Tag: Movies

Not Waiting for Directions (Home)

When you just want to do it yourself but can’t

“Dear Saint Anthony, look around, something’s lost and can’t be found.”

~ Catholic prayer to the patron saint of, among other things, lost objects

“When evil-doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out ‘stop!’”

~ Bertolt Brecht

“Never start a piece with a quotation.”

~ Nora Ephron

Do you have the feeling that we are all living through a Kafka short story? “The Trial,” perhaps, or “The Refusal,” maybe? When I was home in Virginia the other week, I asked my brother Jeff if he’d ever read Ray Bradbury’s “The Sound of Thunder,” and when I recounted the plot, he realized he once saw a bad movie version; and it came up because, as we caught the latest news out of America, I mentioned that I keep looking for a smashed butterfly on my shoe.

For some reason, I got on a mailing list for Catholic charities and I often receive “free gifts” of amulets and charms and bracelets and necklaces of St. Anthony. Coincidentally, he’s my favorite patron saint.

Like me, in addition to those stories, maybe you are thinking of that Twilight Zone episode, “It’s a Good Life,” where that evil kid keeps wishing everyone who displeases him away to the cornfield, and no one will stop him out of fear, and also love, because his parents choose to save him and let the rest of the world disappear. In the same way, Trump bastardizes the Kennedy Center even as he plans to close or demolish the Museum of African American History, and Musk eyes selling off the National Gallery treasures to “save money.” Wishing all our history away to the cornfield. And, echoing Brecht, there’s no one to stop them.

Or is there? Reading historian Heather Cox Richardson the other day was a tiny balm, as she recounts recent events and sees shifting winds. I’ll take it.

Your Miss O’ has been lying low these past weeks, visiting aged parents, aging brothers, a young nephew and vibrant sister-in-law. Also watching birds, smelling lilac in bloom, watching red azaleas pop, walking around my childhood block in drizzle. In addition to watching classic movies and “Harriet Tubman” on PBS and “Poetry in America” episodes with brother Jeff during the week, I caught A Complete Unknown on my last night, the weekend nephew James visited. James just wouldn’t go to sleep in his designated living room, what with all the excitement generated by middle-aged relatives, so he happily sort of watched the movie with the grownups, not understanding any of it. Fortunately, there’s no nudity and little in the way of bad language, but at the point where Joan Baez gets out of her bed where Bobby Dylan is sleeping, only in her underwear and a tank top, four-year-old James commented, “She forgot to put on her pants.” Uncle Jeff chucked, “He doesn’t miss anything, does he?”

If you haven’t seen that Dylan bio pic, for me the most interesting storyline was the one featuring Pete Seeger, played beautifully by Edward Norton. The movie helped me understand this mystery surrounding the rift that formed between Dylan and his early supporter and champion Seeger. Their link was Woody Guthrie, suffering from Huntington’s chorea at the movie’s opening, the disease never named or explained, as Hollywood does. I won’t belabor the plot, but essentially when Dylan went electric at the Newport Folk Festival, Seeger was dismayed and dejected, not because he hated rock, but because it was the end of his dream. For years and years, Seeger saw in Guthrie, and in the work of folk musicologist Alan Lomax and in folk musicians like Joan Baez and Odetta, the opportunity to proclaim a unifying voice in American music. Amidst the turmoil of the civil rights movement and the communist accusations of HUAC, the folk music movement offered the possibility of a true common ground across race and social class and political affiliation, youth and old age. In Dylan, Seeger saw the last piece of his dream, a young, galvanizing voice, filled with unendingly creative songs of love and political revolution, fresh and original but also connected to our American past.

But Bob Dylan was an artist first, an individual all the way, with no interest in marches or politics, not really, and not at all interested in unifying a nation. The rest is history, Highway 61 Revisited, and unending tension and turmoil in America. This is not Bob Dylan’s fault. Pete Seeger meant well, too, but no single person can make us all believe one “us” to be true.

No one, alone, can fix it.

But if something can unify a people, it’s probably music that comes as close as anything. Music and food. Music and food and complaining about noise.

On Thursday morning this week, around 8:30, as I was working when I heard this high-pitched BEEP BEEP BEEP [beat] BEEP BEEP BEEP. Smoke alarm? Tow truck? Work truck backing up? After about 15 minutes of this blaring through my window, I decided to take a walk hoping the cause of the noise would resolve. One 20-minute walk later, I could still hear the beeps from two blocks away. I went on a fact-finding mission. Where I live is like a mixing bowl of sound—finding the source was a confusion to me. I called 311—a wasted half hour of the operator’s frustrated inability to locate where I was on the city map. Feeling crazy at this point, I texted my co-op group, and neighbor Chris took over, agreed with me it was in a trash bag, rummaged, found the culprit—a discarded smoke alarm!—and smashed it. Oh, blessed relief.

In the midst of ICE raids in America destroying families, there are still annoyances like that, you know what I mean? It’s the thing I’ve never understood, not since I watched the 6-day war on Walter Cronkite’s 6 o’clock news when I was James’s age: what are human beings thinking when they annihilate other humans? We have enough little daily problems, don’t we?

If noise rage occasionally unifies us, language never seems to be able to, because as poet Nikki Giovanni said, too many people try to speak English rather than speak through it. Saturday morning, I had to go get bloodwork and urine testing done for my physical this week. Earlier in the week, I’d received an email that my neighborhood LabCorp office “has closed.” Full stop. I was so bummed—the next closest one is in Jackson Heights, about five subway stops away. Instead, the email continued in the next paragraph, there will be a new office…wait. It’s the same address, but one floor up. God I hate it when people can’t fucking communicate. What the email should have said is, “The second floor LabCorp office is closing for two days in order to relocate to the third floor.” Do you see the difference? Why is this hard? Because it is.

When I arrived at 7:45 for my scheduled 8:00 AM appointment, I saw a packed waiting room—highly unusual, but the office is “new,” so one makes allowances. One man there had a son, probably eleven or twelve and clearly on the autism spectrum, chasing him around, keeping him out of lab rooms, out of the hallway. I went to self check in kiosk but saw this sign:

So I went to the window to check in, as directed. The nurse behind the glass, short, dyed black hair, officious—clearly overwhelmed (like her male counterpart) by the double duty of being a receptionist and the technician, came out to the kiosk and said, “Give me your ID, I’ll do it,” and I pointed to the sign, saying, “If it works, I can do it…,” but she was clearly focused on finishing the check in. Again, I pointed out the sign directing us to go to the window. Did she take it down? No. She straightened it. (My seat being nearby, I spent the next 45 minutes explaining to everyone who came in, “It works, ignore the sign.”)

Between the lying sign, the autistic child flying around, the woman who was denied a pregnancy blood test because she didn’t have a doctor’s order, the men needing drug tests for their jobs, and the seats all facing forward staring into the abyss, I felt I was in some kind of play. Not really Kafka, but rather, Samuel Beckett. I was in a Beckett play. I love to see plays but it’s not always great to live them.

True to my heart, to cheer myself earlier this week, I went to The Public Theater to see a collection of short plays by one of my favorite playwrights, Caryl Churchill. As only an artist can, she captures me in this time, even in America. I think the titles say it all.

And that’s the latest. How’ve you been?

Love to all, somehow,

Miss O’

What’s Not Lost in Translation

Moments in my chaotic New York City week

So all the ick news first, aside from all the Musk-Trump criminal dismantling of every living institution in America so that it’s close to unrecognizable (taking over the Kennedy Center? The National Archives? closing what Department?), I learned at work this week that the two editors I supervise applied for a transfer to another (lately resurrected) department where they’d previously worked because they can do what they are best at there (I choose to believe it’s not about me) and got it, and that I will have to finish a huge project probably alone, the timing being what it is; then, at my ophthalmologist’s office for a checkup, I learned that not only am I at the beginning (and still reversible) stages of diabetic retinopathy, but also that I owe an outstanding balance of nearly $500 (of deductible-meeting crap) from visits over the past four years because their billing department never sent me the bills; and then I learned from my CPA that my company inexplicably failed to take out the correct amount of tax (and all week I’ve tried to correct it for this year, but the system doesn’t work, and we no longer have humans working in HR (take that in) and I am screaming into screens) and so instead of getting a refund, I in fact owe some $1,500; and the tendinitis in my write-hand (punny ha ha) wrist is so bad still after three months, medicines, and PT, that I would have to spring for a cortisone shot (sweet, sweet relief after the injection site pain and, obviously, the bill). Poor fucking me.

