Olivia

I thought of this song last week, I assumed out of the blue. More likely, her picture or name in a story announcing her death was in a sidebar that I saw without noticing. I associate her with a particular memory, of Monroe* dorm at W&M, watching her sing this in the summer of 1974.  I suspect it was this performance on the Andy Williams Show. The young men were, frankly, whimpering while looking at her, spontaneously volunteering out loud to be the one Olivia loved, promising to leave whoever our other girl was. "I don't often wish I was white," my friend Gerard chuckled. "I think we're all about equally badly placed to be on her date list," another friend laughed. 

Looking at it now, I am struck by how much the line "There you are with yours, and here I am with mine" strikes me much more negatively now. She remains lovely and gives the song great emotion, but my brain now goes "Therefore, you're not supposed to..."  It looks different when you are married, I think. At the time I suspect I thought she showed great restraint and honorableness. Now I think then you shouldn't even be mentioning it. That's not quite fair, I know.  Songs can express what we think we might say, what we wish we could say, and not be true representations of what we actually would say.

And my goodness she is adorable and plaintive and one hates to say anything against her, so I can scramble for excuses.

It was decades ago that the women in our Bible study noticed that they responded very differently to "Dr. Zhivago" than when they were schoolgirls.  Then, they were in love and it was sooo romantic, and she was beautiful and he was handsome." Later the thought came to them while watching: But wait. She's...married. It matters. Yet as above, in art it is permissible to express what we might not in the hard light of day. 

*Of course we had a Monroe dorm. Come on.