazy, mixed-up world.  It's honest and unvarnished and makes sense of the idea that we're all just a little bit crazy.  Believe it or not, I left the theater in a much better frame of mind than when the credits rolled for This is 40.  Uplifting, indeed.

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.