I Want to Be Diane Keaton When I Grow Up

Actually I think I am already Diane Keaton minus the style and the being a single mom. Back in the day people always used to say I reminded them of her and I never really got it (I did briefly wear vests and ties, yes, but I never thought I really looked like her much) and I always thought they were meaning it in an Annie Hall sort of way, which I’m pretty sure they were, and which I realize was at least loosely based on the real her. At the time I didn’t get the complexity of Annie Hall, I more just got the flakiness, and so my appreciation of Diane Keaton has come late to me, after more viewings of some of her older movies and also with Something’s Gotta Give, which solidified my girl crush. I have come to see her as remarkably beautiful, not just because she seems to be an interesting person, but because she’s proof to me that you can be physically beautiful with a few lines on your face and that Hollywood is so thoroughly wrong in it’s beauty ideal, and I hope that I will remember Diane when I don’t want to look in the mirror anymore because the world tells me I should have lifted my face about ten years earlier and throw in some cheek implants and collagen while I was in there. Last night I tore out all the articles from the last couple of month’s magazines that piled up that I hadn’t read and just started plowing through them, and so I finally read the profile of her in the Times magazine from last month, and related to her on a lot of levels, but not on this one: a friend of hers said she wakes up every morning and “sees her clothes like paint coming out of a paint tube: What am I going to mix today?” I wake up every morning and think, what worked last week, and what’s clean? I’m not saying I don’t have a smidge of my own style, but I tend to stick with what works (jeans + whatever + boots) until I’m hopelessly bored with my wardrobe and then I make declarations like “I’m going to get a new style!” and then I buy a new t-shirt and pair it with the same cardigans I’ve been wearing for six years and the boots I’ve been wearing every winter for five. (Yesterday, I saw a girl I know wearing similar boots, and she told me someone told her, “Oh your boots are like Betsy’s.” I don’t really know what that means except that everyone knows I only have this one pair of boots. Well, I have other boots. But apparently this is a little-known secret.) Last year, I discovered layering a short-sleeved t-shirt over a long-sleeved one, which other people discovered back when I was in high school, but whatever, this rejuvenated my wardrobe (and kept me warmer!) until recently, at which time I’ve been thinking, again, “I need a new style!” So in honor of Diane Keaton, this week I am going to wake up every day and think of my clothes as paint coming out of a tube. What’s weird is that I actually did that yesterday before I read the article, and Ben said, “Oh, what a cute outfit” (or something) and so I am going to continue to do this because it’s not like I don’t have enough options for mixing it up a bit. I have a dresser full of t-shirts, a drawer full of tank tops, and two drawers full of cardigans, and I promise you they’re not all currently in rotation. Look out, Chicago.