25 Years of Bull Durham and Why Women Love It

Twenty-five years! It seems like yesterday that we saw Susan Sarandon tie Nuke to the bed and force feed him Walt Whitman. But it was twenty-five years ago this week that the romance began.

Bull Durham is the movie with Kevin Costner playing an aging catcher in the minor leagues. It’s a movie that appears to be about baseball life with the hopes and desperate desires of men who want to play ball for a living. And while it is seemingly a men’s movie with all the swearing, ass slapping and drinking and real life baseball lore, it is in fact THE all time best chick flick.

Yes, we love Kevin Costner from the first moment he arrives in the locker room wearing his navy blazer, rumpled white shirt and khakis that are the perfect shade of tan with a hint of olive. He’s a manly man who in the first 20 minutes gives the fabulous, if too artful, monologue about his beliefs which includes, “I believe in the cock, the pussy, the small of a woman’s back…that the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent, overrated crap”, and which ends with his belief in “long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last three days”.

Yes! You had us at “long, slow and deep”—and yes, at the Susan Sontag part too.

But it is a later scene that grabs every woman because we see something we really want.

“Do you want to dance?” Sarandon asks Costner, sitting in the kitchen late at night. He says yes, but surprises her by not by dancing but instead by sweeping all the food and dishes off the kitchen table onto the floor. He spins Sarandon onto that now empty table and they go at it.

Yes, what he does in that scene is part of it; we want a man to want us that much; we want a man who wants to make love a second time and on the kitchen table. We want that kind of passion. But, there is something bigger in that scene that is a woman’s dream come true.  What most women desire is not what Costner does, but what Sarandon does NOT do. As all of her dishes and the leftover food crash onto the floor Sarandon allows herself to be swept onto that table instead of diving for a broom, or a dish cloth and saying to her lover, “Hold on a second, I’ll clean up this mess and then meet you in the bedroom.”

No, she is in the moment and desiring this man and this sex more than she desires a clean floor and a neat kitchen. She wants the rapture of this man’s body even with cereal and milk oozing under the fridge. And she is not saying, “Oh dear God that was my mother’s china bowl.” Nope, she’s on that table having a ball.

Oh, to be that kind of woman. We assume the power is in the man, that to be taken so passionately would free us. But what we see in Bull Durham is a woman who CAN be taken. She is not thinking, “When did we last wash these sheets?” while a man is dutifully going at it.

Oh, we may wish for a partner to love us with such sweet abandon, but Susan Sarandon, in Bull Durham, shows us a woman who can abandon herself to pleasure 

Father's Day Forgiveness

In the book, Alcoholics Anonymous, Bill Wilson wrote, “Resentment is the number one offender.” You might expect the founder of AA to say that booze or too much drinking was the big problem. But no, Wilson, 20^th century self-made philosopher and self-made alcoholic knew better. He continued in the same paragraph, “From resentment flows all forms of spiritual disease.

Most of us know that, but it’s hard to get unstuck when a good, juicy resentment takes hold of you, so I like this pithier saying: “Holding a resentment is like setting yourself on fire and hoping the other person dies of smoke inhalation.”

Resentment as a topic on Father’s Day? But of course!

All of us had fathers. And with today’s social changes---divorce and remarriage-- some of us have two or more, so there’s plenty of fuel for those fires. Our parents disappoint us and we, in our turn, disappoint our children. In some families the injuries are bad: fathers may abuse, abandon, deprive or neglect. What do you do when you smell the smoke?

The antidote to resentment is, of course, forgiveness. Perhaps that will be the theme for some sermons today and surely a forgiveness story will show up on the Hallmark Channel as well.  But life is not a made-for-TV movie so how do you save yourself from the heat of resentment?

I had to extinguish a fiery resentment that I carried for years about my Father. When I was young my Dad worked many hours, travelled a lot, left his kids with my mother who was addicted to Dexedrine, and then he died young. I had a big box of resentment matches and I struck them all over myself. I had this idea that I just didn’t get what I needed from my father. More than one therapist agreed that my “issues” did indeed come from that deprivation. That intellectual understanding helped me to a certain degree but it also functioned as dry tinder for my favorite fire.

