I started this yesterday and got distracted by everything, from my daughter arriving in Paris (from Amsterdam) (I was keeping tabs via WhatsApp, and Olivier who was meeting The Teenager and her friends at Gare Du Nord. Oh technology) to what was on the day’s meal plan (fruit bowl for breakfast, salmon and broccoli for lunch, rocky road on a sugar cone midday snack, skirt steak and asparagus for dinner). Really, I wanted to write about The Cure, and how they were celebrating their fortieth anniversary of being Robert Smith’s vision of the world.  The Cure. At a concert this past weekend in Hyde Park, Robert Smith told the audience, “Forty years ago this weekend was the first time we played as the Cure…And if you’d asked me then what I’d be doing in 40 years, I would be wrong. But it’s thanks to everyone around me that we’re still here, and to you all as well, so thank you very much.” I’ve been listening to the Cure since I was a teenager; hearing them for the first time in high school, thanks to some boy, I don’t remember who, that seminal song, “Killing An Arab.” I spent my babysitting money on my first Cure record, “Boys Don’t Cry.” As I entered college, and WLIR, my local radio station, switched it’s format to  new wave, I got all the music fit to listen to, my goth girl mixed with a little Madonna style flourishing (all black grab, hair teased like Siouxie, Madonna black bracelets adorning my wrists); my coming of age, as a museo, forever cemented. The Cure part of the lifelong playlist.  Last year, “Boys Don’t Cry” became the “our song” for me and the boyfriend, the song he chose to do karaoke to on the night we met; my fashion style decidedly different as a woman in her fifties, skinny jeans with a loose top, hair air-tossled. Still. That girl that was first taken with Robert Smith’s persuasive token, “I would break down at your feet/And beg forgiveness/Plead with you,” got her heartstrings pulled once again, in her adult glory. Thank you, Robert Smith; your music is Just Like Heaven.

Chimanada: “My point is that a woman doesn’t have to be perfect to be deserving of justice.”

Thandie Newton: “If I’d been a pale-skinned young woman talking about that stuff, it would have been more newsworthy. But, you know, I’m tired of being depressed and feeling like I’m a piece of [expletive]. That’s what abuse does to you: It robs you of the desire to celebrate yourself, it robs you of your innocence. I stand up and I’m counted, and I let it go.”

Caitlin Moran: “You just treated the men like you would a younger brother. You shamed them in front of their peers. The cure for flamboyant public sexism was flamboyant public shaming.”

Amber Tamblyn: “How lucky I am, even in the most difficult moments of marriage, that you have someone on the other side who’s willing to learn.”

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And now have a laugh with Michelle Buteau.