Art affecting life

I've been blogging with three fabulous women for over a year and a half now and have been enjoying all the fun topics we come up with week after week. If you want to see what we've discussed in the past, check out our posts here.

This week, Moma Rock picked the topic: Talk about a book or movie ( if you have more than one, that's OK too) which you feel has changed your life, either for the better (or for the worse).

Before reading ahead, first see what everyone else had to say on this topic:
Froggie
Mom of Many
Moma Rock

You already know all about my involvement with The Rocky Horror Picture Show.  I'll gladly refresh your memory though. I feel that it had a huge impact on my life, including my personality. Going to the Mundelein theater every Saturday night in the summer of 1994 did more than just entertain me. I got my first experience of being in a non-dysfunctional group of friends. (While I liked some of my friends in high school, I didn't really feel like I fit into the groups they wanted me to be involved in. I didn't like their friends, so that made it harder. Plus, there would be fights within the groups. Spring Fling senior year sticks out in my mind...) It was nice to just hang out with a group of people and feel accepted right away. I also felt like guys finally found me attractive or worthy of flirtation. Embracing this feeling gave me confidence when I met my first boyfriend during freshman year of college. And performing as Magenta gave me confidence to be uninhibited and accept myself. It was where I became friends with out-of-the-closet gay guys for the first time, making me feel more comfortable about friends coming out to me later that year, and beyond. It was also the catalyst for meeting certain friends. I met my friend J, the "eleventy feet tall" freshman in college because of a newsgroup post he put up, asking if Rocky Horror was playing anywhere on campus. We later ended up seeing it in Peoria and he became part of my circle of friends shortly after that. We talk sporadically via e-mail, but he was an important part of my life in college. And then there's Kev a.k.a. "Quick," who I met through our internet server because he saw my handle was "Magenta." We were both in relationships at the time, so it wasn't for any reason other than to become friends.  Years later, he married Moma Rock and now we've become close friends. If not for Rocky Horror, we might have never made such a connection!

In the summer of 1998, I stumbled upon Bridget Jones's Diary by Helen Fielding. I had seen it at bookstores and it sounded interesting, so I decided to buy myself a copy. I found myself laughing out loud at inappropriate times, but Bridget was just so funny. I loved the messages she got about her disappearing skirts and how she wrote "v." for "very." (I would imitate the latter.) It was hard not to love Mark Darcy, even before I knew that he'd be played by Colin Firth in the film version. Both the book and movie of Bridget Jones's Diary had impacts on my life. The book was my first exploration into the world of chick lit, and obviously wouldn't be my last. And the movie saved my sanity after a really upsetting situation involving a guy the week before I saw it in the theater. I saw the movie with a friend who also was having guy problems. Watching Bridget tell off Daniel Cleaver was so empowering that I felt better about things and knew I could move on from that awful guy situation. (I even wrote him a note telling him off; not super mature, but I needed to do it.) A few years later, my friend and I saw the movie of Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason together with our significant others. It was like we had come full circle!