Feeling pain

New York

My love for Ashley Judd has gone the way of Iraq. Remember a couple of years ago, when a friend of mine offered to take me backstage to meet her and I got cold feet? I have just read an interview she gave, and I thank God for my cold tootsies. Here’s the beautiful Ashley on life in general and Indian brothels in particular:

I spend time talking about how women’s reproductive health is the nexus of eradicating a lot of inequality…I’m able to maintain healthy boundaries, to hold space with exploited people with more integrity…I feel pain about poverty. When I go to a brothel, I feel complete and sometimes homicidal rage. And I am frankly going to die if I am not part of the solution. I will take in all those feelings, and they will eat me alive.

No Ayn Rand she. Mind you, I dig what she says about inequality and poverty and the horror of Indian brothels, but it’s the inarticulate way she says it that has turned me off. Why are young actors so embarrassingly addicted to jargon and so tongue-tied? When one is as attractive as Ashley it accentuates the solecisms: hence my ardour going south.

Forty years ago I was dating a ballerina of the New York City Ballet. She was a pretty little thing but highly tuned and very nervous. She hated it when I got drunk and I knew it was not going to last. One night at P.J. Clarke’s a fight broke out at the next table — Clarke’s back then was full of white professional football players and Irish drunks who goaded the former once in their cups, so no one paid too much attention.