born 29 January 1970

Dmitri Malikov, birthplace unspecified, Russian musician

Eric Packham, Starke, Florida, extra

Felipe Cordero, birthplace unspecified, Costa Rican production manager

Heather Graham, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, actress

James H. Dargie, North Adams, Massachusetts, CGI animator

Janice Kawaye, Los Angeles, California, voiceover talent

John Walton, Budapest, Hungary, porn star

Paula Larrain, Valparasio, Chile, Danish journalist

Robert Collins, Concord, Massachusetts, sidekick

Robert Jolley, Pocatello, Idaho, cameraman/grandnephew of Ansel Adams

Tony Travis, Cleveland, Ohio, writer/director

Here was how I first envisioned this post going:

BULLETIN

Attention, Unmarried Men Of America….Attention, Unmarried Men Of America….

Today is movie star Heather Graham’s 40^th birthday!!!!!

She’s single, fellas, SINGLE I tell you….

Somebody, anybody, please, it’s a longshot, yes, but, c’mon, I myself am extremely happily spoken for, but ONE of you has got to step up to the plate here!

* * *

But the more I thought about it, I came to the following conclusion:

To really get at what’s fascinating to me about Heather Graham and her singlehood, I have to delve into available internet speculation about the real-life persons she has been linked to over the years. And I’m going to do that in just a second, but first, I feel compelled to point out that she does deserve more credit than she generally gets as an actress. Lots of equally gorgeous women have had far less substantial careers. She’s good in all the better-known pictures she’s done. Even a kind of throwaway cable TV special like Say It Isn’t So works better than it ought to, due in no small part to Graham’s feisty sticktoitiveness.

Today’s Winner may never get married, and why would she? Why would anyone care? I mean, yes, her job is to be a bodacious big-screen beauty, as opposed to a great, serious actress. Time and again in the movies she’s embodied a ripe and juicy but ultimately elusive object of desire. (I’m looking at you in particular, Special Agent Dale Cooper.) As a red-blooded male, I’ve basically been programmed over the years to think of her largely in terms of her hypothetical romantic attainability.

I’m not the only one. All you have to do is type the letters H and E into a Google Image search, and already “heather graham” will spring to fifth on the dropdown list of all searchable entities beginning with those two letters. She’s ahead of “heaven”, “hell”, and all human beings, including “heidi klum” and “heath ledger”. Among all possible search terms beginning with those two letters, she trails only “heart”, “hello kitty”, “herpes”, and “hello”.

But the way you have to look at this, I’ve concluded, is that judging from all the people that the internets claim she has bonked, this woman is a female Warren Beatty. This is trickier than it might at first seem. I think that she’s just been playing the field, avidly, all these years, and intends to go down in history as a kind of Doña Juana de Los Angeles, the envy of all those women who might have wished to sleep with the broadest possible range of men imaginable. It’s a backdoor feminist triumph, really, pun only reluctantly intended.

Want proof? OK, of the people she is thought to have been with, we’ve got: the iconic, the famous, the old and craggy, the gadabout, the intense, the spooky, the fabulously wealthy, the totally awesome and rad and just plain nuts, and, as of recently, the by-all-appearances-normal-and-down-to-earth, among others.

Damn, Heather Graham. You are a STUD. Happy birthday: ring or no ring, there’s a 0% chance you’ll be sleeping alone tonight.