How Long Can You Stay A Virgin?
I love old movies. I particularly like Doris Day movies, and if That Touch of Mink comes on with her and Cary Grant, I will watch it every time. It’s amazing how I never get tired of it.
It could have something to do with the camera shots of Bermuda, and seeing the Pan Am jet and the itsy bitsy bus with the Pan Am logo in front of the Bermuda hotel. We were probably the only airline to go to Bermuda then. Or one of the few. I flew for Pan Am for twelve years so I never tire of spotting our old stuff.

Besides Steve McQueen, and that awesome car chase, seeing the Pan Am planes on the SFO airport runway are the reasons I love watching Bullitt.
In That Touch of Mink, Doris Day is 40 (in real life), but still a virgin (on some other planet and in the movie), living with Audrey Meadows, also 40 and still a virgin. They sleep in twin beds and share a bedroom. I’ll let that sink in. It’s probably a one bedroom apartment. Even in the 1960s, apartments in Manhattan were the size of an empty tuna fish can and cost at least three million dollars a month.
Audrey works in the Automat, an awesome place that someone should bring back. You got to peek in little windows to see your food, and everything cost a quarter, even the caviar. Not really; Audrey stole all the caviar to sell on a Manhattan street corner so she and Doris could make rent. If a girl couldn’t make rent, she might have to “gasp!” sleep with some guy for a free meal.
These two women were the first virgin cougars to go walking around New York. Barring any nuns who really were as pure as they claimed, naturally.
I think that’s pretty spiffy. To be 40, and look young enough to play a 20 something virgin. (I think we’re supposed to know Doris is in her 20s. What do I know? Maybe Cary Grant knew she was 40, and thought it was a shame such an attractive woman wasn’t getting laid.)
We, the viewers, are supposed to believe she’s a virgin, even though Doris had been around Hollywood for more than twenty years by 1962. She’d married her first husband at 20 and had a son that same year. When That Touch of Mink was released in 1962, her son would have been 20 years old, easily embarrassed and Mom was running around Hollywood pretending to be a 40 year old virgin.
Oy. Where’s the nearest therapist, amirite?
Doris said some insightful things for a 40 year old virgin who’s short on common sense, as she seems to be in many of her movies:
‘The really frightening thing about middle age is the knowledge that you’ll grow out of it.
Wrinkles are hereditary. Parents get them from their children.
If it’s true that men are such beasts, this must account for the fact that most women are animal lovers.’
For those quotes alone, we can forgive the Constant Virgin persona.
This movie will make you feel schizophrenic, if you’re into that, which I am every now and then. There’s a psychiatrist who is flummoxed by homosexuality and thinks Gig Young had — I mean really had — a baby with a putative hubby.
Meanwhile, no one seems to have sex, whether they’re newlyweds, having an affair, or just getting it on in a one night stand. In fact, the so-called “gay” Gig Young is the only person who appears to have had any sex at all!
Poor Audrey Meadows. I wonder if she ever got laid?

