When was the last time you saw 1982’s The World According to Garp? It is still quite extraordinary and odd (available On Demand at Comcast). Robin Williams plays the son of Jenny Fields (Glenn Close’s superb film debut), an unconventional nurse who becomes a feminist icon. Robin’s speedy humor is toned down, but his Garp – Jenny’s son – is resplendent in physical awkwardness and squishy face. The film is based on a John Irving novel that itself is a peculiar mixture of insight and tone-deafness. Irving “got” a lot about violence against women and male sexuality, but really didn’t understand much about feminism or the forms it was taking. Adulation of a leader by huge crowds of compliant admirers, for example, was the opposite of the leaderless structures feminism developed (and which, even recently, the Occupy movement picked up on).
Jenny does not care for men or their lust (about which she is forever judgmental) and certainly doesn’t want to live with them, so she basically rapes a dying patient in order to get pregnant. She herself is half eccentric independent woman, half prude, but conducts herself with unshakeable composure and fearlessness, rescuing children and women with aplomb. Garp is horny and neurotic. He decides to be a writer, but despite the critical acclaim for his first novel, his mother’s feminist manifesto overshadows his book. She becomes rich and famous. He remains tortured and jealous.
John Lithgow gives us a staggeringly warm, engaging portrayal of Roberta Muldoon, a transwoman who becomes a part of the family. Swoosie Kurtz does a great job as a prostitute-turned-disciple. Mary Beth Hurt, as Garp’s wife, is suitably bland as the key to Garp’s desperation to have a “normal” nuclear family as an antidote to his unusual childhood. Jenny uses her wealth to create a women-only retreat for women in distress – but here Irving’s imagination fails him. The self-mutilating cult of fragile, terrified women he places at Jenny’s home are an unconvincing flaw in the author’s conception.
Nonetheless, the film is extraordinary and while it struggles to condense Irving’s novel, it loses none of the eccentricity and quirkiness that make the story captivating. It’s better than most films and holds up remarkably well over three decades later.
Judy and Deborah and I have a culinary three-way happening. We meet up every few months to catch up. This isn’t the first time we’ve come to the, ah, well, let’s call it the X-Café. It’s located halfway between their workplace and my home (ie, my workplace.) There are tables outside, so we settle in. They have made me a few color copies of the cover of my book Lillian’s Last Affair (Deborah executed the cover for me; Judy was an early reader) and hand them to me in a manila envelope which we put down to hold the table while we go in to order.
There is the competent wait person and there is the incompetent wait person. No, they don’t have white bread for my BLT but they do have sourdough bread. No, they’re out of the brioche buns for the hamburgers, but they have chapati which, the incompetent one assures me, is identical to brioche. Once we all locate some things on the menu that they actually have, we return to our table where I find the envelope soaked in some kind of oil – salad dressing? – that had managed to escape the cleaning of the table that apparently never happened. I immediately look at the left sleeve of the red Chico shirt I just bought online, on which I had been leaning while waiting for my friends to arrive and yes, it too is spotted with oil.
This leads to flurries of suggestions from the competent, now very embarrassed, wait person. She brings me a wet washcloth, offers soda water, while the incompetent one says, “Soda powder. No soda flour.” Baking soda we say. That’s it. Judy and Deborah say, “Shout!” and I know just what they mean. We settle in to wait for our food.
Out comes the incompetent one. There isn’t sourdough bread after all. What about 7-grain? Me, I’m a white bread girl. Period. I’m flexible about a lot of things, but I want my bread white. I go back into the restaurant to reorder. In the end I go for a Greek salad.
Food arrives. Judy picks up her wrap sandwich and it explodes in a waterfall of tomato colored juice splattering down the front of her lovely white blouse. That’s two shirts we’ve lost to lunch. Deborah’s grilled veggie sandwich eventually arrives, with an incongruous side of mashed potatoes – which is, in the end, the tastiest morsel on our table (not counting Deborah and Judy, of course.) The owner comes out to make sure everything is okay. We say, fine, fine. The competent wait person brings me back the money I paid for the BLT. No charge today.
