When Harry Met Sally
You've Got Mail was on tv last weekend. I love this movie, and even more now than when it was first released.
This was the movie I watched sitting on an airplane on a runway in Detroit after having been in a holding pattern for an hour and a half over snowy, unapproachable Chicago. This was the movie that was playing as I tried not to think about being on a plane with shadowy, odd-smelling strangers, when I tried not to ponder the possiblity of having to catch another flight in the morning (which is precisely what ended up happening.) And this was the movie playing when there was an announcement from the flight attendant for Katherine Brill to please exit the plane and report to the gate immediately.
Great, I thought, I'm sitting in Detroit on an airplane full of dark figures snoring and coughing around me for an indefinite period of time, and now I'm about to get news that something tragic has happened back home.
When I reached the gate they very indifferently and impersonally told me it was my father on the phone:
Hello?
Hey!
Not my dad.
Shaun?
Yeah! Hey! You wouldn't believe the hoops I had to jump through to get ahold of you!
How did you know where- how did you find me?
Well, we've been waiting at the airport for you and I saw the delay and made some calls...are you okay?
Yeah.
Everything's alright?
Yeah, I'm alright.
Ellen and I have to head back to campus, but I'll catch a cab back to the airport to get you. Just call me when you get here.
That could be the middle of the night.
That's okay.
Isn't- (we'll call her "Jane")- Isn't "Jane" coming to see you tomorrow?
Yeah, that's alright.
Okay, well we'll see...
Just promise you'll call me when you get in.
We'll see...
No. Promise.
Okay, I'll call you!
(It almost goes without saying that it wasn't too many days after this conversation that he broke it off with "Jane.")
Even watching the movie this weekend, it still amazes me that that was what was playing on the runway that snowy night, like a hand gently nudging me in Shaun's direction. And When Harry Met Sally had been on tv the Christmas just a month prior, when Shaun and I were becoming fast friends, "best friends." But do you have room for a best friend when you already have a boyfriend? Well I, for one, was naive enough to think so...
Stranger still, when you combine When Harry Met Sally with You've Got Mail, our love story is told almost in its entirety (minus a few parts like the sandwich-in-the-diner scene.) The reason these screenplays are so close to our life-scripts is for one of two reasons: Either Nora Ephron and I have lived very similar lives, or, (much more probably,) this is just the way good writing is; it convinces you every apparent oddity and quirk in your personality, in your gender, and in your relationships are wonderfully poetical and unique, and at the same time perfectly normal, allowing you to view life and all its paradoxes and pain as both humorous and sacred at once.