Then a few years ago on a retreat I was telling my story and the retreat leader gave me a surprising bit of redirection. I was telling her how my Dad had maybe given me 30 to 40% of what I needed as a kid and, well, poor me and bad him. “Well, yes,” the retreat leader said, “He may have only given you 40% percent of what you needed but what if 40% was all he had?” (He was after all a man whose parents died when he was young, he had grown up in poverty and he’d never been given a minute of emotional resource he could rely on). “So, she continued, “When your Dad gave you that 40% he was really giving you 100% of what he had.”

It was like a bucket of cold water poured on my head.

To forgive does not mean to pardon, it means to let go. Jesus, another great teacher, said, “Forgive them for they know not what they do.” In his language, Aramaic, he used the word shaw for forgive; shaw means “to untie”.

So if like me you set yourself on fire with victim-approved matches --untie yourself today. Forgiveness makes a great Father’s day gift; You give it to yourself.

Reminders to Me

I live in a surround of Post-its: Reminders, Affirmations, Things to think about.

Here are two that I wrote down a long time ago but still need to think about almost daily:

*What would detachment look like? Sound like? Think like? Feel like?

and

*What matters more: What people think of me? or Who I am and how I feel?

Yes, recovery never ends.

Eve Ensler -- In the Body of the World

“I could not put it down.” I have heard people say that about a book and I have read reviews that said that about a book and I always thought that sentence meant, “This is a really good book.”

I have read many really good books so I thought, “Well, I’ve had that experience too.” Until this morning. This morning, because the Sunday paper was late and I wanted to sit on my couch with coffee –my favorite thing early on a Sunday—I picked a book from the pile of new books waiting for me.

My thinking went something like: “Eve Ensler, vagina chick, great play, oh here’s more about vaginas, but she’s an important public intellectual, better take a look, probably can skim this, get the drift, then be done.”

I read the jacket cover and inside blurbs. And was thinking: “Oh, she had cancer, that’s too bad. Wonder when I’ll get cancer again, look how she uses her life experience to make art, even cancer, good for her.”

Then I started to read. Introduction was intriguing, “She’s going to make women’s bodies, child abuse, war, the Congo, activism and the environment a whole. How in the hell can she pull that off?”

Then chapter one.

It’s been almost an hour and a half, and I kept saying, “One more, I’ll just read one more chapter.”

I could not put it down.

Except for this part of me that feels so compelled to tell you what I am seeing and thinking and feeling and wondering about. So I got off the couch to come here to say to you:

Eve Ensler’s new book is called “In the Body of the World” and it’s about a woman’s body and women’s bodies and rape and nature and a child’s sexual abuse and a grown woman’s addiction, and friendship and medicine and the Mayo clinic and the scariest kinds of surgeries, and it’s about the Congo and hope where, really, there shouldn’t even be hope and it’s also about language and transforming personal experience and shit—literally shit—into art.

And I could not put it down.

The Course in Miracles Comes Again

My recovery began with the Course in Miracles. It was the stepping-stone to the Twelve Steps and it let me both radically and gracefully into the rooms. In that first year I was so unconscious and so sick. A small group of people, meeting once a week to discuss a strange, somewhat esoteric text, was my intervention. Books, always books.

There have been many writers over the years that have tried to lead others to The Course in Miracles. Early on Jerry Jampolsky wrote several small books using the “Course” principles. Wayne Dyer used ideas from the Course in most of his books. Then Maryanne Williamson took a huge leap forward with her teaching, writing and well, by becoming a media star all the while talking Course in Miracles talk.

Now a new, younger, and very hip teacher has emerged. Gabrielle Bernstein, author of “Spirit Junkie” and  “May Cause Miracles” is leading another generation to “the Course”. And I’m grateful. Gabby’s is a recovery story and a story of a young woman who had lots of spirituality combined with lots of addiction but who had the energy and boldness to grab it all and Go!

Gabby’s new book is a 40-day plan to learn the basics of the Course in Miracles: forgiveness, changed perspectives and changing your thinking. And I love that she does it without sackcloth and ashes.

In many ways there is nothing new under the sun but sometimes we need a new teacher to let the light in.