Getting off the ride
Uptown Girls (2003)
happy birthday, ebie! you’re twenty-two now, which might just make you (and therefore me) a grown-up girl. terrifying! wonderful! i really can’t wrap my head around the fact that we met when you were just seventeen. we really were girls together. i’m so grateful to have known you and loved you through those malleable, horrific years in college of being not quite girl, not quite woman. remember all those late-night walks across campus, inexplicable boys, four-year plans for a half-dozen potential majors; those summers spent floating in your houston apartment pool; handwritten letters left on dorm desks; bedrooms with half our closets strewn across the floor two hours before every rooftop party…i could never extricate your colors from mine when considering the landscape of my coming of age. when i think of what it looked like and felt like to be a brilliant young girl, i’ll always think of us.
anyways, per our annual tradition of exchanging newsletters on birthdays, i wanted to put together some thoughts about you and me, about how life has seemingly flatlined following graduation, and if whether that’s just the fate all young women who have apparently exited the summer of their lives must reckon with—or if maybe, just maybe, there’s a way to be both twenty-two and still the most magical person in the room.
have a wonderful day, ebie <3 i love you for the girl-woman you are.
-KL
i watched uptown girls (2003) right around when the tiktok meme about it started circulating around. see: young dakota fanning and brittany murphy spinning in a teacup on coney island. fanning, playing precocious 8-year-old ray, silently turns the wheel on the spinning teacup faster while molly, ray’s lackadaisical 20-something nanny, looks at her, an unreadable expression on her face. in the moments leading up to this scene, tragedy has just struck, and this is as close to a cogent language of shared mourning as we can get: neither the little girl who pretends to be older, nor the older girl who pretends to be younger, have the emotional wherewithal to name this grief out loud.
the point of the meme is, of course, the look on molly’s face. even without any movie context, the screencap speaks volumes on a topic that has recently gripped every girlblogger i know by the jugular: the deeply sad, deeply helpless experience of realizing you are not a girl anymore. worldliness has stripped you of privileges entitled to the girl, as you find your disillusionment mars her optimism, your wisdom corrupts her purity, and your confinement to the daily labors of life severely cramps her freewheeling style. “i’ll live on water and sunshine!” molly protests playfully when she comes up short on money. indeed, girls can live on water and sunshine, but women cannot. in girlhood as magical realism,
writes:Being a woman is hard-lined and concrete. It is waiting for the bus and running other people’s errands. There is nobody who asks the question ‘How does she do it all?’ in good faith. The question is rhetorical and the woman is simply expected to do. I’ve been afraid of the day that I stop feeling like a young adult and start feeling like a regular one for this very reason. Have I done enough with my twenties? Am I planning for the future? When will I start feeling like a woman and stop feeling like a kid? Maybe childhood is something you let go of when you have a child of your own. This is an even more upsetting thought to me. To be a woman is to be a caretaker, and to be a girl is to be cared for.
where ray’s empty household and uninvolved mother have forced her to take up the cold affect of a little adult, molly remains stunted by the premature loss of her famous parents, whose deaths have provided her with a millions-dollar-deep trust fund and little direction in life. molly spends her nights and days in true nepo baby fashion, dancing through the glittery avalanches of new york city’s music scene, sleeping with emotionally unavailable men, and spoiling her pet pig moo (’it means pork in thai!’). then a series of events forces her to find work as ray’s nanny. meeting ray sets off a chain reaction and an emotional reckoning for molly, whose coming of age is perhaps overdue.
at one point, molly tells ray the story of how and why she ran off for a day as a child: overwhelmed by the news of her parents’ plane accident and newly bereaved without another soul in the world to care for her, she decided to pack her knapsack, look at a map, and board a train headed for coney island, where the only ride she was allowed on was the teacups. ‘i feel like i’m still there, spinning round and round and round, and the ride won’t stop, and i won’t dare get off,’ she says to ray, beginning to cry.
boasting ‘two obnoxious lead characters’ and an ‘uneven screenplay’, uptown girls failed to impress critics of its time and was ubiquitously panned by reviewers upon its release. of course, this didn’t stop me from making ebie watch it with me on the eve of her twenty-second birthday, because i loved this movie, and i knew she would, too.
