Monday, May 22, 2006

You never give me your money ...

The Beatle puns are starting to turn up everywhere, even in the legitimate press like TIME and NEWSWEEK, in reports on the McCartney-Mills break-up. So far I've seen, "Baby, You're a Rich Man, and Now I'm a Rich Woman," and "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Man," and, of course, "Can't Buy Me Love."

I may be in the minority here, but I believe the official statement about how media attention broke them up. The second Lady Mac seems to suffer from Carolyn Bessette Syndrome. You know, "when my husband said the press would criticize everything about me, I had no idea he meant that the press would criticize everything about me." I'm not minimizing how demoralizing that level of scrutiny must be. It just surprises me that Heather Mac, like Carolyn Bessette, didn't see it coming. Beatle wives have historically had a rough time of it. Isn't "Yoko" the universal synonym for "bitch?"

I get the impression that, unlike Linda, Heather wanted her own identity and resented being regarded not as the new Princess Diana, but instead as a little tart with a shady past who is really not good enough for Paul.

Oh well, as the poet and philosopher Carrie Fisher once wrote, "If it didn't end badly, it wouldn't end at all." Maybe the McCartney-Mills marriage was never supposed to last forever. After Linda died, Paul looked more than an open wound than like a romantic troubadour. If Heather and baby Beatrice brought him back to the living, then we should all be grateful for this short-lived union.

Besides, it gave us this bad joke (courtesy of Martin):
"Why won't Heather get anything in the settlement?"
"Because she doesn't have a leg to stand on."

It's OK to laugh as long as you know you should feel bad about it.