Weekly Girl Crushes: Uterine Edition

 

Image Credit: W.W. Norton
Image Credit: W.W. Norton

Girl Walks into a Bar … Comedy Calamities, Dating Disasters, and a Midlife Miracle by Rachel Dratch

Landing a featured role on Saturday Night Live is apparently WAY simpler than finding a suitable mate in NYC. To which I say, indeed. Rachel Dratch is mostly known for her Debbie Downer character and her infamous exit from the original cast of 30 Rock, so you might buy this book thinking it’s another Bossypants or Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?. But no. It’s a pregnancy memoir wrapped in a dating memoir surrounded by snark—so much delightful snark. When she enters the house of horrors world of over-thirties dating in NYC, she notes that friends are always telling her to watch out for red flags, which in normal cities usually refer to the simple no-nos of dating—like a man who wears a wedding ring, has a bed temper, or under tips. But in our fair city, she dates a man who may totally be a cannibal. And cannibalism is, admittedly, kind of a nonnegotiable. And then, in the ultimate dating urban legend, she meets a normal human male at a bar—only to discover that he, of course, lives in northern California. After disregarding the first rule of dating (i.e., that long-distance relationships will destroy your soul and make you THAT girl who is always crying on the B train at 8 AM), Dratch coughs up the airfare … and ends up pregnant. After a few months of dating someone who doesn’t live in the same time zone, she’s knocked up in her mid-forties. There are like four female urban legends in there. During the course of her pregnancy, she laments the fact that baby books are all written for women in “normal” cohabitating relationships. One book suggests that husbands should take their pregnant wives to see “the new Anne Hathaway flick.” There are so many problems with that sentence—the least of which being the fact that the latest Anne Hathaway flick was Les Miserables. Once Dratch gives birth to her son, she becomes the least annoying attachment parent ever, by which I mean the only attachment parent I have ever heard of who didn’t make me rethink sexual reproduction altogether. While this story may sound like an Anne Hathaway flick circa 2005, the book doesn’t have a tidy ending. But it does have a hopeful ending. And it offers women throughout the five boroughs an excellent piece of dating advice: if you want a committed relationship in NYC, find someone who doesn’t live here. Continue reading “Weekly Girl Crushes: Uterine Edition”