Koo-koo, ca-choo

(This piece was submitted to Richmond (Va.) Style Weekly in June of 2005. It did not run on the "Back Page" but was published on its Website around that time.)

WHERE HAVE YOU GONE, MRS. ROBINSON?

(Paul Simon)

(Soaring from “The Graduate” to crashing and burning at “The Big Chill.”)

Long hair. Long hair was a totemic icon in the late 1960’s, for both guys and gals and a bitter point of contention for many others. My own hair was never very long, but I liked it on the ladies. Back then, long-haired Katherine (sp?) Ross was a lust-muffin for a lot of guys, and many of us were envious of Benjamin Braddock’s dilemma of lackluster courting of her character, Elaine Robinson, in “The Graduate” while having illicit, hot adultery with her perfectly-coiffed, “middle-aged” mama. (Dustin Hoffman should be so lucky. Nobody cared it was acting.) Most guys my age nurtured the fantasy of sex with the seductive 35-year-old Mrs. Robinson brilliantly rendered by Anne Bancroft. We never knew her given name; she was always “Mrs,” which lent even more mystery and attraction to the idea. Though some of us also fantasized about an encounter with the long-haired, plain-vanilla daughter, she was totally eclipsed by the mother. Katherine Ross has aged along with the rest of us, and now “Mrs. Robinson” has gone—forever.

Most of us lost our relative innocence with Benjamin in “The Graduate.” Our journey toward redemption with “The Big Chill” has been sidetracked in many ways. Those of us born in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s are truly middle-aged now, and we are as differentiated as the members of any other “generation,” notwithstanding the Baby-Boomer pigeonholes into which so many marketing types and journalists wish to cram us. Many of us arrested as our hardened, cynical selves exemplified by William Hurt’s character in “The Big Chill” without any such redemption. We hold ourselves up to the light and try to see the homogenized, media-generated Boomer archetype in ourselves, but to no avail. None of us ever got to make love to “Mrs. Robinson” or “Elaine” for real, and because they never really existed, that is probably a good thing. Yet, one thing we all pretty much share is the intensity of our aversion to getting older, and that seems to be what is driving the marketing bus. Most of us think of ourselves as forever young enough to walk in Benjamin Braddock’s flippers. Most of us aging guys who “graduated” with Benjamin Braddock in the late 1960’s will forever remember “Mrs. Robinson,” while few will remember “Elaine.” I shall always treasure the lust in my heart created by Anne Bancroft’s intense performance in “The Graduate.”
I was also quite interested by Anne Bancroft’s long-term marriage to the great funnyman, Mel Brooks. Somehow that fits: a “love totem” married to a comic genius; “Springtime For Hitler” meets “Mrs. Robinson,” proof that each had great tastes in the opposite sex. I truly envied Mr. Brooks his comedic achievements and his companionship to Ms. Bancroft.
So life passes by and we dote on our offspring; we deplore their failures and take pride in their accomplishments. We dread what the future will hold for them as we wondered about our own. We want to caution them against all the false turns and dead ends that we discovered (as if for the first time ever), but most of us should understand they will just have to find that out for themselves. We should warn them about the futility of following “role models” and the traps of fantasy romances, all to no avail.
Listening to NPR recently, I heard a clip of an interview with Ms. Bancroft mildly complaining about the preoccupation of many identifying her with “Mrs. Robinson.” I understand her annoyance, but I wanted her to understand what I was feeling also. And I never did get into “plastics,” as Mr. Robinson exhorted Benjamin to do.
So, with the untimely death of Anne Bancroft I shall simply say, with total affection that just about all of us, not just Jesus, will forever love “Mrs. Robinson” more that she will know.

Wo-wo-wo.