Sue Katz: Consenting Adult

Film Review: The King’s Speech

  First a personal note. Although I don’t stutter myself, Marty Jezer, a beloved friend of mine who passed away in recent years, wrote a brilliant book about stuttering and the nasty “cures” visited on those who do. (You can find Stuttering: A Life Bound Up In Words here.) So I took a special interest in this captivating film.

The second son of the late King George V is unexpectedly shoved onto the throne when his brother King Edward VIII abdicates due, ostensibly, to his irrepressible love for a twice-divorced American, Wallis Simpson. However, this reluctant King George VI (Colin Firth) – father of the present Queen Elizabeth  – has been stuttering since childhood and the necessity to make constant war-time speeches is excruciating. His wife recalls that although she turned his marriage proposal down twice because she never wanted to live the royal life, she decided finally that they’d be protected from it by his “lovely stammer.”

Luckily he has been working with Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush), an unconventional, un-certified speech therapist with whom he, quite surprisingly, develops an actual friendship. King George VI has never really hung out with actual non-aristocrats and it takes Logue to teach him how to behave himself – and how to form a friendship. Rush is the most endearing character in every scene he appears in.

The wives of the two main characters maintain quite remarkable relationships with their husbands. The women intervene as equals when their men need a bit of bucking up, but otherwise appear to have their own independent lives. Queen Elizabeth (the late queen mother) is well-played by Helena Bonham Carter, and Myrtle Logue, a minor role, is nicely carried off by Jennifer Ehle, who I immediately remembered as Elizabeth Bennett from the 1995 TV mini-series Pride and Prejudice.

The director Tom Hooper has been honing his chops for just such a film by directing other period pieces, including two much-acclaimed TV mini-series “John Adams” and “Elizabeth I” with Helen Mirren.

The good news about “The King’s Speech”: The settings are scrumptious – an inside view of all the palaces and cathedrals familiar to us in a commoners-sort-of-way. The acting is magic, from the top to the bottom of the cast. The movie, although two hours long, kept me so engaged throughout that I neither dozed nor slipped out for a pee, my usual film-going activities.

The disconcerting news: There is not a single person of color in the film, as far as I could see. I understand that in 1936, when George VI acceded to his perch, the aristocracy and their pals were quite likely to all be white. However, there are occasional crowd scenes and street scenes when the ragged lessers are glimpsed, and even there it is as if no one in the 1930s England was non-white.

The other “whitewash” as it were has to do with Wallis Simpson and Edward. Although there was a hint of their sympathy for Hitler and the Nazis, and of Simpson’s alleged ongoing affair with the German Ambassador Ribbentrop, I suspect that the true backstory to Albert’s abdication had more to do with the British government’s political distrust of this couple on the eve of war with Germany, than with the scandal of her divorces and nationality. Hopefully wiser, more informed readers will please let me know what they think about this.

Overall, I haven’t spent a better 118 minutes in a movie house in a long time, despite its limited human palette. The trailer follows:

 

Dear Mr President...

You too may have been a fan of "Stephen Views the News" back when it was still being published as a weekly digest by Stephen Weinstien. Some time ago he decided to quit blogging regularly, but today he wrote this letter (below) to Obama. I have had a few such rants myself, but Stephen has a very special way of writing with clarity. To wit:

I worked very hard for your election. To date your presidency has been one of some accomplishments and more disappointments than I would have anticipated. That being said, today it is rumored that in your upcoming State of the Union message you will be asking for cuts to Social Security. Should that happen it will be a game changer in that if you seek another term, no matter who you would run against, including Sarah Palin, I would cast my vote for anyone but you.

It seems that almost every time you negotiate with the Republican/conservative/special interests in our society the American people get short-changed. This is not hope we can believe in, it is not good politics and it is sickening. I am often left wondering what happened to the man we watched on election night that brought tears of joy to our eyes.

Respectfully,

Stephen Weinstein

This is What Passes for Customer Service

Since I was passing MicroCenter anyway, on my way home from teaching merengue to Chinese elders, I stop to see if I can pick up an inexpensive wireless mouse for my laptop, as the one I have is erratic and only works -- like a 50s television -- if I beat up on it.

There are a gazillion mice to choose from and a lot of help from geek boys roaming around in store polo-shirts. Each has a completely different opinion, gives me conflicting advice, and in the end I choose the $10 store brand – anything to avoid giving Microsoft another penny.

I go to pay and there is a line from here to the blueteeth waiting on two beleaguered cashiers to check us out. Really, there are about 20 of us in line and facing the head of the line is Mr White Guy saying to the men in the line (he doesn’t seem to notice the women), Hello, my name is Mr, Peacock and I’m the Director of Customer Service and thank you for shopping at MicroCenter.”

So I lean over and say down the line, “Ahh, if you’re doing Customer Service, why not get someone else out here to help ring up our purchases? Or you can do it yourself.”

