At about 11:30 pm, after all the visitors have come and gone and I've drank as many cups of tea as my bladder can handle, we start to settle down - we put up our feet and turn on the television. Lo and behold - Working Girl is on. A million props to Working Girl, because on this night, it is officially the best movie ever made.
I cannot explain television in Ireland. One night you'll find yourself trying to get tired, so you turn on the TV and miraculously catch an episode of True Blood at 10 pm, followed by an episode of Blind Date, followed by America's Next Top Model. Brilliant. The next night, you'll come downstairs fighting insomnia and jet lag with the small glimmer of excitement; based on what you watched last night, at least you'll see some awesome entertainment. But no - it's an episode of Becker, followed by a documentary about sailboats, followed by a Bosnian singing competition. It's so random. And this is why catching a movie like Working Girl, from the beginning of the whole movie, is a special treat. One more point about the strangeness of Irish television - they were showing the same movie on a different channel, but it had started fifteen minutes later. There ya go.
Back to Working Girl. Sara and I had a ball. We cackled at Joan Cusack's hair and makeup and Melanie Griffith's lingerie. And Sigourney Weaver - what a nasty bitch! And of course, any and every version of "Let the River Run" is played throughout the whole glorious movie, putting it in our heads for at least the next 48 hours.
After the movie is over, we creep upstairs and settle into our beds, gushing over what a great film it was. Right when I feel like my eyes might be getting tired and sleep could be near, which is a rare and beautiful thing during the first few nights in Ireland, Sara decides she wants to try and sing me her favorite lyric from the theme song. I say "try" because she's never actually able to sing the complete line. Why, you ask? Well, because as she attempts to sing, she's doubled over with laughter. Mostly because this is the lyric:
Come run with me now,
The sky is the color of blue
You've never even seen
In the eyes of your lover.
You see, in this moment, this is the funniest thing to ever happen, ever in life. And maybe nobody will understand that, and maybe it's not even that funny in retrospect, but in that moment, in this tiny room on the 3rd floor of a crazy, skinny house with my parents sleeping a floor beneath us, it is insanely hilarious. And we're both in our 30s and on a family vacation with our parents and sleeping in single twin beds barely a foot apart from each other and have hardly eaten any vegetables for days and we're now completely hysterical. Over nothing. We can barely breathe, tears are streaming down our faces, and we are trying to stay quiet so as to not wake our folks, so what comes out of our mouths sounds like a wheezing, heaving, messy, snorty, guffaw.
This is Crazy Lady night. The night where the most assinine things are the funniest, where our stomachs ache not just from the lack of vegetables, but from the giggling as well, where nobody but us would understand. And I love it.
