personal essay on sisterhood of the traveling pants

The harold needed me to write about what I hated most in 2005. It was upposed to be 150 words. I wrote this in 30 minutes without stopping. It is the pure essence of a hilarious summer. I will whittle it down to 1/6th the size some other night.

Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, June 2005

When I walk home past the shut-up York Square Cinema, beneath the doomsday lettering of SAYONARA, I want to cry. As if frozen under the hard ice like the upturned face of a dead child, the poster of the film that sunk with the theater stares out with a dreamy, unreal calm.

I didn’t see Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants at York Square. I saw it in New York somewhere, probably at Lincoln Center. I was a cub reporter there for the summer, and I was seeing a boy I kind of sort of liked who was leaving the next week. I did that thing I kind of always do—where I fear the goodbye, so I do my best to sort of ruin everything before it happens.

My two best girlfriends there that summer were both lonely, doe-eyed, set in their ways. Quiet, thin, tasteful—they were my opposite, and I did everything I could to get them to drink something without an olive in it. Or squeeze out a giggle. Or an unwitting fart. The tagline for Sisterhood was my best sure bet: “Laugh, Cry, Share the Pants,” sounded more like what my croaky jewish mother might yell through a department store’s changing-room swingdoors than the draw thought up by L.A. marketing execs looking to score with a feel-good teen drama. We would say it to eachother on subway platforms, jabbing elbows and pointing out the poster of a body-model's airbrushed ass. It was our lodestar.

Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants is exactly what the title should suggest: It is the kind of movie so bad it doesn’t seem true. The film is quite literally about a pair of pants lent around a group of friends that happen to fit, equally, and for this achievement they take on a magical quality. “You think that a pair of jeans that fits all of you is going to fit all of this?” hawks Cuban sista Carmen, as she slaps her ass and gives the skinny-legged jeans a once-over. But when they’re on, all she can say is… “Noooo waaaaay.”

I would have said the same.

I promised the Gudruns I’d see it opening night. That was a Friday. Maybe I had also promised the boy I was kindofsortofseeing that I’d see him that night. It was his last weekend before he left sometime mid-week, but I had a job that took a lot of time, and he was working at a booth in the book fair down at the convention center early every morning. I did what any heinous bitch would do and forced him to come with.

I don’t remember exactly what happened, but I know we sat on the bed and fought about why I would rather go to a terrible movie than be with him. I felt indebted to my friends. I was the jet stream that gulfed their continents of quiet sadness. They could not go on without me. He was only angry. I made every wrong decision, my priorities were out of whack, I would rather go to shitty fucked up chick flicks than be together when we only had so many days. Looking back I see that he was probably just sad that I was doing what I always did, choosing my friends over him. Looking back I see that I did make the wrong decision, that I missed him so long afterward because I blamed myself for treating him the way I did. There were so many of these moments where I did not choose him, and he subtly twisted the knife to get me to regret every last one. At the time I said, “But you can sit next to me in the theater?”

I couldn’t bear to listen to him shift in his seat. I started to cry during the movie when the littlest girl caught Leukeumia, and then I was crying because I didn’t want him to leave. “Do you want to go, please?” I said. We left. We walked to my apartment for a long time without speaking. I could hear him huffing. I was still crying. I was sad for my aunt whose apartment we were walking toward, who was also dying of leukeumia. I was sad for my friends who I had left behind. I was very sad to think of him leaving.

But most of all, I was sad because the movie had been terrible. Not funny terrible. Its fault was that it had tried to be good. Where other cult films had triumphed with plots so kooky you laughed at the nature of cinema verite as heartily as you laughed at the foils of its actors, “Traveling Pants” showed me only what I had been doing wrong: I was trying to be good in the ways that others wanted.