before seeing ’sex and the city’ (the film)

Well, before seeing the rest of it, that is: on the New York Times web site and I suppose lots of other places on the web, you can see so many trailers that you wonder what’s left un-previewed.

In one sequence, Carrie is reading ‘Cinderella’ to a four-year-old girl, and as she closes the book, she says, “You know that this is just a fairytale, right, sweetheart? Things don’t always happen like that in real life. I just think you should know that now.”

And the little girl, gesturing toward the book, commands, “Again!”

To which Carrie responds, “And another one bites the dust.”

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It’s possible that Sex and the City is the dating bloggers’ ‘Cinderella’, the fairy-tale notion that we’re all leggy, stylish, and white. For ‘fairytale,’ substitute ‘movie’: “Things don’t always happen like that in real life.”

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But I need to confess my semi-ignorance: I never saw the television series. I heard of it, of course, but I didn’t watch it because I didn’t have the time or the interest. With two children at home, unpleasantly stressful work, and a husband about whom the less said, the better, Sex and the City was the last thing I wanted to see.

But in December 2006, as (during a subway ride) I was telling some friends about my new dating life — telling them, in fact, about some of Rolly’s eccentricities — my friend M suddenly said, in a loud voice, ‘Mimi, your life is just like Sex and the City!’ Her voice was so loud that everyone in the car turned to stare at me, to see who this woman was whose life was just like Sex and the City.

Then, a few weeks later, one of my dates (Yellow Tie, to be precise) asked me to meet him at the bar at Plaza Athénée, which advertises on its web site that an episode of Sex and the City was filmed there.

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Clearly, I had to know more about this sub-culture.

So I went to the series web site, studied the photographs and read through the plots of each of its ninety-some episodes.

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I was edified: their dates were more glamorous, but mine were weirder.

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Then on a plane last summer I saw my first SATC episode. And now that I have a television, I’ve seen a couple more.

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Yes, so, those four elegant young women represent only a tiny fraction of the New York dating population.

What about the divorced osteoporosis-ridden greying post-cataract empty-nested toe-separator-wearing AARP-mailing-listed women who date the eccentric hearing-aided balding stomached cholesterol-medicated cialis-users?

Yeah, what about us?

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I’m going to see the film with the thought that my life is a sort of reality check, if the 33 men I dated can be thought of in terms of a word like ‘reality,’ and many of them can’t.

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The New York Times article says that women are going to see this in ‘groups’ for a collective chick-flick experience. I’d sort of like to do that, but I want to see it the first night, and that’s a Friday, so I’ll be with Plan C. He dated 84 women, so he’ll offer another kind of reality check. He’s actually embarrassed about that statistic, but I’m proud of my 33.

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I may be in the same area code as these women — my phone number does begin with 212 — but am I on the same planet?

Stay tuned to sexagenarian07.wordpress.com .

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