How The Brangelina Wedding Really Went Down

40s chick has been a bit AWOL. It started with a diversion to writing for a fun blog that necessitated seriously weekly scrutiny of The Bachelor ,
a little dating advice for the guys on the Big Bang Theory
and a jaunt back into the 80s and 90s episodes of Neighbours. This then overlapped with some well-earned downtime in a remote part of Western Australia where it was too ridiculously beautiful to sully beach time with the presence of technology.

However, I’m back on a plane to Melbourne and feeling like I need to give the 40s chick blog a little lovin.

What I didn’t fail to miss during my time beachside, was the fact that, despite their protestations that they wouldn’t wed until there was marriage equality for everyone, Brangelina bought into the urgings of the marital mafia and tied the knot.

Given I felt the need to keep sand out of my iPad, I know nothing of how this shindig went down. I only saw the news through that flickery ticker tape thingy on the bottom of the screen while I aimed to wrestle away the pool comp title at the local pub.

I’m sure the interwebs and some lucky publication with the exclusive have the deets, but in the absence of all that, here’s what I think NEVER happened at the Brangelina wedding.

Shiloh went frou-frou

From birth, Shiloh has demonstrated an anaphylactic-style aversion to girl clothes. Early on, she became the natural antidote to Suri Cruise and just kicked some androgynist stylin’ butt.

So I’m tipping that this wedding did not see Shiloh clad in emerald taffeta, with carefully custom-dyed silk shoes and a prom-worthy corsage.

If it did, I’m thinking she kicked down some doors till she found the waiter’s ante-room, funded a superannuation fund for some poor local with this week’s pocket money in exchange for his uniform, and then happily attended the rest of the celebrations in trousers, albeit a little generous for her tiny frame.

There were Team Jen protesters

Jen’s supporters are still hurting from the way Angelina ALLEGEDLY/TOTALLY snared the married Brad during the filming of Mr and Mrs Smith.

No one wanted the golden couple torn asunder by the predatory Angelina – it spawned a Shenzen-province production line of Team Jen T-shirts and a Twitter hashtag before really understood what a Twitter hashtag actually was.

Just as the sad SaveAlbertPark clan are still attaching yellow ribbons to oak trees to protest the Melbourne Grand Prix some eighteen years after the Grand Prix took up residence around the track, there are no doubt similarly resolute Team Jen die-hards waving their T-shirts aloft.

I suspect they are still drinking NY coffee over old eps of Friends rather than picketing Chateau Miraval, but I’d like to think they are still there staging a teeny but heartfelt protest nonetheless.

Ange and Brad’s outfit

 Designers would be slitting the throats of their first born children to be dressing the couple for their matrimonials. However I’d like to think of Brad and Ange defying tradition by rocking a little double denim a’la Brit and JT

Or Ange shucking skinny shoulders into a Diana-style gigantic sleeve.

Oh Yes.

The Celebrant

 Given Brangie’s indifference to the Moses commandments,  eg coveting those married elsewhere, I suspect that they may have engaged the services of someone less religious, but rocking the following elements in their CV:

• Served as s spiritual doula, presiding over serene home-births, creating the most zen imprint on the birth of blessed children
• Apprenticed dutifully to the Dalai Lama, emerging as an enlightened prophet
• Meditated in a cave in Bhutan for a year
• Curated Gwyneth Paltrow’s green smoothie recipe collection on goop.com

No. I want the guru of the Brangelina nuptials to have been a chain-smoking, Wild Turkey-swilling Elvis impersonator, a little on the fuller side and likely to bust out of the white suit at any given moment.

How YOU doin’?

The history

 I’m pretty sure that the Brangelina celebrant, Elvis-impersonator or not, would have acknowledged the journey that brought these two together, including:

• The W magazine spread (so soon after the Aniston split that it made us all a little queasy)
• The Rainbow Jolie-Pitt children
• Childbirth in Africa – only a Hollywood actress would figure that for a safe concept

Instead, I’d like to think they ritually emptied Billy Bob Thornton’s blood from that vial that Angelina used to tote around and re-used it as receptacle to throw down some quality Tequila shots.

 

I don’t know, you tell me, what did you expect from Brangelina?

 

 

 

 

 

The Dating Downside of the Billionaire and the Supermodel

The Aussie trash mags were agog this week with the unqualified rumour / dead-set certainty that Miranda Kerr and James Packer were an item, nay, truly in love.

