The Good Wife = Perfect Television

I just finished watching The Good Wife on TV tonight. Its the only story-arc series I’m bothering to keep track of at the moment. Television series that have a story-arc are more difficult to get attached to. It means you have to allocate the time to make sure you watch it every week. If you miss an episode its like skipping a whole chapter occasionally while reading a book. I like this show enough to make the effort. I’m not really a detective/murder/police/lawyer genre person. I usually read Sci Fi for my escapist entertainment. My problem with crime/lawyer etc stories is that even after they tell me who did it I still don’t understand how it got done. Or if its in book form I frequently want to read the ending after the first few chapters. It helps me to figure out if I want to spend the time finishing the book. But it doesn’t really give away the plot. Even if you read the ending you still don’t know HOW A got to Z. But, it peaks my curiosity to read the end.

Anyway, back to The Good Wife. I like the main character, the wife. I remember the actress from ER. Boy does she look different now! She has really curly hair like me but now its so sleek, I’m jealous. Alicia, the wife is perfect. Smart and rarely a hair out of place. Perfect eyebrows. Perfect clothes, classic, always matching, sober colors, that fit her perfectly and look great. She is always collected and in control all the time. Knows what to say and even if she is taken by surprise rarely ever gives away anything she is thinking. Of course its easy for her – she has a crew of hairdressers and stylists at hand to make sure she stays looking that way and a script to tell her what to say. But I’ve run across women like that in my life. I can’t say that I ever became good friends with one though. Mainly because they intimidate the shit out of me. They are the kind of person I used to wish I could be but know that I never will be.

BK (before kid) I used to Dress. I liked clothes. They were my mask. I used to sew my clothes and I did it well. My costume fit me perfectly. I wore makeup (still do that) and spent a lot of time on trying to force my hair into doing what I wanted it to do. (gave up on that) But even though I easily admit to being a control freak, I was never an over-achiever. Even in school. If I got an A easily, I was happy with that. If I got a B and would have had to work hard to make it into an A, well I was happy enough with the B.

Actually there are two kinds of perfect. The first type is the kind of perfect that an over-achiever has had to work really hard to achieve and which somehow, nevertheless, always seems a bit forced and false. Then there’s the second kind – the perfect kind of perfect. That kind of perfect never seems false or even over-worked; it just seems perfectly natural. It has to do with Style, with a capital S. Grace Kelly had that. So did Katherine Hepburn. And so does Alicia.

Actually, I like Alicia, the good wife, because she is everything I am not. Even when I used to DRESS there was always something that kept it from being perfect. I definitely wasn’t classic style to begin with. I once had an outfit of black slacks with big yellow polka-dots, paired together with a yellow blouse with tiny black polka dots. I wore them with a black belt and a pair of black earrings that had small yellow and white polka-dots on them. So what wasn’t perfect, one might ask? Well in my mind, the yellow blouse wasn’t exactly the same shade of yellow as the yellow polka-dots on the pants. Close but not perfect. For a control-freak that’s important. But not being an over-achiever, it was good enough for me. I realized that I was never going to be the second kind of perfect. The kind that just comes naturally.

Because its not just about the clothes. Its the good wife’s whole manner. She’s so serious, on the outside at least. But not me. I’m serious on the inside, but not on the outside. Making a joke and being silly is more my style. I don’t mull over every word before I say it. I just blurt it out. I’m not so sure if that’s good or bad but I don’t really care any more. The only thing I want to be taken seriously for is the work I do. That’s important. And that the people that I care about know that I care about them. That’s also important. But I’ve pretty much given up trying to be any kind of perfect. Good enough is good enough for me. I can enjoy watching perfect people on TV and that’s just perfect.