What Would Angela Lansbury Do?
Rhonda and friends channel the wisdom of some remarkable women, from Jessica Fletcher to Cher to Hillary Clinton. Who's your spirit guide?
Born a Libra with a Virgo ascendant, I am truly and doubly fucked when it comes to the ability to make decisions.
Air sign Libras are known for seeing all sides of a situation - ie overthinking – while earth signs Virgos are perfectionists who struggle to move forward without having all the information at their disposal.
Frankly, it’s a wonder I can get dressed of a morning.
Of course I can always (and do) consult my horoscope, on the very excellent Pattern app, which seems to know me better than I know myself. Or I ask a question or two of one of my tarot decks. But even I’m not woo woo enough to fully place my life in the hands of esoterica.
Instead, recently, I’ve been asking the great Angela Lansbury what to do. Yes, I know she’s dead. But even from beyond the grave, I’ve discovered, she is able to shine her light on womanly problems.
It’s all Marie Noel’s fault. When I call my friend out in Australia in despair about my frankly catastrophic love life, the question she’s started throwing back at me is: ‘What would Angela do?’. I asked if we needed a oujia board to contact her, but Marie Noel, being an obsessive fan of Murder, She Wrote, is confident she knows exactly what Angela would do in any situation.
In Murder, She Wrote, I’ve Googled (having never watched it), Jessica Fletcher, ‘a shrewd mystery writer’, helps the authorities nab the real culprit by getting to the bottom of every crime she happens upon.
She does sound pretty awesome. As well as being a best-selling novelist and amateur detective, she’s been an English teacher, a criminology professor and, briefly, a congresswoman. In short, a very sorted sort of woman – the kind I’d like to be if I ever grow up.
Angela, meanwhile, was even better – a Democrat and Labour supporter, a winner of too many awards to enumerate, and a producer of her own show – one who rejected pressure from network execs to put Jessica in a relationship, believing that the character should remain a strong single woman. Jessica never remarried after her husband died, just as I never shall. No matter how hard Christian Bale may beg.
Crucially, Angela saw Jessica as a role model for older female viewers. And Murder, She Wrote itself was a television landmark through having an older woman as the main protagonist – opening the door to series such as The Golden Girls.
Among other awesome roles Angela played were women's rights advocate Sue-Ellen Gamadge in the Broadway revival of Gore Vidal's The Best Man, while in her own right she was honoured for the charitable work and philanthropy she undertook, and was described by drama critics Martin Gottfried and Dominic Cavendish respectively as being ‘Meticulous. Cautious. Self-editing. Deliberate. It is what the British call reserved”, and full of ‘self-composure, commitment and, yes, gentility’.
So far, so very not me. As Marie Noel sums it up, Angela always picks the sensible option. And that’s also something I’ve never been known for. That will be my Sagi moon. A lunatic clown lives inside of me. My oldest friend from childhood described me as ‘highly intelligent while lacking all common sense’.
But a girl can aspire to wisdom…
Speaking of impulsive Sagis, I asked Tracey which woman she turns to in moments of doubt, knowing of course that the answer would be her ultimate ladycrush Cher. And while she’s no Angela Lansbury, Cher is indisputably a holder of much wisdom based on her own wild and incredible life. Among my own favourite Cher nuggets are: ‘I was pretty bad, but I wish I’d been worse’; and ‘If it doesn’t matter in five years, it doesn’t matter.’
(Tracey or Cher? – the resemblance is uncanny)
And sometimes it’s okay, you know, to choose not to be sensible. While recently reading Stacey Du Guid’s chaos-memoir In Pursuit of Happiness: Mating, Marriage, Motherhood, Money, Mayhem in tandem with trying to get a handle on my own mayhem, I often found myself asking ‘What would Stacey do?’
And knowing that she would, at least at certain points of her life, have done something really quite deranged, I would feel better about an ill-advised course of action I was considering – on the basis that I couldn’t make any more of a mess of things than she had.
Thinking back, I’ve channelled a strange array of women at various times in my life, from Hillary Clinton to Björk, so I guess it could be claimed that the only pattern in my life is extreme vacillation. Certainly, while I fantasise about spending this winter hiding out in my bedroom, finally watching my way through Murder, She Wrote and imagining Angela/Jessica peering sternly over her glasses at me, willing me to do the sensible thing, you’re just as likely to find me tossing back Negronis in a karaoke bar, warbling Cher, in full lunatic clown mode, on the verge of making disastrous decisions. The fault, dear Brutus, is in my stars.