Thank you, internet.

But one day this week—I think it was the eye appointment day, Wednesday, when I returned home with dilated eyes and shock at hemorrhaging money—on the way into the city, a Black female conductor announced at every stop (because the N-W-R-Q lines still do not have recorded voices to announce stops, and I love that) something to this effect: “Ladies and gentlemen, let the passengers off first, let’s help each other out, everybody, let the people off first before you try to get on. Move into the middle, people, help everyone out, we’re all together here.” Love her heart. On the way back to Queens that same day, a Black male conductor did much the same, adding on occasion, “It’s not about the price of groceries, everybody, just help each other out here and move all the way into the car.” This same conductor also used the intercom to explain the location of every staircase, connection, and elevator at every single stop. A total doll.

And if you are like me, you can’t help but look up and down the train car, men, women, children, every color and shape and gender and age and religion and background and profession, staring into phones, or not; bundled up, world weary, and it hits you all over again that the reason “white middle America” is afraid of brown and black shadows is because they literally have no idea how New York works. It’s not perfect, never that, but it works. Look at us. Us. Right here in this train car, crowded, or not, for miles of stops along our way. Not yelling at or killing each other. All of us just being.

Also in my travels, I found myself thinking about a poet friend who lives in a rural area, who years ago, when I mentioned how much I loved the movie Lost in Translation could only grunt in disgust. When I asked why, she said of the lead characters, “All they did was squander an opportunity to see Japan.” I had to think for a second, because I was remembering the filming of Bill Murray’s whisky commercial, the Tokyo karaoke bar, the hotel bar nights, Scarlett Johannson’s quiet excursion to a Japanese garden and learning flower arranging, and of course the hilarious trip to the ER so Bill Murray can get Scarlett’s broken toe seen to—all these relationships and stories they will have to tell about, or not, when they return home. What did my friend mean, “squandered”? I started thinking. I guess another view is they didn’t really do all that much…and then it hit me. I said, not at all angry, but with a sense of discovery, “You’ve never traveled outside the country, have you?” She looked at me suspiciously, and slowly shook her head, as if her response to a movie shouldn’t depend on having had the experience. More to the point, though, she had almost never, within or out of the country, traveled alone. And there it is.

What was lost in translation for her in watching Lost in Translation is the feeling of sudden paralysis brought on by the jetlag stupor you feel combined with being quickly overstimulated in a new place while on no sleep, while being both excited by the prospects and daunted by selecting the best thing to do right now. The one universal is a bed (never one you can check into before 3:00 PM) and a bar or cafe, and heading to either one can give you a chance to sort of recover your wits (if you know how to manage the currency), but when you are alone with no one to bounce ideas off of, being in a new city, whatever the language, can be pretty isolating. One time, visiting London, I spent nearly one entire first day just sitting alone on a bench in Tavistock Square, where Virginia and Leonard Woolf had lived (in a no longer existing building, bombed out in WWII), underdressed (a cold day for summer) and disoriented, and in those days, a teetotaler. I could barely make myself try to find a place to have tea. If I did eat or have tea, I don’t remember. I remember a white-gray sky, damp chill air, and just watching people against green trees and grass and gray buildings.

Did I squander my first day in London? Not at all. Oddly, that first day of “doing nothing” is still the one I remember most vividly and fondly, whatever the discomfort and confusion. I was there, in the heart of London, on my own, unremarkable, on an ordinary day. Not bad.

As a result of my many NYC train treks this week, it also dawned on me that perhaps the reason I needed to leave Facebook, finally, was that my life in New York can be one of overstimulation even on the dullest days, and that Facebook had become more overstimulation, not sure which way to look, who I’m forgetting to check in on, that sort of thing. Maybe I’m just not wired for all that anymore. I know that many people can simply sit on a virtual Facebook bench and do nothing, or idly and dispassionately watch the goings on, not unlike I did in Tavistock Square or Scarlett and Bill did in Tokyo. You do you, as the kids say. However we engage, or don’t, we are all in it together, so move to the middle of car and let everybody onto the train. And remember to give people their space (remarkably, New Yorkers do know how to give you yours, even by a fraction of an inch, and if only the whole country could cotton on, that would be great). After all, everyone here with you is simultaneously present in a pubic place and also living a very private drama of their own.

