JUNE 20th - What is Love?

On this day in 1987, the undisputed King of Late Night, Johnny Carson married for the fourth and final time. The lucky bride was Alexis Maas, who was quite a bit younger than he was when he met her on the beach two years prior outside of his home in Malibu (also where they got married). Must have been a nice little trip to Malibu for Maas. Just hanging out on the beach, nice little vacay. Thhhhheeerreee’s Johnny. Just saying. I would not mind hanging out on the beach, which is already an enjoyable place to be, with an empty glass of wine (meaning I already had some) and then have some rich celebrity come and fill my glass and fall in love with me. I mean if we’re going for a compatible comparison, it’d have to be a bit of an older woman. Hello there, Demi, Michelle, or Diane. (Some of these women are probably married, but it’s my fantasy, so quit raining on it, Party-Poopers). That’d be a pretty good vacation too. Is it also weird that I don’t feel that Johnny was the slightest bit creepy for marrying someone 30 years his junior? Probably has something to do with him being Johnny Carson. Regardless of the issues he had in his personal life, and they’ve been expounded upon at length in multiple books and documentaries, the guy was all class and he was funny as all get-out on The Tonight Show. There’s also the fact that this marriage lasted the last seventeen years of Johnny’s life. So maybe he finally got it right. You have to give the guy props for continuing to try. Or you could look at it as a bit of a Fool’s Errand. After the first three times of getting knocked out by love, maybe you just hang up the boxing gloves. Kind of says a little about you, depending how you look at it. Glass half full or half empty? I choose to see it as an impressive demonstration of the triumph of love over the mundane minutiae and insignificant problems that tear people apart. And that is impressive. But of course you could be like Thomas Jefferson. He once saw a woman Ben Franklin called more beautiful than Helen of Troy single-handedly cause both British and American troops to throw down their weapons, place their coats on the dirt road so her feet wouldn’t touch the ground, and begin writing love sonnets simply because they were mesmerized by her beauty. TJ was not mesmerized. He was like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” captured the British General and won the battle. But then, as you know, TJ wasn’t impressed by anything.

This day has been Marked.

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