"I've chosen my wedding ring large and heavy to continue forever. But exactly because of that all the time that Dave and I have an argument I feel it like handcuffs, and on anger time I throw it in a basket. Poor Dave, he bought me three wedding rings already!"
About this Quote
Commitment, in Carmen Miranda's telling, is literally a prop: big, heavy, built to "continue forever". That phrasing borrows the fairy-tale marketing of marriage, the kind of permanent promise you can supposedly buy in metal and weight. Then she punctures it with a physical gag: the same ring turns into handcuffs the moment an argument hits. Love becomes an accessory that can double as a restraint, and Miranda - a performer whose career depended on turning spectacle into truth - knows exactly how funny and revealing that is.
The subtext is less "marriage is hard" than "marriage is performative". A large ring isn't just a vow; it's a public signal, something you wear for other people's eyes as much as your partner's. When she throws it "in a basket" during anger, she's staging a little protest against that public script. The basket is domestic, almost slapstick, like a costume piece tossed offstage between scenes.
"Poor Dave" lands as a punchline and a tiny act of mercy. She frames herself as volatile and him as the long-suffering buyer of replacement symbols, which slyly flips power: he keeps paying for permanence, she keeps proving permanence is negotiable. In the mid-century celebrity context, it reads like Miranda smuggling modern ambivalence into an era that sold marriage as destiny. The joke isn't that she can't keep a ring. It's that a ring can't keep a person.
The subtext is less "marriage is hard" than "marriage is performative". A large ring isn't just a vow; it's a public signal, something you wear for other people's eyes as much as your partner's. When she throws it "in a basket" during anger, she's staging a little protest against that public script. The basket is domestic, almost slapstick, like a costume piece tossed offstage between scenes.
"Poor Dave" lands as a punchline and a tiny act of mercy. She frames herself as volatile and him as the long-suffering buyer of replacement symbols, which slyly flips power: he keeps paying for permanence, she keeps proving permanence is negotiable. In the mid-century celebrity context, it reads like Miranda smuggling modern ambivalence into an era that sold marriage as destiny. The joke isn't that she can't keep a ring. It's that a ring can't keep a person.
Quote Details
| Topic | Husband & Wife |
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