The first sight of the Grand Canyon. The dip of the roller coaster. The bite of wasabi. Your first orgasm.

Remember that craze of nostalgia movies back in the Seventies? Well, I know you don’t, Grl, but we’ll fire up the laptop and watch Paper Moon one evening, snuggled up together.

Summer of ’42. It came out in theaters when I was a teenager (barely), but I had to wait for a television rescreening years later to see it. My parents certainly weren’t going to take me to an R-rated film! I had to rely on Mad Magazine’s version in the interim, so my memories have the same soft focus as the film itself.

The film and the novelization by Herman Raucher were huge hits. The “nostalgia” craze of the ’70s was just beginning, with The Way We Were, American Graffiti, Paper Moon and others to come.

It was the baby-boomers reliving their good times, I guess. The years before jobs, children and mortgages. The years of high school, college, good music, fast cars and first love. A dollar bought you an hour and a half of memories in a dark hall, and you emerged, sighing, into the present day.

There was more than happy memories in this film. There was the conflict and confusion of those years. The war, to be sure, always looming just over that sea horizon and underscored by the young men in uniform, but beyond that, the threat and promise of adulthood.

As Raucher says,

Nothing from that first day I saw her, and no one that has happened to me since, has ever been as frightening and as confusing. For no person I’ve ever known has ever done more to make me feel more sure, more insecure, more important, and less significant.

There’s conflict and confusion. And there’s a great story.

Hermie, Oscie and Benjie are three boys, summering on the fictional Packett Island in that summer of 1942.* Oscie is a little older than the fifteen year old Hermie, and Benjie a little younger, and the “Terrible Three” play their roles to perfection. Oscie is the knowitall, brash and bold; Benjie is the nerdy youngster, always just a few paces behind. And Hermie, as played by Gary Grimes, is in between: cute and handsome, shy but willing, romantic and gawky.

We first meet Hermie as the three boys conduct a commando reconnaissance raid on the beachfront house of young bride Dorothy (Jennifer O’Neill) and her soldier husband. Peering over the dunes at the couple, Oscie and Benjie make ribald comments, as the husband kisses Dorothy and then picks her up and carries her inside, while she laughingly protests. His friends leave, but Hermie is smitten, frozen to his observation post until the shouts of the other two boys rouse him.

Over the summer holiday weeks, Hermie braves the scorn of his friends to get closer to Dorothy, left alone on the island when her husband ships out. He performs chores for her, cringing with embarrassment when his attempts to show worldliness and sophistication flop. “You should be more careful – you could get a hernia,” he advises her about lifting bags of groceries.

As boys are, they are obsessed by sex, and painfully ignorant of anything but the basics. The discovery of a medical text with body parts named in Latin, and photographs that no drugstore would possibly develop, provides help, but ultimately even more confusion. Just what is this mysterious “foreplay”, why is it required, and exactly how do you play it?

There are teenaged girls, and fumbling encounters at the movies and marshmallow roasts, but it’s Dorothy that Hermie desires. One evening he shows up at her place for coffee, but all is silent save a record stuck on its final groove and the smell of alcohol and cigarette smoke. Nervously entering the house, Hermie finds a crumpled telegram, advising the death of the husband.

Dorothy emerges, tear-streaked and devastated. She puts the record on again. It’s That Old Feeling, a reminder for Dorothy of her lost love.

She holds her hands out to Hermie, they dance, slowly and tenderly, and then she takes him to bed.

It is an incredible scene. Sweet, poignant, soft and sensual, but without being salacious or sleazy. It’s soft-focus sex – you know what’s going on, but you can’t see any details.

And that’s what makes it. After all the embarrassment and ribald speculation, Hermie’s fantasies have come true, but in a way that he never imagined.

He leaves the house, drifts away home through the grass on the dunes, and in the morning returns to find her gone, the house empty, a note on the door. He never sees her again.

The film ends with Herman, now grown, returning to the island, returning to the house, decades later. We hear him as he looks out to sea,

Life is made of comings and goings. And for everything that we take with us, there is something we leave behind. In the Summer of ’42, we raided the coast guard station four times. We saw five movies, and had nine days of rain. Benjie broke his watch, Oscy gave up the harmonica… and in a very special way, I lost Hermie forever.

This film speaks to me, as it did to so many of my generation, and, for all I know, everyone. Our own first experiences may be wildly different, but like going over that first rollercoaster dip, we can’t go back to the safety and innocence of a minute before. We’re different now.

I’m romantic enough to think that losing our virginity isn’t so much a loss – after all, what have we physically lost? – as it is a gain. An entry into adulthood, solid knowledge, a feeling of confidence, a desire to do it again and get better at it. And I’m romantic enough to think that it isn’t so much sex that we learn as we explore further, but love. Love and intimacy and the shared feelings of another human being. I love being able to give my partner that ultimate pleasure. And I love it when we come together, and I know that just a few inches away, the same waves of bliss that are rolling through my happy brain are crashing ashore in my lover’s head.

