Really, Really Good
I love “Gilmore Girls.” I loved it when it was happening and after it happened and through the bonus “A Year in the Life” encore season created by Netflix. I love the dialogue on speed, the kind you have to listen to closely because if you don’t it doesn’t even sound like words. I love the characters and the family dynamics that were constantly being waded through-- so much so that I didn’t even mind that the entire seven season show seemed to be filmed in a circular town with a gazebo in the middle. Lorelai and Rory, the ever-evolving mother-daughter duo from the hit, have been in the background for lots of the days of our family’s lives.
A couple of weeks ago while wandering through a bookstore, I stumbled upon a book by Lauren Graham, the actress who played Rory’s mom in “Gilmore Girls.” The book was a bright yellow hardback with a caricature of her on the front. The title in hot pink letters read, “Have I Told You This Already?” Immediately, I snatched it up and started flipping through. (This is the gift of brick-and-mortar bookstores. Although Amazon has creepy spot-on algorithms that I will never really understand, it can’t bump you into things you don’t even know you want.) I bought the book, brought it home, and read it in one day.
Graham’s book was funny and real and thought provoking—everything that the “Gilmore Girls” had been, though it wasn’t a book about that. And what I discovered in reading it was that I loved Lorelai (and her slightly slower speaking alter ego, Sarah, in “Parenthood”) mostly because I love Lauren Graham. The parts she plays are partly her. She can’t seem to separate who she is from who she’s pretending to be and therein lies the magic. Though maybe the limit as well. She would be hard to believe as anybody else. Graham most often plays this strong but soft, likeable, single mother character who trips on the ropes that designate the lanes of herself in her own life. Such Hollywood typecasting keeps her in a pool that’s grand—if a plot calls for a self-deprecating female who can balance bold and tender like a ball on the nose of a seal, she’s the choice. Not a choice, the choice. And in so doing, she makes enough to live a lovely celebrity life. But the water she gets to swim in is surrounded by an edge.
Perhaps what I love the most about Lauren Graham is that she doesn’t seem to mind. It’s almost as if she prefers it that way. The pool lets her be who she most wants to be.
In one of her essays from “Have I Told You This Already?” Graham writes about an endeavor she and Mae Whitman, her much younger yet soulmate-ish friend whom she met on the set of “Parenthood,” embarked upon following Covid. The two enjoy a rich friendship despite the 20 year gap that separates their ages, with humor being the tie that binds them in the places their shared experiences don’t reach. During the global shutdown, one of the ways they entertained themselves (and perhaps served their creative spirits) was to create imaginary segments for an imaginary podcast. These ranged from “Ask Lori”, a recurring financial segment that grew from watching Shark Tank together, to “Why do I even still own this?” a feature where they’d pull things from their closets or their drawers. Their every conversation during the shutdown, seemed to somehow be swift and funny fodder for the podcast in their minds.
Then out of nowhere they sold the concept, and the podcast became a thing.
They called it “50/30” (a wink to the gap between their years) and almost as soon as it got started, joy began to leak from their banter like air out of a hole in a tire. The tidal wave of ideas that had been ever flowing, suddenly went dry. The intimate humor the two shared turned awkwardly self-conscious. It was as if everything that was something in the space that belonged just to them, somehow became nothing when they let the whole world in.
They pulled the plug on the podcast.
Some things are just the size they need to be. And some rare people have scotopic vision that gives them the information they need to ascertain exactly what size that is. It's almost as if they can sense the parts of themselves or their lives that might get swallowed up if they choose to make it about more.
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In a recent in-depth interview on the PGA golf documentary “Full Swing”, golfer Joel Dahmen’s career is one of many professional golfers spotlighted. Dahmen was the 57th best golfer in the world at the time of filming. He’s good. Really, really good. If you’ve ever tried to play a round of 18, you understand that “really good” is in a stratosphere most of us can scarcely comprehend. “Really, really good” is a whole other thing altogether. But Dahmen is not considered elite. He’s the fringe guy who once finished second at the U.S. Open but as often as not may fail to make any respective cut. In a refreshingly candid interview with both Dahmen and his caddy, Geno Bonnalie, Bonnalie says at one point, “Joel could be top 30 in the world, but I don’t know if Joel wants to be top 30 in the world.” A statement laid out less with condemnation than with admiration for a guy that seems to be really good with just being really good.
That’s a twist on the western way.
Mostly, in our country, if you can be better than the competition, you’re expected to be. And if you’re not, you’re a bum. If the external accoutrements don’t say you’re better than the other guy, you get labeled as “lazy” or “scared” or “apathetic.” After all, the great American philosopher Ricky Bobby once said, “If you ain’t first, you’re last.” We laugh because we know it isn’t true. And yet we kinda act as if it is.
Lauren Graham is not Julia Roberts. Joel Dahmen is not Tiger Woods. But what both these high achievers have in common is a peace they’ve found within their competitive worlds. They both aspire and work and achieve (far more than the vast majority), but they seem to know where the edges are--those lines that once they’re crossed, take more than they give.
Like the “50/30” podcast that knew where it belonged, those who fly the highest in a multitude of ways seem to have a knack for sensing where the wall of the pool is and when to flip and turn. And thus, they live happy. They get what they want and what they need by not sacrificing either for the other in the hunt.
P.S. Gilmore Girls