When Your Dog Gets to Kiss Viggo Mortensen and You Do Not

Previously published in Salon circa 2011

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Hello Readers — This essay was originally published in the late, great BARK magazine (and on open Salon.com) in 2011 or thereabouts and I can no longer find any trace of it (or, oddly, of me) online anymore. So I thought I would share it again. To, you know, continue to try to convince the Almighty Algorithm that I am a separate Lee Harrington from the one who writes about very different topics.

Chloe is long gone and this point, and I am no longer the same person (thankfully) who wrote this piece. Still, it was fun to reread and to remember this short period of time when I indulged in a celebrity crush. Enjoy! And please share this Substack and encourage others to subscribe. It’s my lifeline :) Thank you!

When Your Dog Gets to Kiss Viggo Mortensen and You Do Not

Once I was in love in Viggo Mortensen. Yes, I know that this was just a fantasy, a celebrity crush, and that I was yet another not-twenty year old woman who had a crush on Viggo, who fantasized about being swept away on a white horse by Aragon. And I know that Viggo, to date, does not know that I exist.

But there is one thing that sets me apart from all the other fans of Viggo: Viggo Mortensen knows my dog exists. He kissed her. And she kissed him back. And then he kissed her again. On the mouth. I kid you not.

Before I explain how their First Kiss came to be, let me first say that I’ve never had a serious celebrity crush before. I’m not the type. I don’t have the time have a crush on a real person, let alone someone unattainable and two-dimensional (referring to their photographs, not their personalities). Secondly, I don’t even know who most celebrities are. I don’t watch TV or read gossip magazines or even see all that many movies (Yes, I live in a bubble and that bubble is called Woodstock). And I certainly have never followed celebrity gossip. My sister fills me in on all the crucial details (who is dating whom and who is no longer dating whom) but other than that I stick to my fictional world of novels. I am a typical Aquarian: head in the clouds, not grounded to reality, preferring to linger in the safer fictional worlds of my own creation. Except for the New Yorker magazine. And the New York Times. But for eight years I refused to read the Times because I couldn’t stand to see the words “President” and “Bush” strung together. That's eight years without reading movie reviews.

So how is it that I managed to hear of Viggo during that eight-year drought? I discovered his poetry.

It was the summer of 2003, and I had been separated from hum husband for a year, and had sworn off all men, and happened to be visiting the apartment of a semi-famous Beat poet whom I was interviewing for Poets and Writers magazine. (He was associated with the Beat poets of the 50s). As I waited for this writer to put on his leather jacket and beret so that we could go out for coffee, I browsed through his bookshelves. (This is something all writers do, and we often judge our fellows based by what books they display on their shelves. They’re as much a part of our images as the berets.)

I happened to pull down a slim, interesting-looking volume of poetry from the shelves by one “Viggo Mortensen.” The name rang a bell (no, I had not yet seen Lord of the Rings), so I thumbed through the pages, and the first page I was hooked. I don’t have the room to quote any of his poetry here, but let’s just say they are honest and soulful and tender. The prose is delicate but the force of emotion behind them is huge. Any writer can tell you something like that is hard to accomplish. A camel passing through the eye of a needle. I could imagine Viggo’s poems being whispered in a quiet room.

I found myself being moved to tears. And the only poets, to date, who had moved me to tears in the past month were Rumi and Mary Oliver. So that’s saying a lot.

I had a heart of stone back then, you see. Divorce can do that to a person, for a time. But Viggo cracked it open.

“Remind me who this poet Viggo Mortensen is?” I called out to my Beat poet friend.

“He’s that cat from Lord of the Rings, man,” my friend answered. “He’s everywhere, man. Haven’t you heard of him?”

(Yes, gentle reader, he said “cat” and called me “man,” but I feel one must extend a certain respect to one’s elders. And, again, I live in Woodstock.)

“Oh, right,” I said. It was then I had to confess that I had never seen the Lord of the Rings trilogy. It was then I had to confess that I hadn’t even read Tolkein’s book series, because I have always been far too serious and deludedly intolerant of “unserious” books, and had therefore declared, at an early age, that had no use for elves and dwarves and Hobbits. As a child I read Jane Austen and Herman Hesse, and could not be bothered with furry-footed midgets.

Thus I missed out on such hotties as Sean Bean, Carl Urban, and Orlando Bloom. And Viggo, of course.

“What else has he been in?” I asked.

My friend named yet more movies I had not seen. I actually see more French films than American ones, because I like to try to stay fluent in French, and most American films, as we know, border on asinine.

But I made a mental note to rent Lord of the Rings. I had to see the man behind the poems.

“You can have that book, if you’d like,” my friend said. “I read it twice. It’s good. That cat’s got it all. Talent and looks. Fuck him.”

Would that I could.

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