One of Miss O’s many, many notebooks.

All of this is just to say, dear friend, given all that you are going through in your personal life and against whatever landscape this letter finds you, I know that you may merely glance at or dip into this post, and I completely understand. Thanks for reading at all, and whatever you do, don’t strain yourself. Enjoy your Sunday. Let me hear from you when you get a chance.

It’s been a long three weeks. Encouragement!

I keep humming, all the time lately, “It’s You I Like.” Like a mantra.

Love,

Miss O’

P.S. A few weeks ago I published part of a play I’ve been working on, but I don’t know if WordPress is the best outlet for me. Thanks to all who read it, in any case!

Summer Stock in a Heat Wave

First of all, I have come to love this movie. Second of all, whenever Summer Stock, an MGM musical from 1950, appears on TCM the host always notes that 1) it’s Judy Garland’s last MGM musical; 2) this is one of the lesser MGM musicals; 3) Gene Kelly signed on in a less prominent role as a favor to his friend Judy who gave him his start; 4) Judy was obese at the time of filming; and 5) Judy’s iconic “Get Happy” number was filmed after production closed, and she’d “slimmed down.” It really sets you up to watch the film with a “pity” and “I guess I have nothing better to do” mindset, right? The movie deserves so much more of an intro boost, and maybe someday Miss O’ will be famous enough to be a guest who can explain all this to Ben Mankiewicz; in the meantime, I’ll introduce it to you.

Get Happy

When I was a kid in the 1970s, I fell in love with movie musicals that showed up on TV on the weekends, usually on syndicated channels, and spent hours and hours memorizing them. This was a confusing exercise. Interrupted as they were with commercials every three to five minutes, the movie plots were pretty much impossible to follow. For example, the opening song of Summer Stock, “If You Feel Like Singing, Sing,” follows the camera over “Falbury Farm” to Judy in her room to singing in the shower to putting on her farm clothes, and as she makes her bed, she learns from her housekeeper Marjorie Main that “Frank and Zeb” are “dressed in their Sunday clothes,” and…cue commercial for Ginsu knives. The next scene was probably Judy going to the kitchen, saying, “I don’t blame them,” and you think, “Huh?” Years later, watching the film uncut on TCM you realize that the network cut out the scene where Frank and Zeb quit their jobs, and how unsuccessful the farm has been, in order to make room for more commercials while my child head spun.

Another plot point that made the movie impossible for a kid to follow on syndicated Sundays is that Judy’s character, Jane Falbury, changes her mind solidly three times about allowing the show to continue in her barn. It’s totally reasonable that she does this, unless between mind changes a network cuts dialogue to insert commercials for Koons Ford used trucks, Ding Dongs, and Aqua Net.

As a result, Summer Stock was lost on me on my first viewing, whereas musicals like The Wizard of Oz, Anchors Aweigh, and Singin’ in the Rain, though no more complicated in their plots, had more understandable and entertaining musical numbers for a kid like me.

What led to me write about this little musical gem (because it is) has to do with summer boredom during a heatwave her in New York City. Right now my job is really slow, and I’m not ungrateful for that, but it’s hard to concentrate on anything with little in the way of deadlines attached while still being tethered to my laptop. To give myself some company, I look for movies to run on a loop when I can’t find procedurals like Law and Order in reruns, and Summer Stock came up On Demand. Over a dozen viewings later, I have this mature, wonderfully acted movie memorized, and more than that, I watched it with different lenses trained on it that might be interesting to, I don’t know, someone. Here we go.

Judy Garland’s Body

Here are a couple of photo stills from the film to help you understand how fat Judy was during filming:

If, like me, you are squinting to see a woman whose body is listing toward morbid obesity, welcome to seeing a normal woman like a normal person. Since The Wizard of Oz, during the filming of which MGM Studios put their young star on a diet of amphetamines, it’s the first movie where Judy’s body is what I’d call womanly. Healthy, even. In her many films, from The Harvey Girls to Meet Me in St. Louis, from The Pirate to Easter Parade to The Good Old Summertime, I see a Judy who is thin, and it’s a little unnerving how thin when you see her body is also covered in layers of period garb. In fact, not really since For Me and My Gal, her first picture playing an “adult” woman character (opposite Gene Kelly, whom she’d seen on Broadway in Pal Joey and championed to be her leading man in that film, thus starting his career), could I recall seeing Judy Garland in modern dress. Summer Stock is also the first movie in years with Judy in short hair—a hint of the hair she will style in more elegant ways in the 1960s. In Summer Stock, the body type works since Judy plays a farmer and a sort of old maid, and after filming completed and her contract was up, Judy’s career came to standstill, morbidly obese by studio standards and washed up at age 27.

