Like in the Mooooovieees

How to make a Hollywood love scene.

Step 1: Get two absolutely gorgeous people who wake up each morning looking like someone did their hair while they slept (because in reality, there was a hairdresser who did their hair right before they "woke up").

Step 2: Set up some impossible scene. Examples include a boating trip on a lake filled with swans and white ducks with a rain storm on the way back. Or a first dance leading to true love that very night. Or at work while others are in the offices just next door. Or sworn enemies who can't even stand to look at each other who suddenly discover that nobody else makes their heart go pitter-patter like that.

Step 3: Get a set dresser to strew clothing around the scene as if it has been ripped/thrown off in a fit of passion.

Step 4: End the scene with the weird L shaped sheets that seem to cover the woman to her shoulders but the man only to his waist.

To hear Hollywood tell it, all relationships are fated by the stars and when they align just right then clothes go flying and you find love.

The movies are wrong! And hopefully you've already realized that.

Because I have to tell you, when I pretend to be a set dresser and strew clothes about the house and my husband looks at me funny and asks me what I'm doing and I reply by saying, "You know, like in the moooovies" (and you have to really hold out the O for effect), all he can do is laugh at me. And that never happens in the movies.

I keep a hair elastic next to the bed so my hair isn't a poof ball when I wake up in the morning. I don't have a hair dresser who brushes and curls it for me just before my alarm goes off. Some mornings my own breath disgusts me. While there are times when passion surprises one of us, there has never been a ripping and flying of clothing.

Instead of that we have the real thing that most of Hollywood just can't seem to get. The killing bugs that scare me. The cleaning the kitchen together. The sitting quietly in the evening and reading. The grocery shopping and taking out the trash.

There is standing on the patio in the rain. There are looks that say so much. There is soft caressing. And there is a lot of laughter (and not just at my attempts to make things like the movies).

And it's real, and nothing like the moooovies!