There is a famed, cringe-worthy moment in the first episode of the fourth season of Sex and the City (“The Agony and the ‘Ex’-tacy”) in which Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker, as you know by now), during the unwanted birthday party everyone insisted she have which no one shows up to, that an annoying cunt of a twenty-something screams, “Twenty-five! Fuck, I’m old!” And this right as she finishes blowing out her birthday cake candle next to Carrie’s embarrassingly empty table. Carrie, who is turning thirty-five at the very same instant, cannot believe the gall of someone so young complaining of being aged. While of course, as the years have gone by since the airing of this episode, New York and beyond thirty-somethings have identified with this scene in terms of how little we tend to appreciate our youth when we have it, what it also forces us to reconcile is how our older selves would look at our younger selves if the two came face to face.
In 2019 Carrie’s case, it would be safe to say that based on her blithe ability to sellout to Stella Artois would make Cosmopolitan-era Carrie break out in a rash the same way she did when Miranda made her try on a cheap wedding dress. Or at least write an annoying question about it in the vein of: “I couldn’t help but wonder, if I had to live in the New York of now and pay ten million dollars a month on rent, would I, too, offer up my dignity to the dual-action whoring out of my personality to the Super Bowl and Stella Artois?”
Although “The Dude” (Jeff Bridges) from The Big Lebowski also effortlessly trades in his White Russian for what he calls a Stella “Artose,” this move is actually in keeping with his character–the dude abides, after all, coexisting with whatever comes his way, profitable business deals included. For Carrie, however, this is pure sacrilege–going against everything her OG self would have stood for, which is to say, having some goddamn edge. A little fucking pride in her consummate taste, managing to go thousands upon thousands of dollars into debt specifically because she would never order something as banal as a Stella Artois. Nor would she have deigned to consort with someone wearing a Navajo sweater (alternately known as the Original Westerley cardigan) at the table next to her.
But alas, here is the supposed “legendary” Carrie Bradshaw of the present proving herself to have gone as soft as everything else in New York. Leading one to believe that maybe, for the purposes of retaining at least a modicum of that version of herself that found enough sexually charged material to write about for almost a decade, she might have been better off staying in Paris in the wake of her Aleksandr Petrovsky smackdown. Then surely, at least, she would have switched from a Cosmo to a Boulevardier without any unseemly or gauche product placement in between. That still would have heeded the Stella ad’s tag line to “Change up the usual” without totally losing one’s entire sense of original identity.
