Sarah Jessica Parker Was Right

We both lost our minds over a total eclipse.

In 2017, the last time a total solar eclipse was visible in North America, Sarah Jessica Parker looked up at the sky and lost her shit.

She flew down to South Carolina, which was on the “path of totality” that year, for the full experience, and, lucky for us, filmed every second of it. The resulting footage, shared in two parts on Instagram, remains one of my favorite online artifacts to date (other than photos of Chloe Sevigny and Pauly D sitting next to each other at a Knicks game, which is basically the celebrity equivalent of an eclipse). The two videos she posted make me laugh-cry every time I watch them, which I’ve done maybe a hundred times in the years since.

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“It doesn’t make any sense!” SJP says breathlessly in the first video, panning the camera around like an amateur horror movie director. “It’s happening! Oh my god, you guys, it’s happening!” She and her family are on a boat somewhere down South, and the sky gets darker and darker as the moon takes bigger and bigger bites out of the sun. When it’s almost fully covered, she lets out a maniacal laugh and screams that she can see the “corona,” which is the firey white outline of the sun’s atmosphere. Then she starts to embellish a bit. “And lightning! And birds that are rarely ever seen!” she shrieks. [???] “This the most spectacular, unimaginably perfect, beautiful…” She trails off, whispering, “Ridiculous,” before the video cuts out. 

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In the second video, she whispers that she “made it,” as though the world was going to end and she was spared. “It’s so humbling,” she says. “It’s so… extraordinary.” 

I love these videos because they are so deeply Sarah Jessica Parker. They are so over-the-top, so theater kid, so I couldn’t help but wonder. She sounds like Carrie faking an orgasm. For years, I used them as further evidence that Sarah Jessica Parker is, in fact, a huge cornball.

And then I went and did the exact same thing.

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I had no idea a total eclipse was happening until a moon-conscious friend of mine told me she was going to Austin, Texas, to see it. “Wait, that sounds fun,” I said. “Can I come?”