I remember her break out role as the blonde in the T-bird in American Graffiti 1973 fifty years ago.
LEX
Yep.
Classic!
It is what many men remember her from.
It has happened to many men at some time in their life.
You see a girl, and she sees you...your eyes meet, and then the moment passes.
But that instant persists in your brain for some time, sometimes your whole life. It is almost never acted on, but...occasionally, it is. In my case, I think it was.
My lovely wife worked at the same hospital I did as a young man, and she was a nurse, when they still wore the white dress with the white hose. I can vividly remember the first time our eyes met, even though I doubt is lasted more than a quarter second.
I was walking down a corridor, and as I came around the corner, she was walking with another woman, engaged in conversation.
I looked at her, and suddenly, her eyes rose, she looked at me (as if she had somehow felt me looking at her) then then her eyes resumed their former aspect.
In that quarter second our eyes met, a lot of things registered in my mind.
She had beautiful dark eyes, very unusual in shape (people she hadn’t seen since grade school would still recognize her by her unusual eyes) and when she smiled, each eye resembled an upside-down smile. She had a long, graceful neck, and short, dark, curly hair. All of it packaged in that nurse’s uniform, dark curly hair at top, and sensible nurses shoes at the bottom.
All of that in a single quarter second.
To this day, I remember it exactly.
We ended up being introduced to each other by a little old lady of 88 years, who wasn’t all with it, but...my wife was taking care of her in the unit, and my wife told me that little wisp of a woman, with white curly hair and dark eyes, was trying to fix her up with every male who came into the room!
As that little bitty woman laid on my exam table, she crooked her finger at me, and as I leaned close to hear what she had to say, she said conspiratorially: “You two would make such a wonderful couple!”
I looked over at the woman who is now my wife after all these years (who was busy checking the output from the plastic urine bag she was draining into) and thought “Wow.”
I did not ask her out first, she asked me, to go out on “Liver Rounds” with her and some of the other nurses. I couldn’t go, but...the groundwork was laid.
So...that was a brief look that lasted my whole life. When Richard Dreyfuss’s character looked over at her in that white Thunderbird with the red leather interior, and Suzanne Somer’s character looked back with that coy smile, it was the same thing.
So, RIP Suzanne Somers. That smile you meted out to the young man in the beat up car beside you was powerful, something most young men can fully appreciate the power of!
There was another movie scene that reminded me of that single “glance”...
In one of my favorite movies “Master and Commander”, when the HMS Surprise is anchors off a Brazilian coast to resupply and all the traders and natives come out to trade, there is one scene where, a moment after he tells his First Lieutenant (I think) to hurry it up so they can get underway, he pauses and looks down into one of the canoes alongside his ship.
There is a beautiful woman, could be Portuguese or a native, but she is dressed in European garb, and is looking up shyly from under her parasol at him. As he looks down, their eyes meet.
It is longer than an instant, but...the dynamic is the same. In real life, that shy, beautiful face looking up at him would have been held in his thoughts for a long time, I suspect.
It can’t be 50! Why I saw it when I was 23. I don’t feel 73.