Respectful Distance, Please

Like you, Sarah, I am a defender of the Charles and Camilla duo. It goes without saying that Charles married Diana under pressure and for all the wrong reasons. The marriage was a disaster and Diana became more than a bit unhinged – who’s to say how much was cause and how much was effect? I’m glad Charles, who was thwarted in so many ways, at least got the woman he loved in the end. Very odd that Joan Rivers is their friend – I did not know that!

What happened to Charles’ fan club. There is not a stirring amongst you. Not one of you cut his picture and pasted your own next to his fantasizing that you were his one, groupied and squealed outside the British Embassy in Washington, bought Wellies and Barbour jackets, or poked your heads into dense treatises on British Architecture to make yourself more suitable for Charles.
There were plenty of aesthetic reasons for keeping Charles and Camilla apart during her child bearing years. Foremost, Prince Philip, at the very least, would have had trouble telling the human breeding stock from the bovine.
Joan Rivers, now 75, looks the way Elizabeth would look like if she opted for a lot of elected surgery. Pick your poison. Age like Joan or like Elizabeth II. Of course, the troika get along because Joan has several gigabytes of Elizabeth jokes, brings along buckets full of QVC trinkets for Camilla to play make believe Queen with, and can quietly mime barfing at E II’s latest hat disaster. (Talk about protected guilds. English milliners only make hats for E II for her seal. They would much rather make hats for Carla Bruni Sarkozy or for the late Princess Diana.)
And that’s why MoBs have to be exceptional casting models for Brothers wherever they appear in the birth order, because an unsatisfactory impression can leave a boy settling for a Diana, heatseeking a Sarah Ferguson, or senselessly hunting Sarah Palin.

SRV, you’re making a lot of assumptions here but that is your nature and your right. Allow me to point out that most MOB readers were not British virgins in the early 1980s and thus not Princess of Wales material. However, your final caution is both valid and unnerving.

I’m sorry that North American continental drift during the mid-60′s was not caused by American lasses’ collective swoon for John, Paul, George, and Ringo. Those crushes and the Prince of Wales had transcontinental legs. It has only been in the media toxic 00′s that we have seen and learned such an exhaustive amount of information about our heroes that the intensity of ardor has receded.
Miley Cyrus would disagree.

Jen, am so glad you’re keeping up with the Windsors!

Faithful readers of MOB, I would like to tell you all that Jennifer’s Anglophile-ism goes back a very long way–she even arose at, what was it, 4:30am(?) to watch the Charles and Diana wedding just a brief 27 years ago!

Enjoying the conversation – is it a sign of respect that most of our teenagers opt to walk behind us when we are seen in public together? I doubt it… but then I am feeling awfully cynical today….