Glamorous

Sunday was Sophia Loren's seventy-fifth birthday. God, she is still gorgeous and sexy, but I fell in love with her in movies from the fifties and sixties I used to watch with my mother. I think she looks her most sexy and powerful and a woman to reckon with in her role as Dulcinea in Man of La Mancha opposite Peter O'Toole. Of course I'm in love with Peter O'Toole, too, but that is a story for another day.

Mostly, people associate Ms. Loren with sophistication and glamour. I recently realized that she was from the same area of Italy around Naples as my in-laws. She has the same big green eyes and arched brows as my mother-in-law. So while I have always wished that I were her to some extent...at least as glamorous and self-possessed, now I like to dream that my daughter may share some distant DNA with my one of my greatest screen crushes and idols.

I like to go back and look at her as Dulcinea, where she was about as undone as she could ever be and still absolutely to die for. Sophia had to be the impetus to put Rachel Welch in a fur bikini a few years later in a little B movie that made the next generation drool and put the poster on their bedroom wall. The resemblance and oozing sexuality are uncannily similar.

I still fantasize that someday, I can walk through a room that suddenly hushes, and not because I am crazily tap dancing a shuffle-ball-change out of there after tripping over myself.

*photo credit unknown or i would say. from promo material for Man of la Mancha