During the early mornings before everyone else's rises..I often get up and put on the classic movie channel and watch all the old classic film stars do their thing...I often do this while I am applying my makeup...and every so often I will see a film I never saw before and get intrigued by...such was the case this past Tuesday...when I saw the movie SID AND NANCY, it was the first time I saw this movie all they way through, I've seen small clips in the past...but I watched it all the way through this time. Start to finish..
All I really knew of Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen was that he was a member of one of Kurt Cobain's (my musical hero...) favorite bands The Sex Pistols and Nancy was his girlfriend...I also knew Sid supposedly killed Nancy...but that is all I really knew...So I watch this movie which so intrigued me that I took a trip to the library yesterday in search of my information on the punk duo...and to my surprise I found a well-worn paperback called "And I don't want to live this life," the book her mother had written after Nancy's death. The cover was a photo of Nancy at the height of her Punk notoreity, her eye makeup inky and exquisite, her expression blank as a model's except for the defiant set of her dark painted mouth.
The book was about what a troubled kid Nancy had been-a hellion with a freakishly high IQ and a whole spat of drug and pyschological problems, who was kicked out of school after school and whose family let her move to New York when she was only seventeen, just so they could be free from her spectacular room-trashing tantrums. Now this was a girl who could get her way....I pored over the photos facinated at the transformations Nancy had made, from suburban girl with akward school portraits to the bleach-blond punk princess on the book's cover and then finally, to obituary.
Of course, as a woman of my age knows, I shouldn't be idealizing a dead girl who'd been mentally ill and on herion..but I've been devouring every girl gone crazy chronicle I can find..it's my favorite kind of fiction, from Sybil to The Bell Jar(sylvia plath...one of my favorite author's ever) to I never promised you a rose garden to Bastard Out Of Carolina...and so on...they are stories about girls who feel wildly out of sync with the world who got to yell and scream and punch and kick and who quit being good( a desire I have often felt myself but never acted on)..I know I'm not like Nancy but something about her feels like the truth. For all her wild druggy exploits the thing that sticks with me the most was the caption accompanying a photo of a teenage Nancy, vamping it up for the camera in a sweater and ski pants, " she wore the outfit once and then threw it away," wrote her mother bitterly.
So I watched this movie even though on screen Nancy screeched and bawled and was hooked on smack, and was really just the girlfriend everyone hated..and even though I knew about Nancy and how she was, somehow this Nancy in the movie was not the Nancy I knew. I saw the movie a second time just to make sure it was still sad when Nancy died in the end, and it was. And I was driving home from the library yesterday I wondered what else I could be if I didn't want to be a "good" daughter, or bad girlfriend or dead. And then it kinda dawned on me...there are so many things I wore and then wanted to throw away....~~~~~~~~~the SUSHI CHICK~~~~~~~~~~~~!
