Shallow Be My Name

By now there are two things about me I am certain you know. The first, that I am shallow and proud of it is, I would think, fairly obvious. After all, it is rather unlikely that I would have spent the past four years writing this blog if that wasn’t the case. The second thing to which I am pretty sure you would agree, is that I have some experience being associated with a person who is much more famous than I. And let me tell you, four years puts that phenomenon to shame. I mean who would have thought that 45 years ago, give or take a few, when one of my classmates joined me in the school elevator singing “People” in a way that made it clear he had discovered some kind of connection between me and that particular ditty, it would be a precursor of what was to come? Since that first “sighting” of course,  I have become accustomed to the various rudimentary impressions of such favs as “Memories” and “Don’t Rain on My Parade” (honestly, who could?), in the same way that over the past four years I have become quite comfortable in my role as the “shallow gal”.  At least I was until a couple of weeks ago when something quite unexpected happened. And it was right out of the blue.

I suppose one should always be cautious about becoming too comfortable in life. We see it all the time in the movies. Or the soaps. You know how it goes. Your favourite character has an unfortunate accident while on her way to find her long, lost brother. Left with amnesia, she spends the next year working as a store clerk in a town not so far from her own until one day, finally, that brother, who by the way has been happily living in her house for the past year (well why not, it was empty after all) walks in and, although he hasn’t seen his sister in forever really, sees himself in the store clerk’s face. He hesitates for a moment, decides it can’t be true but nonetheless, returns the next day. Realizing he might just as well be looking in a mirror he knows, in his heart of hearts, that it simply must be her. It takes a few days of sharing stories from their checkered (to put it mildly) childhood but after much convincing, he finally gets her home, gets her better (not such an easy feat) and life is good for them both. They spend the next three years bonding, remembering the good times forgetting the bad, making up for time lost. Life is comfortable but you have that nagging feeling that when things get too comfortable, something not so great is bound to come along to stir that pot of theirs and inevitably it does.

(My husband some times tells me that these treatises of mine sometimes get a little derailed. I never said this train ran on a track in the first place. Trust me. Eventually this is all going to make sense.)

My guess is that by this time most, if not all of you have heard something about Mr. Donald Trump. Clearly we all know that he is interested in becoming the President of those United States of America, but it wasn’t always so because Mr. Trump, or perhaps I’ll call him “The Donald”, has done many things in his life to date. Most recently we learned that “The Donald” gained some notoriety from starring in a TV show where teams of celebrities compete in a series of rather inane tasks for which they are mostly ill prepared, culminating in one or more of them being “fired”.  From what we are not really sure as most of them are not actually gainfully employed anyway, which possibly is the most reasonable explanation for why they agreed to go on the show in the first place. And I don’t suppose I have to tell you that before all of this hoopla, “The Donald” built many an empire. Like you, I knew all of this but never really thought much about it, or him, until recently when a dear friend of mine brought the following quote to my attention:

“Whenever I’m making a creative choice, I try to step back and remember my first shallow reaction. The day I realized it can be smart to be shallow was for me a deep experience.” (D. Trump, 2004). 

Hmmm…so now it’s me and Mr. Trump. As you might well expect, this revelation jolted me right the heck out of that comfort zone of mine. I mean, it’s one thing to consistently come up with witty retorts to that age old “do you know who you look like” question but quite another to find yourself sitting in the same haystack as “Mr. T”.  Let’s face it. At best it’s a rather dubious distinction. Somewhat perplexed by the whole thing, I was left wondering what to do next and that’s when it happened.  The idea just popped into this little head of mine. As distressed as I was about my new celebrity association, I got to thinking. Mr. Trump has a lot of money. At least much more than I have and one day he’s bound to realize what a good idea it would be to have a website in which he could wax eloquently about the creative benefits of being shallow. He’s going to need a catchy name for the site. I’ve got what he needs. So Mr. Trump, give me a dingle and we can negotiate. I won’t be greedy. I’ll settle for just a million or two. And make no mistake. I will be really comfortable with that.