One Ring to Find Her.

For a womanchild who perpetually hesitates to categorize or assign order to anything, I find it interesting (well, amusing) that I've always divided the western world into two types: Beatles people, and Rolling Stones people.

But second things first—I actually made a video, my first in eons. I may plan to make it an annual event (a promise or a threat, depending on who's watching):



Anyway, I found that Beatles people, much like the Beatles themselves, started out neat and tidy, then ended up corrupted sometime between their twenties and thirties, only to level out somewhere around forty, when they started ordering Time-Life CDs and buying Activia. Rolling Stones fans like myself? Always a little bit off, due to a series of misadventures wrought from the cradle to depraved. Stones people could be found on the news, running from traffic copters. They brought knives to a fistfight at Altamont. They gave lotto scratchers to their kids as birthday gifts. As for myself, I wasn't yet at the Lizzie Borden onramp; even now, I'm still sort of stuck on the corner of Patty Hearst and 1974, minus the SLA, the machine gun and the beret. Exiled on Main Street, if you will.

And so it went, to know a person was to know if they were Beatles or Stones. Sure, a person could be a fan of both, but a Beatles person usually liked other Beatles-like things, voted a certain way, watched PG-13 horror films and loved them, and so on and so forth. Miike had to have been a Stones person.

Cardboard? No. Delicious? Yes.

This was my way of thinking for quite some time, until Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings rolled around in 2001. I was still a Stones person, but then I also became ... a Potter person. With reservations. The first two films reminded me of one of my favorite childhood films, The Worst Witch (1986). Too much.

Still, I enjoyed the Sorcerer's-slash-Philosopher's-slash-Pharmacist's Stone, only very mildly tolerated The Chamber of Secrets, and loved the hell out of Azkaban, and continued on to the rest of the series without ever having watched one Hobbit, one elf, one ring to rule them all.

Forget beyond the Goblin City, I want to move here.

Then, last night, it happened. My husband put on The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, and I actually watched it. My sweet, swaddled baby Jesus, that film is long. But damn, is it so, so good. Afterward, I wanted to renew my wedding vows in a recreated Lothlórien, with a big-ass Bilbo birthday cake. I wanted to throw my wedding ring on the stove and see if I could read a secret message on it without branding my fingers. I wanted to speak Elven, be Elven. Actually, I really just wanted to be Liv Tyler, much in the same fashion as I wanted to be Jennifer Connelly as a child—dancing with David Bowie in Labyrinth, wearing the big ballroom gown. Except without all her whining. And Jareth wanted her to stay with him up in his castle beyond the Goblin City? "It's not fair" indeed.

I digress; back to LOTR. What a great movie. I foolishly assumed, all these years, that while I was a Potter person, LOTR was strictly for The Lords of the Rings people, Beatles types who enjoyed D&D, and WoW. And B&Bs. But these people are now the ones running the world, aren't they? And so it goes.

I absolutely loved The Lord of the Rings. I'm sorry I waited 10 years to see it. I plead guilty of ignorance, as only a Stones person would.





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