Think Pink … Romance
by Nobody Special
Honestly we had planned romance, a simple, “Golly wasn’t Samantha great to work with? Such fun, with a spiritual aura and an admirable comfort with the cosmos. Too bad she had such lousy taste in men back in the early days, really. But since she retired, she dumped the guy and has a great career going. Some people you just know are going to succeed, no matter how many — or how few — clothes they happen to be wearing at work.”
We could have done that. It would have been fine, and then everyone could have just popped over to the solo video, which does in fact feature a rather fetching pink outfit. Truth be told it definitely falls into that “less clothes at work” category, but that hardly seems the point of the, um, exercise.
Somehow, though, the #MeToo movement came up (again), this time in the context of a recent episode of the Murphy Brown reboot. Referencing a line on the show, one of the (older) members of our group began talking about how the level of communication required in a dating relationship these days differs substantially from “expectations” in prior generations. Attempting to explain contemporary thinking, one of the characters in the show says something to the effect of how this “talk first” approach makes the situation “less romantic” perhaps, but that represents a small price to pay in order to avoid women feeling abused.
As with nearly all conversations of this sort that happen in the office, the elder people grew passionate, nearly desperate to explain social mores of the last century, while the younger people looked at us blankly, if not with outright amusement. Then they went back to their cell phones.
