Dean and Sylvia

SYLVIA

--When are Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan going to make another of those wonderful romantic comedies, like Sleepless in Seattle or You’ve Got Mail?

--Tom and Meg will certainly be looking for scripts they can do together. But meanwhile, they each have projects going on their own. They’ll both be going in front of the cameras in biopics—Tom playing Dean Martin, while Meg does the life of Sylvia Plath.

Give up those adorable
Tom and Meg romances?
It’s too much to ask.

And there’s a better way.
Sylvia loses the Mademoiselle
competition. To make it up,

her parents take her
for a week in Havana. She meets
Dino--handsome, gifted, unfulfilled.

She tells him he needs a partner,
a wisecracker, zany—“What about you,
sweetheart?” Dean asks, eyes twinkling.

Her parents take her back to Boston.
She’s shoved into Wellesley, Lowell, poetry,
Ted Hughes, and Dean meets Jerry,

who looks sort of like Sylvia, without her
vivacious wit. Life pulls them apart,
their chance at happiness lost…forever?

It looks that way for Sylvia. One day,
she decides to end it all. She goes to turn on
the gas jet, but by mistake, hits the radio,

hears, through the static, Everybody
loves somebody sometime…Dean! He’s playing
the Albert Hall, with Jerry! She leaves

Ted and his mistress minding the kids,
she takes a cab, gets backstage to find
Dean in his dressing room, a gun to his head.

She pries it gently from his fingers. They talk
all night, walking beside the Thames. Dean tells her
he can’t stand another night with Jerry.

They’ve found each other. Jerry
goes off to France, Dean and Sylvia
head for Vegas, where he teaches her

how to laugh again, she writes
new material for him, brings
a touch of profundity to his act:

When a boot hits your eye
like a big Nazi spy
that’s a Daddy…

It’s a happy ending for Sylvia,
and there’s a lesson to be learned
for all of us: