Mother May I For The Love Of A Secret Sin Dying Between Friends: The Susannah Story, A Lifetime Original Movie

I was thinking about how this blog reads a bit like a bad Lifetime Original Movie, what with all the cancer and the grief, a woman fighting to regain control of her life so she gets a drastic hair style. It could be called "Mother May I For The Love Of A Secret Sin Dying Between Friends," pretty much because those are the key words in any Lifetime Original Movie. I was thinking that maybe I could be played by Tori Spelling, although we look nothing alike, so perhaps Kellie Martin from Life Goes On? I mean...

We both do the same wan victim look, except of course she wears her jeans much higher than I.

Then I remembered that there is a website that tells you what celebrity you most resemble, so I turned to the experts of the www because I have too much free time and am vain like that.

(Let us not mention how I picked a flattering photo of yours truly and admittedly don't look this smooth in the day to unfiltered day...)

Match: 74%	Match: 73%	Match: 73%	Match: 72%	Match: 72%
Jason Statham	Fred Durst	Ralph Fiennes	Gwen Stefani	Madeleine Albright

Only to be told that I will most decidedly not be played by Kellie Martin but rather talent ranging from Jason Statham to Madeleine Albright, at which point this Lifetime Original Movie picked up a sub-storyline in which the heroine has a touch of body dysmorphia and drinks a lot.

Anyway, because this is Lifetime and not, say, HBO, I am going with the role of Susannah played by Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit fame, my 73% match. Really, the resemblance is striking.

So imagine, if you will, it's a Friday night and you're flipping through the channels maybe feeling a little guilty that you had cereal for dinner again and something makes you pause at "Mother May I For The Love Of A Secret Sin Dying Between Friends: The Susannah Story, A Lifetime Original Movie." Before you know it you are sucked in to the implausible storyline. Girl is afraid of MS, thinks she has MS, is called crazy, her mother dies, then her step-father dies (from MS!), two kittens die (I don't know what this does to further the storyline either but it happens) and then she is finally diagnosed with MS herself at which point she realizes she is not crazy but has been right all along so she takes charge of her own health and researches a cutting edge treatment that could possibly save her life, raises the money and dyes her hair pink...will she succeed? (deep breath) Will I succeed?

Personally I would have fallen asleep on the couch already, this Lifetime Original Movie is so badly written, but on the off chance you are still watching let me explain...

There is a lot of this movie on the cutting room floor. Scenes in which Fred Durst (me) is curled up in a ball on his (her? my?) bed, scared. Scenes where Fred Durst flexes his/her/my feet to see if they are MS-y in any way, arches his/her/my neck, obsesses over symptoms and what ifs and whys. Except of course what ifs and whys are hard to show on film, so instead you see scenes where Fred Durst dyes his/her/my hair pink and says BALLS a lot (possibly bleeped over for network television). Because Lifetime Original Movies about women who just cry all the time without ever feeling powerful don't sell a lot of Yoplait or whatever commercial comes on at the break. 

But it's there nonetheless. Between all the positive posts there are moments you don't see. Moments where Fred Durst looks into the mirror up close and for a really long time, too long--you know how you can stare at your reflection so long that you actually lose sense of self? It's a strange take, his acting superb in that moment. Fred Durst stares into the mirror and you see something behind his eyes, a question, a flickering answer that he can't quite grasp. Does the pink hair complement his skin tone? Will his insurance agree to pay for follow up care? And the bigger fear behind his eyes, the one we all want to know, the hesitation before every line he reads--will he succeed?

Will I? I don't know.

xo,
S