Slowly Going Bald

[Wherein I recount, for no reason other than sheer boredom and public self-flagellation, the women who provided me with the first clues to the terrible burden of malehood that would one day come to run my life.]

As a boy, I found myself under the sway of subtle hints and longings that were vague harbingers of the terrible change to come. But while I started to really lose my head to hormones around age 11-12, I realize that as a boy I was still somehow fascinated with women, even though I had absolutely no idea what to do with them or why I cared so much. With that confusion in mind, this ongoing list will look at the images that stirred in my youthful chest the rumblings of a manhood that was still a long ways off (and should be here any minute, I assume).

The cover of Career Opportunities
I remember seeing this box on video store shelves and feeling a kind of sweet apoplexy at the sight of Jennifer Connelly. The film came out in 1991, the same year The Rocketeer was released. (1991 was a pretty big year for Jennifer Connelly invading my brain.) I didn't even know that the guy on the Career Opportunities was Frank Whaley, just that I wanted to be Frank Whaley. Boyhood is a weird and confusing time, mainly because everyone keeps telling you that you have it easy, when really your head is full of gauze and you're wary of just what exactly a woman is or what she can do to you. I loved it the way boys love anything, which is to say I was enamored of its curves and awed by its power. Jennifer Connelly would go on to more scandalous roles as her career developed, almost as if some terrible cosmic force was making sure the relative depravity of her roles increased as I aged, so that I went from thinking she was pretty and alluring when I was 9 to seeing things like Mulholland Falls and Requiem for a Dream in high school and wondering what the hell had happened to the babe in the white dress who was saved by the guy in the jetpack. But Career Opportunities will always be how I remember Jennifer Connelly. This video box cover was the perfect image for a 9-year-old boy: Vaguely sexual, but ultimately clean and harmless.