Prelude to a Kiss

If there’s one thing I miss about having a boyfriend, it’s the kissing.

It’s weird, isn’t it, that a self-diagnosed germophobe such as me should want to have someone else’s mouth against her own? Especially when it’s common knowledge that a human bite would be more hazardous than a dog’s because of the bacteria in our saliva? And remember that dogs eat shit and dead things that they find in the yard, so that’s not saying much for the human race.

Putting all ideas of coprophagia aside, the significance of a kiss is in the intimacy, a shared moment of pure abandonment. A kiss is its own particular brand of currency.

It seems as though I have always been in search of the perfect kiss. My first crush was on John Schneider, Bo Duke on The Dukes of Hazzard. I can remember lying in my bed at night at probably all of four years old trying to imagine what it would be like to kiss Bo Duke. But at that age, having never kissed anyone before, I found that in my fantasy, every time my lips would touch his, he would fold over backwards, just like a sheet of paper. That year in kindergarten I experienced my first kisses thanks to an unwilling boy named Darren Dillingham. All of my female classmates would gang up on Darren during recess and chase him down. When we caught him, we’d hold him against the school building and take turns kissing him while he yelled, “Nooooooo!” Considering Darren’s vocal contempt for our game, I'm surprised that the recess monitor never prevented us from doing that. Certainly, if we were kindergarteners acting that way today, Darren’s family would probably have a sexual harassment lawsuit slapped on the school as well as on all of our parents. 

Many of the girls in my class started “going out” with boys in fifth or sixth grade, around the same time that I was watching A Room with a View and thinking that Lucy and George’s kiss at the end of the movie was perfection. Partly because I was a late bloomer, partly because I was never really enthralled by the boys in my small town, my first kiss happened in the spring of my sophomore year in high school. Needless to say, that kiss was far from electric. It was exciting enough at the time, a feeling that I attribute to so many years of anticipation, but it was hardly the stuff that movies are made of. And how could it be when the soundtrack was Guns ‘n Roses and Tesla?

Happily, the kissing has gotten better, much better, since that first awkward embrace.

Over the years, I have studied screen kisses for inspiration. Many are mediocre at best, but a few stand out for me. The pause before Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway’s lips meet in The Thomas Crown Affair… That soft and tender greeting between Grace Kelley and Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window… The hunger between Keira Knightley and James McEvoy in Atonement’s library scene… That playful, explorative kiss that Audrey Tatou gives to Mathieu Kassovitz at the end of Amelie… The breathtaking longing that Ryan Gosling has for Rachel McAdams in the The Notebook’s rain scene… The way that Gerard Depardieu envelops Andie McDowell during the final scene of Green Card… The decisiveness of Michael Vartan’s kiss when he runs onto the field to embrace Drew Barrymore in Never Been Kissed… The reunion between Maria Bello and Hugh Dancy on a suburban street at sunrise in The Jane Austen Book Club.

I don’t particularly consider myself a romantic and I am known to scoff at over the top displays of affection, but show me a well-crafted kiss and I’ll always turn to mush. Better yet, send one of those well-crafted kisses my way and let me show you.