Live live live!

Thanks to our Screen Detox holiday, we’re only watching college football and classic movies from the 50’s that grandma likes. The latest was Auntie Mame from 1958. She’s going to sum up my rules for lifestyle design in three words.

• Auntie Mame: Oh, Agnes! Here you’ve been taking my dictations for weeks and you haven’t gotten the message of my book: live!
• Agnes Gooch: Live?
• Auntie Mame: Yes! Live! Life’s a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death, so live, live, live!

It’s 1958 and she’s already a “lifestyle design” consultant. She knows exactly what her life should be and how she should live it. She has advice for others (whether they want it or not) and her life is, usually, going as planned–or precisely according to her lack of structured plans.

For most of the film, she has the funds to make all of this happen easily (through exotic travel and “culture”). However, at one point, she actually has to work and she gives it her best shot. But then she, basically doing the same thing we’re doing 60 (that’s sixty) years later: she writes a book about her life, how she’s living it the way she wants to, how happy she is, and how to make it all happen.

Hmm, sound familiar? (A Writer Walks into a Bookstore) We could ask, “Hasn’t this all been said before?” or along the same lines, but from the other side of the tracks, “If it was relevant then, it must be relevant now.” Ah, what to do, what to do? I know exactly what to do and along the same lines I have no idea what to do.

2013 is going to be about living. Ready? Live, live, live! Happy 2013!