Miranda – Aussie model made good by being blessed with the revered Victoria’s Secret Angel wings who shortly cemented her celeb-status by marrying and bearing an heir to Orlando Bloom, only to have her marriage undergo dignified disintegration two years later.

James – spawn of famous yet aesthetically challenged Packer media-mogul family, he of a procession of brunette wives, an OTT superyacht and the taint of scientology via his friendship with Tom Cruise.

Associated hashtags trended up in the down-under realm of the twittersphere. Given the unnerving timing of Miranda’s split from Orlando and James’s de-merger from his third wife Erica Packer AND the fact they all already knew each other, there was an element of alleged chronological impropriety. Hose that down all you like and you are still left with

#rebound

As anyone who has tried to get back on the horse, so to speak, after even the most anonymous split, where there was no divvying up of superyachts, harbour-houses and LA-pads, will tell you that the first relationship post marital implosion is fraught. Even if all you are quibbling over is the meagre pickings of a couple of superannuation funds, a cream-brick house with an outdated kitchen and 1997 Holden Astra, the first relationship you dabble in after signing the documents is as likely to be successful as Lindsay Lohan’s next rehab stint.

Take a model and a billionaire and the rebound relationship has platinum status #firstworldproblems

Here’s how the difficulties of model- billionaire rebound relationship differ from your own.

One – the relationship nickname might not work.

My first recollection of this was Bennifer – the ill-fated pairing of Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck, who in my opinion deserved to go down in flames after the production of the execrable Gigli which took 121 minutes out of my life that I will never get back.

The Oscar-winners of the super-couple nickname stakes undoubtedly go to Brangelina who after similarly dubious relationship timing vis-à-vis Brad’s marriage to Jennifer Aniston (#teamJen) managed a nicely multi-syllabic melodic combo that has precisely the number of consonants as the number of children they have.

Miranda and James? I’ve got nothing.

Jamiran – sounds like Jamiroqai’s unloved stepbrother

Packerr – entirely lacking in imagination and, depending on which way you look at it, reduces a Victoria’s Secret Angel to a single letter.

Miracker – which is their best hope but means they will go down in history as a misspelt Spanish percussion instrument.

Two – the tabloids know about your relationship one millisecond after you do

In your average suburban relationship, you can keep knowledge of your new relationship to only your besties and those who happened to be on FB in the 3 minutes where you drunkenly posted a premature couple pic (before the grown-up in you kicked that #nofilter pic to the kerb given the sense you had that it might not last until the next change of season)

If you are a model/billionaire coupling, you have less than a single heartbeat before your digitally welded picture is splashed on a mag cover, especially if its in an off-week for the Kardashians.

Three – everything that’s gone before is public

With your average suburban soccer dad, even your best online-stalking efforts will likely turn up nothing worse than some ill-advised lycra in a cycling/triathlon phase, or a litany of boring-sounding administrative jobs on Linked-in.

Google James Packer and you have everything from a period of overindulgence in pretty much everything that is high-calorific in life before he went through his recent body transformation,

a lifetime where he has not nailed a decent hairstyle,

and a hint of what might be instore in the unlikely event you grow old together – in the form of his father Kerry Packer.

Four – you become part of a cliché.

James is now known as serial modeliser, having dated

• Model Jennifer Flavin who had been ditched by Sylvester Stallone
• Model Jodie Meares who learned so much career-wise from their time together that she progressed from swimsuit model to swimsuit designer and her spiritual progression dictated that she reinvent herself from eastern-suburban Jodie to Himalayan-meditation-retreat-dwelling Jodhi.
• Model Erica Baxter who hailed from the same teeny country town as Miranda. Did both of them rate in the year-book as ‘most likely to snag a billionaire’?

Not on the same scale as Leonardio De Caprio, but unless Miranda is about to become a honey-blonde, there’s no danger of being enticed into his world.

So listeners, much as you might be balancing the edgy thrill of a rebound relationship with the ennui of kindy-drop-off, the weekly grocery run and the unenviable challenge of just trying to keep up a summer-sandal-worthy pedicure, bear in mind it could be worse.

You could be reading about your new relationship in media more permanent than an ill-advised instagram pic viewed through a suburban cut-price-vodka-hangover.

If you are taking your online dating a little more seriously than this blog, check out this website for fabulously simple online dating advice.