And then the bees arrive. One. Two. More. Around the food. Under the table. They summon their friends to come swarm. Judy starts clearing away the plates. We can take a hint. My friends invite me to come to their office to make a photocopy of something I’ve mentioned. We’re laughing over the disaster in their office when Deborah suddenly clenches her stomach and says, “Oh, no”, charging for the bathroom. The bees may have gotten our leftovers, but Deborah has clearly brought home something to remember the lunch by.
How do you make a film about the last days of the American war on Vietnam? First, you count on the appeal of using iconic images of people scrambling up the CIA building rooftop tower to jump into an escape helicopter and of footage of little helicopters belonging to the South Vietnamese army being manually pushed over the deck of an American ship to make room for the next load of desperate people.
Next, take the incalculably privileged child of a ruling class family (Rory Kennedy, the youngest of the 11 children of Robert F. Kennedy and Ethel Kennedy) as your director/producer and hook her up with friends at PBS. Add some unpleasantly close close-ups of the talking heads of (almost exclusively) white male soldier (why are shoulders and chests and bodies never shown anymore – just pores and moles and nose hairs?) Eliminate any context whatsoever – including the why and the what and the how long of the Vietnam War. Do not mention even once that there was a movement back home against the war that included many disillusioned veterans. Don’t point out that Americans killed untold numbers of Vietnamese people, experimenting as they went with such inventions as napalm. Do not interview a single Black soldier – in fact, only imply that there were Black soldiers by a shot of a Vietnamese woman with a child who looks mixed-race. Interview ubiquitous slimebag Henry Kissinger (good for his book sales). Throw in lots of vague but nasty anti-Communism of the most superficial boogeyman sort whenever the North Vietnamese are mentioned.
Piece this together into a self-righteous “documentary” about the last days of Vietnam, when the Americans (always the last to know) were shocked as the North Vietnamese moved in on Saigon. Make sure the film lacks suspense, intelligence, or a point. Let the (mostly) white male soldiers who were involved show you how deeply sorry they were that they couldn’t save all the South Vietnamese who worked for them. Blame it on one guy – the Ambassador, but excuse him because his “adopted son” was killed in Vietnam and so he feels especially “involved.”
This is the most pointless piece of celluloid I’ve ever seen about war. For some reason The Boston Globe, in a special screening at the Kendall cinema, was thrilled to make it the first of a new monthly program having something or other to do with documentaries. But this isn’t a true documentary: if you don’t know the history of the war on Vietnam, you won’t learn it here; if you’re unaware of conflicting views among soldiers and Americans in general about this war, you won’t find them here. It’s not even an apologist approach. It doesn’t try to justify the war – it ignores it. Instead, it takes the last couple of days and uses the final airlift as a means of demonstrating how feeling and heroic our American men are.
And if the film itself doesn’t emphasize that enough, says the Globe, then here is a panel of five men (sic) to blah blah blah. I can’t be more specific about what they said in this discussion after the film as I was part of the swift movement out the door.
I have written about typewriters often. For example, there was this autobiographical piece in April, 2011, in which I admitted “Once a Typist, Always a Typist.”
This weekend I was strolling around the street fair held on our Town Day just a block away from my apartment. There were many booths – from the ubiquitous fried dough to the Friends of our fab library (I’m a “Friend”) to local craftsfolks.
One woman at a booth had a brilliant idea of how to attract children to her booth. She made a manual typewriter and an old-fashioned dial phone available to play with. The kids had never seen such items and they fought to get a turn at these antiques.
They were amazed to use a machine that actually printed as they input their data – they probably thought the typewriter was futuristic. They didn’t know which end of the wired phone to speak into.
Although I’ve had a personal computer since 1985 and am rarely parted from my keyboard, I miss the typewriter. Here’s an entirely unrelated video of yet another way to use a typewriter – this time as an artistic medium.