“I’m busy doing overwrites,” he says, bustling over to a cash register and punching in some data, to the bewilderment of the clerk.

“Well, perhaps until you’re needed for the next overwrite, you can ring us up.”

He ignores me, walks away a bit and gets on his cell phone trying to look important. I want to pat his head and tell him that it’s been years since flipping open a cell phone made you look important.

I get out my own cell phone to call the store to get a bigger manager out here to deal with the situation – but without giving up my place in line. I don’t have the number so I stop one of the many employees wandering by and he gives it to me. Of course, a machine answers to say that all the lines are busy and they’d be with me eventually, although I really should just go to the flippin’ website.

The line gets longer and one of the two clerks is caught up in a problem with a customer’s product and we are down to one guy. Mr Significant strolls back to the vicinity about the time I step up to the cash register. First thing, I ask him for his business card. Next, I ask why, with all the employees roaming the stores pushing sales, not one of them could be drafted into ringing up those sales.

“Several people called in to say they weren’t coming to work,” he told me – which I considered a non-sequitor.

“What about hiring some additional help?” I suggest. “There are a few people out of work, you know.”

“They don’t pass the test,” he answers in a lowered voice.

“What test?”

“The drugs test.”

I cannot believe this ass-wipe. Why a computer store is drug-testing potential employees, I cannot figure out. In all the millions of people unemployed and prepared to work, not one has passed their bleeding drugs test?

I’m going to write to the CEO as soon as I can bear to spend the time finding out where and how. But if this dork-drip is doing their customer care, they must not care at all.

P.S. Not one of the people in the line, which had meanwhile grown even longer, made a peep. Not even a murmur. Just swallowed and waited passively. (Perhaps they were all Democrats.)

Osteoporosis: Do All the Miracles Turn into Assaults?

For years now there seems to be a consensus among those who take a professional interest that I have osteoporosis. This despite the unfortunate fact that there has been such a plethora of errors in the taking and reading of my bone density tests that no one can figure out anything quantitative.

One year, vertebrae were compared with unlike vertebrae because a machine or technician lined up the previous year’s x-rays incorrectly. Those errors, however, have never been excised from my record, which therefore is in a state of chaos, with subsequent comparisons showing a variety of conflicting and unreliable results.

A couple weeks ago I took a bone density test which caused my physician to write me an email that started with, “Now this isn’t really an emergency, but go get all your dental work done right away so that we can talk about starting you on Fosamax.” Many post-menopausal women in this country are on Fosamax, some of them a long time, even though the data on this powerful drug is contradictory: Some doctors say one needs to take Fosomax for five years consecutively, but that’s all. Some say that the effects (both direct and side) of Fosomax persist whether the woman continues use of the drug or not.

Anyway, my doctor then wrote to my rather cool endocrinologist to report on the situation, a fact I learned when the endocrinologist’s office called to make an appointment with me, suggesting a day less than a week away. “When are you generally booking for?” I asked her assistant. And as I suspected, she said about 4 or 5 months ahead.

This non-emergency faster-than-a-speeding-bullet arrangement was a bit stressful. Not the least because I don’t want to take Fosomax. They admitted ages ago that it can cause serious gastrointestinal ulceration, but now it turns out that in old women it is causing spontaneous thigh bone breaks. But most off-putting, in a small percentage of people (admittedly mostly but not exclusively in people getting the drug intravenously as a cancer treatment) it causes necrosis of the jaw – i.e. the jaw bone disintegrates after you’ve had dental work and part of the jaw needs to be amputated. I have crap teeth and they will be requiring all sorts of expensive and therefore delayed attentions in the coming decades. I’m never going to be able to “finish” my dental work – I’m in a continuous state of buying some dentist or other a nice summer home.

So here you have a drug meant to prevent fractures that (sometimes) causes the jaw bone to liquefy when provoked and the thigh bone to splinter without provocation. No thank you. I’ll take calcium.

While my own physician can’t quite understand my reluctance to ingest Fosomax, the endocrinologist was with me 100%. First, she said, she was going to get a colleague of hers who she considers the best in the business to read the x-rays correctly so we actually know what’s going on.

Second, I should start drinking milk and eating cheese and looking up “calcium-rich foods” on the internet and stuffing them in my mouth. That seems a small price to pay to avoid what sounds to me like another one of those drugs which, while purporting to do something or other for women, ends up doing something worse. From thalidomide to hormone replacement therapy, all the miracles turn into assaults.

I know that milk products are fattening and should generally be avoided – or so they’ve been saying for years – but now I’m no longer going to feel guilty about my sharp cheddar and the price of Jarlsburg. It is, after all, medicine for a condition I may or may not have to one degree or perhaps to another.

PS: I only got such a swift appointment because there happened to be a cancellation that minute.