A Bolt Of Lightning Up Your Bottom

When a gentleman has a close lady friend – possibly one who’s married to him or at least has agreed to spend large swathes of their life with him – he finds himself at some point watching several films that feature Reese Witherspoon or Alicia Silverstone.

Such films are usually “chick flicks”, aimed predominantly at a female audience who can turn off important parts of their brains at will, thereby allowing them to experience surprise and enjoyment when the heroine leaves their selfish, morally bankrupt city-slicker boyfriend for the rough-and-tumble guy next door who has never worn a suit in his life but knows how to deliver a baby cow.

While watching chick flicks is an important stage in any relationship – along with many other sacrifices couples make for each other, like giving up half of a perfectly good bed or agreeing to deposit toenail clippings into an appropriate receptacle rather than onto the dining table – it’s one that continually leaves me confuddled because I can’t for the life of me tell the difference between Reese and Alicia.

If you showed me a picture of one of them and asked me who it was, I’d say “well, that’s Reese Witherspoon, or the other one... er…” and then spend valuable minutes trying to remember which one was in Batman And Robin, which one was in Clueless, which one was in Legally Blonde and then attempting to put a name to the face in my brain, which looks like this:
This mental image is fundamentally useless because it’s a morphed picture of both of them, a gestalt entity my brain calls Areesia Silverspoon. Yeah, thanks a lot, brain. That really helps.

Why do we need them both? Is it because Hollywood churns out so much chickery flickery that there’s simply too much work for one unbearably kooky starlet? Do they get together and cheekily (but kookily) swap scripts to see if baffled directors notice they’ve got the other one? Or are they in fact the same person? I trawled the internet for a picture of them being kooky together, but guess what? No such picture exists!

I can only, therefore, draw one conclusion. Alicia Silverstone is the super-hero alter-ego of Reese Witherspoon. When producers need a pretty, kooky, initially vulnerable but eventually independent and forthright character they hire Reese, but if the script’s a bit lacking or the male co-star is a bit too famous, they get on the Silver-phone and call for Alicia to provide that advanced level of extra-prettiness, super-kookiness, mega-vulnerability, ultra-independence and hyper-forthrightitude. I believe they’re that way round because ‘Witherspoon’ is a silly, dull name, like Clark Kent or Bruce Wayne, while ‘Silverstone’ sounds like one of the X-Men women.

And another thing: why are the X-Men women also called X-Men? Don’t they get cheesed off being called men all the time?

“Oh, hello Storm from the X-Men”
“Actually I’m a woman, and to help you remember here’s a bolt of lightning up your bottom”
“Ooyah!”