One of my favorite things about my first husband was that he and I used to quote lines from Steel Magnolias to each other all the time. If one of us groaned when getting up off the couch, the other would say, “Exercises are good for her!” Or if I was meal prepping for the week, I might say, “It’s in the Freezes Beautifully section of my cookbook!” If we were saying goodbye for the day, we’d say, “You know I love you more than my luggage.”
This little nugget is among the facts of my first marriage that has prompted more than one gay man of my acquaintance to laugh sympathetically at me, pat me on the shoulder, and say something like, “Oh, honey,” by which they usually mean, “Lady, you were quoting Steel Magnolias to each other, and you didn’t realize he was gay? Get real.”
Now, do I know plenty of gay men who couldn’t identify a Steel Magnolias quote if it bit them? Absolutely. Do I know several straight men who love that movie? Also, yes. It takes all sorts to make a world.
Arguably, the most iconic and memorable scene from Steel Magnolias happens near the end, when Sally Field delivers a devastating graveside monologue about the death of her daughter (played by Julia Roberts), which is only interrupted by Olympia Dukakis offering to let Sally Field hit Shirley MacLaine to relieve herself of her pain.
I was 12 years old when that movie came out, and I saw it in the theater with my mom. The entire theater, including my mother and I, were SOBBING as Field cried through her lines, and then, when Dukakis pushed MacLaine into view, and even Sally Field began to laugh, I heard gasps followed by raucous laughter, including my own. I loved the total catharsis of that feeling. I felt calmed, cleansed and refreshed as we left the theater, in a way that only crying or only laughing had never made me feel before that point.
I knew then that, as Our Lady of Perpetual Hope herself, Dolly Parton, says later in the film, “Laughter through tears is my favorite emotion.”
Ancient Greek philosophers, dramatists and orators often praised the concept of catharsis, which summons up the physical idea of vomiting — a literal cleansing of the organs. From their perspective, if theater could aid in the release of any negative feelings or tension, then it was a useful social and political tool. The Cathars, a medieval religious sect, took their name from that idea of purging — their name derives from a Greek root that means “the pure ones.”
Oddly enough, one of the things the Cathars were known for was the denial of the flesh — the elevation of the spirit over the body, the privileging of mind over matter.
But maybe what makes laughter and tears, either combined or individually, so cathartic in that best sense of release and relief, is that they render our bodies undeniable and return us to them. In his 1902 “Essay on Laughter,” writer James Sully says, “We will try to avoid the error of those who in their subtle disquisitions on the comic idea forgot that laughter is a bodily act.”
When I watched Steel Magnolias with my mom, I was three months into 7th grade. I was miserable. The one common thread between the 12-year-old me watching that movie and the 26-year-old me who left the man who used to quote it with me is that both those versions of myself wanted nothing more fervently than to escape my body.
In 7th grade, which was a harder year even than my divorce, my youth director’s kind wife took me out for breakfast at McDonald’s every Thursday. On the last night of my first marriage, I folded socks and watched a Primetime Live about Bjork’s stalker, in which my interest was wholly absorbed, and it was one of the most soothing moments of my life.
To tell an honest story of any hard time is to include details like this — sometimes absurd, sometimes mundane. To remember that there were moments when your attention was fully diverted and you knew yourself to be alive in a body that needed breakfast and clean socks.
On the night my grandfather died, my grandmother refused to go to the bathroom for hours because he was comforted only when he could feel that she was holding his hand. The first thing she did when she knew he was gone was to let go of his hand, push her chair back from his hospital bed, and go to the bathroom.
We are bodies even in our devastations. Stories are often cerebral things, but to tap into the body listening or the body telling is alchemy. Tragedy has its own gravitational pull, but so does comedy. One is not more real than the other simply because it’s heavier.
If the Greek view of tragedy was that it produced catharsis, then the Greek view of comedy was that it balanced the literal “humors” of the flesh — the viscous materials they believed life was made of: “blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile.” According to Thanos Matanis, “It was believed [in Ancient Greece] that those with a good balance of humors would be naturally light-hearted, a trait that involved what we now call a sense of humor.”
I’m 48 now. There are still times I remember the struggling 12-year-old I once was or the devastated 26-year-old. I wish I could pluck them out of time and shield them. But then I remember a hushed theater. Gasps. Raucous laughter.
I return the plucked and tattered versions of my old self to the moments they were in: close to their kind mother in a dark theater, alone on a soft couch folding warm socks.
I leave them to live their sad funny stories.
I do my best to tell them.