Go see the movie. See it again if you’ve watched it a long time ago. Enjoy the scenery, the three boys coping with the world, the funny moments – there’s a fantastic scene where Hermie goes into a drugstore to buy condoms – the interactions between the characters, and finally that delicious, bittersweet scene where Hermie becomes Herman.

—Guy Sez

*In the novel, it’s Packett Island. Herman Raucher based the story on his childhood holidays on Nantuckett, but in the film, it’s clearly California around Fort Bragg.

Guy sez: I spotted a headline the other day: Teen has Boob Job! Yes, it was the sort of magazine that aims to catch the eye. The story talked about a sixteen year old girl having breast augmentation surgery.

Is this crazy or what?

It is actually rather common, I find. In every sense of the word. Perhaps the most visible example was model Alicia Douvall, whose daughter, then twelve, wanted an iPhone and bigger breasts for her 13th birthday. Alicia, who at that point had undergone 14 breast operations, declared that her daughter wait until she was sixteen before she would consent. It didn’t stop her calling in the photographers for a tasteful round of mother and daughter snaps. And again when daughter Georgia changed her name to Destiny, believing it would help her modelling career.

Links to stories and photographs of doctored breasts here and doctored photographs of breasts here.

Well, I guess people can do what they want with their bodies, and I’m as much a fan of the perfect breast as the next man, but these stories leave a sad taste in my mouth.

In my male opinion, the breasts women have at sixteen are usually the ones they want at twenty-six. And thirty-six. And forty-six.

It doesn’t really get much better than sixteen. Gravity, sun, babies and just plain aging take their toll as life inexorably proceeds. The wrinkled, empty, droopy, stretch-marked, blotched breasts of the senior citizen await all.

And, though I’ll probably be hurled straight out of the “Members Only” entrance to the Penis Club for saying this, this guy doesn’t care all that much.

Despite what the glamor mags say, women are not their boobs. Nor any other part of their anatomy. I think that the sexiest part of a woman is her…

Love that smile!

…smile.

Give me a lady with a sense of humor, a genuine smile, a loving heart and eyes that sparkle, and I won’t worry too much what she looks like under the covers.

This is not to say that I don’t go all weak above the knees when a big-bosomed waitress leans low over the table to serve me a slender latte. She knows exactly where my eyes are fixed and why I’m unable to talk or breathe or do anything but drool as my gaze is drawn irresistibly down her cleavage.

It’s the way we men are wired, okay? It’s somewhere down there in my brain between the lizard cortex and the caveman lobe.

Women know this all too well. It’s why, when you think about it, cosmetic surgery is rather like choosing a style of clothing. Like fashion. “Breasts are pointy this season.”

In the end, it’s up to the wearer. Having a sweet pair must make a woman feel good. Hang on to them as long as possible, is my advice. Support those babies. Cosmetic surgery if you must, but it’s not going to fool anyone too long, if fooling is your game.

Unless it’s breast reduction surgery. If your address is 38D Braberry Lane and you’re still a teenager, then maybe it’s worth dropping a size or two, to save the strain on chest and shoulders, keep gravity at bay, and increase the number of men able to look you in the eye.

If I must give an opinion, it’s for quality over quantity. As a close friend of mine observes, “anything you can’t fit in your mouth is wasted.”

Halloween video – with pumpkins

This woman is gorgeous! But those jugs have got to be giving her gallons of grief. In my humble opinion, she would be every bit as vivacious and attractive if she were an A cup rather than LL. Yeah, she wouldn’t be quite the blinding beauty in that Marilyn Monroe dress, but she’d select something different, something more suited to her ittie-bitties.

Perhaps my co-writers have different opinions. I’m outvoted, gender-wise, these days, and really, what business does a guy have telling women how to wear their bodies?

–Guy Sez

Video report: breast surgery for graduation

Grl sez: I’m actually with you on this one. Mostly. There’s a few reasons I can think of for having a boob job – breast cancer for one. Or if you genuinely aren’t happy with the size of your breasts – it’s hard for me to imagine! I think mine are the perfect size, for me anyway. I guess that’s the point really.

The issue I have with increasing your breast size is when people think having bigger breasts is going to make them happier – I suppose in some cases they would, but when people want them because they think they will make them more popular/cooler/etc etc etc, that (for me anyway) is a concern.

Like what Guy said – it’s who you are and how you show it that makes you popular/cool etc. This is so true. People tell me I have a nice smile, and I like to think that this is reflective of my personality, not the actual physical smile!

But, on the other hand, there are always situations where it makes perfect sense – not that I can think of any right now, but if you were to put a sensible argument to me, I’m fairly sure I could be persuaded otherwise!