Mrs. Mark Sanford, Meet Mrs. Stephen Haines

The kids are at camp this week, so Mr. and Mrs. Crazy-Go-Nuts went to a movie last night. Not to brag, but it started at 9:50 and the popcorn was dinner; can dancing all night be far behind? Don't answer that, but after all the recent news about hi-pro marriages gone wrong*, it was nice to get away for Away We Go, a big-hearted little meditation on old-fashioned living in sin.

(*Jon & Kate, I never heard of you until recently, and wish I could get back that innocence. John Edwards, the sound you hear is Bill Clinton laughing; not even that old hound dog was ever accused of having already picked out the music for the wedding he'd have once his wife was, um, dead. And Mark Sanford, don't look now, but your beautiful missus can and I predict will do better. Old CW: At least he's in love! New CW: (Tan) lines have been crossed before, so please zip it oh King David come to life; the mother of your children does not need to hear on television about how hard you are trying to fall back in love with her.)

In Away We Go, two madly-in-love 30-somethings with few belongings but a fair amount of baggage fly off to find just the right nest for the baby they're expecting. She won't marry him, maybe because since her parents are dead she "doesn't see the point.'' But they're so much more committed than all the couples they see making a hash of it that we don't know, either, why they'd want to change a thing. The scene on the trampoline where they exchange unofficial vows to do things like let their daughter be fat or skinny or any size at all except bent-out-of-shape over her weight was one of the sweetest things I'd seen in a while.

A couple of nights earlier, as it happens, I'd also seen the ultimate divorce movie, The Women, on TCM, and wondered if Jenny Sanford maybe fit the mold of the Norma Shearer character, Mary Haines, who rides out and rises above the indignity of losing her man to the fling he imagines himself in love with. The whole thing is fabulously over-the-top, with good wifey Mary (who because this is 1939 is a.k.a. Mrs. Stephen Haines) advising bad-girl girlfriend Joan Crawford that the trampy get-up she's just charged to Stephen's account is far too obvious for his taste and Joan answering that if she finds she's wearing anything Stephen doesn't like, well then honey she just takes it off.

In the last scene, mortally clueless hubby (off-camera, like all of the guys) is the last to learn that Joan really was only after his big old bank account, and comes crawling back to Mary. "Mary Haines, where's your pride?'' shrieks her busybody non-friend, Rosalind Russell. "I don't have any,'' she replies. "That's a luxury that a woman in love can't afford.'' Mrs. Sanford, I am not going to go all Rosalind Russell on you here – only you know what's right for you -- but the way you're marching through this mess with dignity intact is a reminder to the rest of us that as another disappointed political wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, said, no one can make you feel inferior without your permission.