there’s much of ebie in molly: girl extraordinaire rolls out of bed at 10pm and gets ready for her twenty-second birthday party; outside, enough delivered flowers to fill a small garden have overtaken the corridors, and even more extravagant gifts await her downstairs at the concierge desk. on her way out, she says something to the effect of ‘be a darling and drop everything off at the salvation army, please!’ to an exasperated, yet undeniably charmed manager, before proceeding to whistle for a taxi to take her downtown to a club. there, she is surprised by mountains of adoring beautiful people who all love her, sing to her, and call her the ‘girl of all girlies, molly gunn!’—finally, to conclude the fanfare, a cute guy gets up on stage and serenades molly, before getting taken home by her later that night. i can’t verify that all of this has ever happened to ebie, but i also can’t not verify it.
perhaps more importantly, this ridiculous sequence of freewheeling extravaganza was how life felt with ebie in college: tumbling, messy, carefree. we were no spectacular partiers, nor so widely beloved as this dead rockstar’s daughter, but our mutual dedication towards noticing and carrying out a romantic life acted as tremendous amplifiers, elevating even the tiniest moments of shared beauty or whimsy between us to memoir-worthy levels of importance. a moment experienced in one another’s company was a moment somehow aesthetically enriched and made more meaningful—how we made one another feel, how we exerted a tangible beautifying force over each other’s lives, and how we prioritized this force over everything else, not only solidified our friendship but catapulted it into the realm of co-conspiratorial devotion. at my inexperienced age of nineteen, i found myself so sick with love for her, and so amazed that i’d not only found a friend, but a martyr to romanticism, that it became impossible to imagine our friendship would ever change.
in so many ways, i believe meeting ebie at the time that i did saved me. but now, the tricky next step is figuring how our friendship as women can ever come close to replicating the magic of our friendship as girls. to that end, i don’t have an answer yet, only that i do believe girlhood must end. ‘childhood feels as though it’s being extended, drawn out like a watercolor, the pigment running paler and paler,’
writes on the twenty something teens phenomenon. in another essay about resisting the urge to be a girl forever, huizinga invokes susan sontag’s suggestion that, ‘instead of being girls, girls as long as possible… they can become women much earlier - and remain active adults, enjoying the long erotic career of which women are capable, far longer.’i feel sad sometimes, thinking of what living and working on opposite sides of the country can do to and cannot do for your friendship. no more sleepovers, no more eight-hour-long exam cram sessions at the library, no more asking you to come over unprompted because i’m more motivated to cook dinner for two than i am for one. i’m finding out, likely right alongside you, that growing up means losing out on a million little intimacies in exchange for an overwhelming, almost suffocating breadth of autonomy. i’m scared of getting off the ride, too, i realize. the lights were so bright with you, the colors so vivid: in the dizzying throes of girlhood, time seemed to stand still, then flow like water all over us, making us feel terrified and invincible in turns. but our lives as women are long, longer than our lives as girls ever were, and i’m going to choose to believe that’s a good thing. i know it’s a good thing. on the matter of growing up, huizinga writes:
Oddly enough, I’ve found that when I step into womanhood more fully, embracing the fact that with each passing day, I’m growing wiser, stronger, and more in touch with myself, I return to that child-like sense of wonder and play… Life can really begin when you let it push you along.
sitting with ray in the same teacup, molly lets go of one final vestige of her own girlhood: her fear of stepping off the ride that makes the world whirl and burst into unidentifiable streaks of heart-numbing technicolor. with somebody to care for for the first time, her eyes are open, she is watching ray cope with the uncopeable, and she sees them both clearly. this is the moment molly finally crosses over from girl to woman, for better or for worse.
i cried twice during uptown girls. once during the teacup scene, and again at the very end, when ray dedicates a surprise performance to molly at her recital. dancing loose-limbed and without self-consciousness for the first time, ray lets her hair down, cartwheels across the stage, and smiles big for molly, not unlike how a little girl should. fittingly, the accompaniment to her dance is ‘molly smiles’, an ‘isn’t she lovely’-esque ballad written in the movie by molly’s late father. up until this moment, molly has refused to listen to her song, repeatedly waving off references and warbling verses by other characters with a tight smile—but womanhood has changed her. having let go of her father’s prized guitar collection and put the money towards renting a small studio instead as she prepares to attend school, molly indeed smiles from where she sits in the audience. there are no more dozens of bouquets waiting in her corridors, no more mountains of gifts at the concierge, no metropolitan magnetism blowing her life out of exquisite proportion anymore—but there is something clearer and sharper now, a candid joy in taking ownership over her future. it’s true: life can really begin when you let it push you along.
as for you and me, ebie, i have a feeling we’ll be OK getting off this ride someday. already, the world outside our little teacup is beginning to come into focus. but if it’s all the same to you, i’d like to go spinning round and round just a few more times with you.
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forever 170girls twirling hand in hand on that SoCal beach
i love u forever!!! <3