So Much Depends
“Who was your childhood crush?” the stranger seated next to me from Dallas to Atlanta asked.
“Hmmm,” I thought for a bit but not for very long, “George Brett when he was playing baseball. Charlie Waters with his helmet off. Shaun Cassidy when he was singing, but not so much in an interview when he was not. How ‘bout you?”
“I was more of a fan of the rough and rugged,” she said with a playful grin, “I loooooved the Marlboro Man!”
In the middle of it now, she followed up, “How about celebrities? Are there any that you just can’t get enough of?”
Trapped for at least a hundred and forty minutes, I agreed to play along. “Ummm, Patrick Dempsey, still, in blue scrubs as Derek McDreamy. John Hamm when he looks flummoxed and unassuming, though he creeps me out a bit when he smiles. Roger Federer when he’s playing tennis or elegantly touching his cuff in a Rolex ad... Matteo Berrettini anywhere.”
We shared a laugh as she pulled up images of the Italian tennis stallion on her phone and I realized while looking out the window: so much depends.
Most things “are” or “aren’t,” their appeal at least in part determined by the angle of the glimpse we get—and the lens we’re looking through. What we’re thinking, what’s going on around us at the time, what we’re flying to and fleeing from at the point of our encounter—it all sheds light, a whole lot or a little.
Context never doesn’t matter. And it often seals or kills the deal.
I once heard a music connoisseur extol the virtues of the Beatles’ pop culture phenomenon, Twist and Shout. “The song is brilliant,” the muser said, then quickly qualified, “as long as it’s played at a party for dancing, that is.” He went on to say that it crumbles if you try to analyze the lyrics or chop it up into bars where its continuous three-chord progression runs on a loop. It won’t hold up. The tune has a time. A place. A purpose. There’s really nothing else quite like it when all the conditions are right.
But on the genius of it... a lot depends.
Framework helps us understand. It clarifies the picture, offering circumstance and backdrop as a surrounding cast of nuance, flare and texture to make a thing look better—sometimes worse—than what it is. And it is continually there, whether we acknowledge its presence or not.
Where we travel to depends on how much time we have, what we’re interested in, how much we can afford. Who we hire depends on what we’re looking for, who is in our orbit, if they are available at the time. How hard we work depends on how badly we want what we’re working for.
The person we marry, the job we take, the house we buy, the car we drive, the church we attend, the food we eat, the time we sleep, the time we rise, the friends we lose, the friends we keep—every bit of it hinges on a vast array of fluctuating parameters. What surrounds the things we do and don’t do, the things we love and don’t love, the things we white-knuckle clutch and the things we let slip away, count. Absolutely nothing sits alone in a vacuum.
Perhaps that’s partly why I only swoon for Patrick Dempsey when he’s Dr. Derek Shepherd. I need the smooth, confident dialogue (“It’s a beautiful day to save lives!”) I need the slightly past-five-o’clock shadow that’s hairier or shaved clean when he takes on other roles, the crooked smile and angsty eyes the camera zooms in and lingers on in Grey’s. The medical paraphernalia acts like layers that frame the face. It’s a role that puts him in his finest light.
During the television coverage of Wimbledon this summer, IBM ran an ad that opened with a lush patch of emerald-green grass that the camera slowly and expertly panned. Then, as the stark white lines of a tennis court began to be magically painted on, an omniscient voiceover started, “The funny thing about context is, you don’t notice it until it’s gone.”
P.S. Twist and Shout