In an attempt to convince ourselves that things are back to normal (a misnomer, this, as the pieces can never be put back as they were; things will, as they always do, return to some kind of normalcy, but it will be a new normal), we visited the DVD store, fluffed up our beanbag chairs, resurrected Vinyl Class, and watched "Lars and the Real Girl". I must have misread the reviews of this, as my expectations weren't high. But in fact it is a wonderful little film, a quiet celebration of the ordinary.
I swear, though, that the day after watching it, when I wandered into the National Library cafe for my morning fix (coffee and the New Yorker), there standing against the opposite wall waiting for her take-away coffee was the living embodiment of Lars's artificial friend. The hair was exact. The face was exact. Everything, in fact, was in its right place. Except, obviously, in the bosom department; nobody in the real world has bosoms that sit quite the way Lars's plastic pal's do (which is probably a good thing; as Billy Connolly said in a different context, you could take somebody's eye out with those). I looked away and she was gone. Was she ever there at all?
