An Ode to Nancy Meyers
Courtesy of @nancymeyers
Though I haven’t met the acclaimed writer, director and producer Nancy Meyers, I often find myself wondering: “What would Nancy do?”
It’s funny how someone can have such an enormous impact on your life despite never having met them – the beauty of art and film in a nutshell. In the recent documentary about Ralph Lauren, Very Ralph, Lauren talks about how the iconic movies of the 1930’s and ‘40’s shaped who he is: his tastes, his aesthetic preferences, his hopes and dreams for himself. That is exactly how I feel about Nancy’s films.
I grew up on Nancy. When I was eight years old, I was an only child wishing for the blue nail polished, poker card touting, ears-pierced-on-a-slice-of-apple camp experience of Hallie Parker and Annie James in The Parent Trap. Too much of a homesick scaredy cat to actually go to camp, Nancy transported me there. When my parents got divorced later in life, The Parent Trap stood as a reminder that even at 28, I could still try to trick them into getting back together (still trying, don’t think it’s going to happen.)
When I was sixteen and my mom came to visit me at the end of a study abroad program in France, I distinctly remember watching The Holiday for the first time with her in our robes, eating room service in our hotel room and marveling at how lovely it all was: one of my most favorite memories to this day.
When I was in college, my best girlfriends and I would cook a feast from Ina’s cookbooks and snuggle in on the sofa, watching Something’s Gotta Give and It’s Complicated, swooning over Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton’s iconic romance and Alec Baldwin’s delivery of “Mommy is the best cook”, between slurps of Jane’s elaborate feast. To this day, whenever either movie is on TV, we all text each other to let the other ones know and immediately switch it on. “You are a woman to love” was a line in my best friend’s Maid of Honor speech at my wedding.
When I was pregnant with my daughter, waiting to check into the hospital to be induced and trying to kill time to bide my nerves, I sat on the sofa with my husband and watched him watch Father of the Bride I and II for the first time, a wellspring of hormones and tears as I imagined him as a father of the bride, to our own imminent baby girl. And when I actually did check into the hospital to be induced, my husband handed me an iPad pre-loaded with Something’s Gotta Give and It’s Complicated to calm me down. (Good job, Ben.) It worked until the Pitocin kicked in.
Nancy’s movies have been there for me through every major moment of my life, from childhood to bringing my own child into the world. They are a portal to a place where everything is warm, from the sets to the characters to the plot lines. They make you feel good – especially at a time when we need it most. So thank you, Nancy, for helping me become me.
