Rose is showing me a series of pictures she has colored in a Dover book of dragons. She flips to one particularly fearsome-looking creature with deadly claws and an evil glare.
“This one is Rilla’s,” she tells me.
“Hi, Sugar,” says Rilla, leaning close to kiss the beast tenderly upon its snarling, dagger-toothed snout. “My little sweetie.”
Here is what love is:
He watched this movie with me because it jumped back into my mind, full force, every single lyric intact, my entire being once more suffused with a yearning to wear ribbon barrettes and flowing skirts while dancing on roller skates, and I couldn’t live another night without having all that synthesizery goodbadness etched into his brain too.
He endured every terrible, terrible line of dialogue and crater-sized plot hole, and he even found the “Whenever You’re Away from Me” number as charming as I do.
This clip is NOT that number. “Charming” is not the word for it. A Giant Glittering Mess of Audio-Visual Cheesepuffery is what this is.
Worth noting: we realized that the same summer I watched Xanadu on an endless loop, Scott watched Kramer vs. Kramer 37 times. This may explain a lot about the way each of us turned out.