Why I'm Single - Part XLVIII

An Ideal Husband
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: July 6, 2008

It never ends.

-Kay Corleone

The Godfather: Part III

So  that she can have the long weekend off, Maureen Dowd brushes off some unpublished notes from Are Men Necessary? and adds the following news peg to make it seem timely:

There’s the Christie Brinkley/Peter Cook fireworks on Long Island and the Madonna/Guy Ritchie/A-Rod Roman candle in New York.

Nothing like a few bad Fourth Of July puns to keep it topical. She then turns over the column to a Catholic marriage expert she describes thusly:

Father Pat Connor, a 79-year-old Catholic priest born in Australia and based in Bordentown, N.J., has spent his celibate life — including nine years as a missionary in India — mulling connubial bliss.

A full thirteen paragraphs of the column are direct quotes from the good father, which sure gives both Maureen and us textual scholars at Dowd Central little to do this week.

She even subs out the Movies With Maureen® to him:

“Take a good, unsentimental look at his family — you’ll learn a lot about him and his attitude towards women. Kay made a monstrous mistake marrying Michael Corleone! Is there a history of divorce in the family?

In other words, don't marry a mobster. Good advice, padre.

But the last quote is the money shot because it provides the rationalization that Dowd needs to realize that despite the fact that millions of couples do meet and marry successfully, she can feel she has dodges a bullet:

“After I regale a group with this talk, the despairing cry goes up: ‘But you’ve eliminated everyone!’ Life is unfair.”

Life is unfair. The rest of us have to take a precious vacation day to get extra time off. Maureen Dowd gets to literally phone it in with her priest.