Sarah Jessica Parker Vs. Air Fresheners

The Case For Sarah Jessica Parker

Ladies, where were you when you realized that it was incumbent upon you to do what you could to counter society's double standard about men's and women's sexual lives by sleeping with a bunch of different dudes? Was it...in front of Sex & The City? Because if it was, you owe Sarah Jessica Parker a debt of gratitude for setting you and your panties free.

Parker not only starred in but also produced the show, which found her character, Carrie Bradshaw, plowing her way through half New York's male population over its six beloved seasons, as well as smoking, shopping, and coltishly tossing her hair. The role helped to turn her into a fashion icon, who had to wear a dozen different outfits over the course of a single MTV Movie Awards hosting gig (one a gown so billowy that she concealed a couple of chorus boys under it -- hi-yo!) and made sure to be photographed often at fashion shows and the like. (Her fashion icon-itude is also what probably landed her a recent spokesmodel gig with Gap even though she is approximately 2'3". But hey, she sure could work it in her jeans with Lenny Kravitz, right?)

Now that Sex is over for Parker, she is working hard to remind us that before she was a TV phenom, she was a movie star: roles in The Family Stone and this week's Failure To Launch are sterling efforts to translate the star quality we saw in her post-Sex Gap TV spots and the print ads for her fragrance, Lovely, back onto the big screen, reminding us of her glory days in Striking Distance and Honeymoon In Vegas. If nothing else, the poster for Failure To Launch sure does light her in a way that seems designed to remind us of when she wasn't forty-one years old. Or maybe make us think the movie's from back then, when she was a breezy single gal getting into adorable romantic scrapes, coltishly.

The Case For Air Fresheners

Air fresheners serve all sorts of useful purposes -- including some that you may not have even considered. For instance, you may be thinking of the ones that plug into the wall and double as night lights. But did it occur to you that those ones -- and the ones that puff out like smoke rings from those table-top jobs, or the ones that look like crystal knickknacks, or the ones that plug into the wall but can also have something else plugged into them, or the ones that come on discs and have to be "played" in some special device -- are keeping countless product designers employed? Imagine if we were still living in those benighted times when our only option for masking the smells of pets or dust in our homes was the olde-fashioned Lysol spray. Primitive!

But the greatest good the air freshener provides is probably the very first one you did think of: in a bathroom, events take place that should be swiftly forgotten, and sometimes opening a window isn't sufficient to dissipate the evidence of a toilet-bowl massacre. Thank you, Glade, for concealing myriad crimes of digestion.

The Decision

We have to be honest: we can't stand Sarah Jessica Parker. We don't know how she got this reputation as a fashionista; her ubiquitous Gap ads grated; now that she's middle-aged, she needs to quit acting like SanDeE*; and every time we refer to her as "coltish," what we really mean is "horse-faced." And yet, air fresheners are not without their faults. For all the effort product designers apparently put in to coming up with new fragrance delivery systems, they still haven't refined the actual fragrance so that it isn't so oppressively chemical that it gives you a migraine: a pine smell is nice, but stepping into a room scented with it shouldn't make you feel like you just got British Columbia shoved up your nose. Air fresheners may have been a great '50s-era convenience, allowing housewives to let the litter box sit an extra day instead of cleaning it as soon as the urine smell asserted itself, but in our day, incense isn't an exotic mystery confined to Hindu shrines, and works a lot better. Sarah Jessica Parker may stink as an actress, but not as bad as artificial potpourri.

The Winner

Sarah Jessica Parker