Wanna hear a secret?

Catherine Zeta Jones is about to become America's biggest star. Forget Nicole, Julia and Sandra. Catherine Zeta Jones has arrived.

I was never a fan. Marrying your way into Hollywood by leaping on the crumbling ruins of one of Hollywood's longest marriages doesn't warm my heart. Nor does selling your wedding to the tabloids and being gouche enough to ask guests to give money for a fund controlled by your newborn baby. That's all a bit nouveaux for me.

That's the past. The girl has cut her chops and stolen the film Chicago, right out from under an outstanding, and I do mean, outstanding, cast.

I nearly rushed the screen after the closing number.

And there's nothing like seeing a great film in Manhattan, where the crowd applauds after each number. Where else would you hear the guys in front of you say, as they exit the theater, "I sure wouldn't have wanted to be the gaf in that last scene."

Brilliant.

In other movie news, there is The Hours. Not a production, but a film poignantly capturing life for women. To record one day, in three women's lives and show you at once how difficult the mundane can be and how few choices there really are in life. But most of all, how our choices are each so monumental, they must be made regardless of how difficult.

The Hours hit me hard a number of times throughout the film because it explored something I've written about here many times: the notion of dying from opportunity. The idea of being tormented by having to choose from so many possibilities in one lifetime.

My friend D. said she had to laugh at one scene involving Virginia Woolfe because it was scripted directly from one of my tantrums. Not happy here, and when I go to where I think I will be happy, I am no longer happy there.

I understand that men find women puzzling. As a woman, I find women puzzling. I find myself puzzling. It's complicated, being a woman and living up to what our mothers were, while forging ahead so that our daughters and sons can be something better.

Too few books and films explore this aspect of women. They make us sirens or shrews, without exploring the motivations that make us both - the tumult of emotions that surge at the vision of a stooped old man or a battered baby carriage left curbside for the trash.

High profile women are publicly berated for flashes of emotion after big political losses, without ever exploring how many times harder that woman pushed to reach a level playing ground with her male counterpart. Female athletes garner mild interest for wins as daunting those won by professional male athletes, and then are shoved back into their place for inappropriately emoting in a male-dominated emotive world.

NHL Playoff losers wipe tears from their eyes walking defeated from a field. Female soccar champions are punished for adopting a male action and swinging their game jersey in gold dusted air.

Women don't have a level playing field, we have our own playing field. And when that's not enough, we have one other thing.

We have the ability to play men like the players they are. No, scratch that. We can play them better.

And all that Jazz.

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