Yesterday was Ladies Night at my place. Besides dining, catching up the latest gossips and talking about what was going on in our lives, the girls and I were also watching one of the best feel-good movies, Sense and Sensibility (1995).
The story is very familiar and classical: when Mr. Dashwood dies, he leaves his estate to the son by his first marriage, which leaves his second wife and three daughters: Elinor, Marianne, and Margaret in straitened circumstances. They have to move out of the estate and live in a cottage that’s kindly offered by a cousin. Their lack of fortune affects the marriageability of both Elinor and Marianne. But through the heartbreak, true love and a happy ending find their way for the sisters.
When we were all being mesmerized by both practical Elinor and romantic Marianne, one of the girls said: “Just imagine, if we have to dress up like those ladies in the movie”
Me: “I think that I’ll have to wake up at 05.00 o’clock each morning to get to work on time”
Girl: “Yeah, me even earlier because I’ll be needing at least two hours, just to get into that kind of corset!”
Me: “And another three to four hours to dress up”
Girl: “Haha … but those ladies’re lucky though, they don’t have to get up early, or go to work”
Me: “Of course not, dressing up is their job!”
With our without wearing any corset, Marianne’s favorite poem, sonnet CXVI by William Shakespeare has also become one of my favorites as well:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
