Rosendale Ramblings By Sari Botton

Even though the New York Times gave it a lousy review, and although I know there will be moments that will make me cringe, I am dying to see the new Dave Eggers/ Vendela Vida movie “Away we go.” From the preview, and other reviews, I get the sense that this movie both identifies with and pokes fun at a certain set…well, that I am maybe a  member of.

It hadn’t fully occurred to me that I was part of a “set” – especially since I have always thought of myself as breaking from sets, an outsider, not a joiner  – until we went to have dinner with friends in Halcottsville. Our friends Jimmy and Beth had invited another couple over as well. That’s when I learned that I belong to the set that is about breaking from sets.

The couple showed up an hour or so after us – in the exact same car. No, the EXACT same car. A grey, 2002 Passat 4Motion wagon. Jimmy greeted them at the door and asked them to remove their shoes. The same shoes Brian and I had just removed – Blundstone 500 paddock boots, the deep, deep, almost black ones with brown trim. There they were on the welcome mat, four pairs of the exact same shoes in the same colors.

She was in publishing. I am in publishing. He records music. Brian records music. They married late, are childless, have a house upstate, and they grow their own vegetables, and they can them and pickle them…just like we do.

As the aesthetic similarities revealed themselves one after another over the course of the evening, my first impression was: Wow. How is it possible that we have so much in common with this couple? It’s eerie…

But by the next morning, after the wine wore off, it occurred to me: we have so much in common with them because we are all part of a big cliche. It is the cliche of people who think they are so alterna- and outsider-y that they are beyond cliches. I am not sure what I am going to get out of standing in the echo chamber of that contradiction for the length of a two-hour movie. But I am somehow intensely drawn to it.