Last week I decided to go out of my way to shop in the newly-reopened Market Basket, where an odd and riveting labor action just ended. I had the distinct impression that the Market Basket prices were higher now than before the action that closed them down for weeks and weeks. I got to the lemons, which had always been two for $1.17 and they were now 99¢ apiece. I bitched about the hike in price. Afterall, I use about a lemon per day because the only liquid I drink is black tea with lemon - all day; every day.
I was in another supermarket where the lemons are usually 69¢ – up to 99¢ there too. They were lousy specimens as well – thick, spongy outer skins, minimal juice. I was on the phone with a friend. I said, projecting a fantasy nightmare, “The next thing you know something cataclysmic will happen in the agricultural world and Trader Joe’s won’t have any lemons.” That’s really where I buy my lemons: they have always been 49¢ each.
My nightmare came true. At Trader Joe’s yesterday there were no lemons. They had limes. They had citrus fruit. No lemons. I asked a helpful employee and he told me that they are unable to line up a producer or distributor of lemons. He cited two factors. One: There has been a significant drought in California and Mexico, so the crop is shockingly weak. Two: The farmers in Mexico are being convinced to grown corn instead of lemons for use in something industrial that I can’t remember.
Okay, okay, this is definitely a First World problem, but even for a person like me who leaves the environmental work to others (we all have to specialize, no?), this is a moment of note. Lemons are one of the basic foodstuffs in my world. Free the lemons!
Better late than never. I knew next to nothing about August Wilson until he died in 2005. The upside of that deficit is that now I can catch up on all his amazing work. I should’ve known about Wilson because he was born in the Hill District of Pittsburgh in 1945 and I was born in the Hill District of Pittsburgh in 1947. A hill of housing Projects for poor people, in later decades it became known as the “worst” part of town, and at one point, a “no-go zone”—meaning, I believe, that the police were afraid to enter the neighborhood. Back in our day, when there was a sense of community, the population was a mix of African-Americans, many of them – like Wilson’s mother – having come up from the South, and Jewish and Italian immigrants. I only lived in the Hill District my first three years, and then we moved out in 1951, I believe.
August Wilson was there a bit longer. But in the 1950s when his family moved out to a white working class neighborhood not far from where we were living by then, they were the target of a lot of racist shit. He had a hard time finding a school and ended up for a while at Connelley Vocational High School, where my dad studied to be an electrician one or two years before getting an electricity shock that put him in the hospital and ended his education. August Wilson too left school around age 15, but he more or less educated himself at the Carnegie Library – the place that saved my life as well, and in fact that library ended up giving him the only college degree they ever awarded.
He produced a series of 10 plays that portrayed black life in Pittsburgh in succeeding decades called The Pittsburgh Cycle – all but one take place in the Hill District. He won two Pulitzer Prizes for them. In fact, seems like he won every damn prize available to playwrights in his too-short life.
I got “Fences” out of the library (one of the ones that won him a Pulitzer). And read it last night. It is compelling, deep, honest, and beautiful. It wrestles, with wit and with candor, with the difficulties of living in that flawed institution known as the family, which itself is embedded in a racist society that refutes your claim to a decent life. Sons are pitted against fathers, and wives against husbands. “Fences” faces the complexities of extended families – and all nuclear families are just one betrayal or disability or disaster away from being extended.
I warn you now that I’m about to have an August Wilson orgy – I’m going back to my library to order as many of the Pittsburgh cycle as are available. I highly recommend that if you haven’t read “Fences,” take an hour or two and enrich your life.
I haven’t touched on the adult part of August Wilson’s life, because I don’t know much about it. I thank Kay Bourne, my go-to historian, for turning me on to August Wilson and to so many other talented, accomplished African-Americans.
I end with two quotes about writing from August Wilson:
“I don't write particularly to effect social change. I believe writing can do that, but that's not why I write.”
“Between speeches and awards, you can find something to do every other week. It's hard to write. Your focus gets splintered. Once you put one thing in your calendar, that month is gone.”
And here is an excerpt from the 2010 Broadway revival of FENCES, starring Denzel Washington (as Troy Maxson) and Viola Davis (as Rose):
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