Still Alive.

Saw the French & Saunders Still Alive show this evening, and it put me in a slightly better frame of mind. Actually, I was a bit teary at the end (before the encore bit with the wall), but so was the man sitting next to me, so I guess that's okay. They wore the funny pants through most of the show, making funny things even more funnier. Still, it's sometimes amazing the thin line between horribly funny and horribly painful. I think the boarding school skit must have really hit some people hard, because I heard a lot of stifled moans at its conclusion, as if everyone thought it was funny, but then couldn't laugh because they'd suddenly realized that it could have been them left at school for the holidays. Ditto for the sketch with Saunders as the whacked out, emotionally fragile, Glastonbury-esque mom and French as the smart, overweight daughte who could never be sure her mother loved her because she was fat. It was funny, but I know many women were watching the interaction thinking, "That's what my mom said when she wanted me to lose weight!"

Speaking of weight, there's a photo in the program/brochure of Dawn French, looking quite young. The woman next to me said, "Oh, she's so young! And thin!" And I replied, "But you know, I bet she didn't realize she was thin." And the woman nodded and said, "We were just talking about that, how we thought we were so huge when we were young, but now we look back, and think, oh, if only I could be that skinny." "Yeah," I said. "I was tiny when I was in college, and all I could think about was how fat I was. It's amazing, isn't it. We all start out behind, thinking the worst of ourselves, don't we?"

And then we enjoyed two women taking the stage, and holding it as their own, and that was the best thing that could have happened after such a conversation.