{happy birthday, constant reader}

“I’d like to have money. And I’d like to be a good writer. These two can come together, and I hope they will, but if that’s too adorable, I’d rather have money.” – Ms. Dorothy Parker

Four feet, eleven inches of snark, razor-sharp sarcasm, biting wit and witticisms. And sappy sentimentality — let’s not forget her screenwriting It’s A Wonderful Life, or A Star is Born, all right? She reviewed for the New Yorker, wrote poetry, and tried to find what it is to be human. I loved her Resumé in high school, and realized she was also painfully lonely and bitter and altogether too brilliant for her own good.

I felt I’d found a kindred spirit – not that I was any or all of those things. But I aspired.

She would have been 117 today – and I wonder what she would have made of this modern world? Of the President? (She left her estate to Martin Luther King, Jr.) Of Twilight? (she was a big fan of the “love-’em-and-lose-’em” school of relationships — from what she wrote, anyway; her poetry reflected painful bloodshed and carnage in the war between the sexes. On the other hand, she married the same man twice, so maybe “losing ’em” is harder than she thought), of the number of lasses in glasses getting passes? I cherish her bitter, zingy observations, her funny, heartbreaking and wistful poems, and even her soppy movies. Today, I shall think snarky thoughts for her.