The MGM Circle Game

Judy started out her career proper has Andy Hardy’s love interest in the Mickey Rooney franchise of movies in the 1930s, most famously Babes in Arms, where the kids entered the realm of movie legend when they found a barn and put on a spectacular show despite the town’s disapproval and the doubt of their families. I don’t know if it was deliberate that Judy Garland ended her MGM career on a farm set, hearkening back to where she found stardom in The Wizard of Oz, and inside a plot with a “let’s get ourselves a barn and put on a show” where she got her start, but it’s really kinda nice.

In Summer Stock, Judy Garland is no longer a sidekick ingenue in search of a show, or a waif who dreams of a world beyond the rainbow over Kansas. This Judy plays Jane Falbury, and she owns the farm (in a small community in what appears to be Upstate New York or Connecticut). Early on, we learn that the farm has been unsuccessful, Jane is engaged to Orville (son of the farm supply store owner Mr. Wingait), and her younger sister Abigail is due back from New York City that afternoon. And what do you know, Abigail surprises her sister with Joe Ross (Gene Kelly), the director of a new Broadway show looking for an out-of-town place to play, along with all his cast, crew, and sets. In the process of figuring out whether the show folk will get to make this happen, Jane’s housekeeper Ess (Marjorie Main) reveals that Jane and Abigail had dance lessons all their young lives, and Gene sees Judy do a little dance in the kitchen. Fireworks ensue!

Why Watch It?

Sure, there’s a predictable plot, tempers flare, people burst into song, love ensues, and a star is born, but the emotional world of this musical is more mature than in other movies, a maturity that resonates with the Miss O’ who still loves musicals a grown-up. This movie opens to reveal a woman who is comfortable in her body, who loves to sing and sings great, who without question runs a farm, and who genuinely loves her life. She is independent in the important ways and wants no rescue, no change. But you get the feeling that despite her four-year engagement to childhood friend Eddie Bracken, Judy/Jane has never known love. Orphaned young at some point, her entire life has been devoted to raising her sister and keeping the farm going. She doesn’t resent it. And she doesn’t realize that she’s been missing a thing until that devilish smile in the form of Gene Kelly arrives to shake her up. Gene and Judy are emotional equals. They spar, they compromise, they fall in love, sure.

But what strikes me most in this movie is that leading man Gene Kelly is a supporting player. The film is totally Judy’s. And the result is an uncharacteristically light and lovely Gene Kelly. Not that he isn’t wonderful in his films. But here he is not wildly aggressive or ego-driven, he has nothing to prove, and he doesn’t have to carry the picture. He’s not a ham. The dances are staged by Nick Castle, though Gene probably choreographed his solo routines, so he’s not carrying that load, either. His role as the show’s director Joe Ross is totally believable, and Gene plays his rages and fibs and falling in love with a master’s touch of humanity. He’s totally equal to Judy on screen, but it’s Judy’s movie, and his performance is the better for it. I think it’s one of his best.

In addition, it seems to me that however “lesser” this musical is in the canon, this is an important film in Gene Kelly’s development as a choreographer. In some of the dance numbers you can see the seeds of even more iconic numbers to come. For example, the staging of “You Wonderful You” with Judy presages “Our Love Is Here to Stay” with Leslie Caron in An American in Paris (1951) and “You Were Meant for Me” with Debbie Reynolds in Singin’ in the Rain (1952). Other dances in the film show classic Kelly moves he will use even more imaginatively in those later films, like the matador move, the airplane move. It’s fun when you realize this because of the order the movies come in. And you are a total movie musical nerd recalling these notes from memory.

Judy’s range as Jane is something she usually doesn’t get to display in other films—fully human, grown up, shifting from joy to concern to rage to apology to thoughtfulness to bargaining, with ease. And what makes Judy such a superb actress is that she is fully present in every scene, with every actor, no matter the roll. Her emotions are both raw and in control, and as a woman in late middle age, I connected with this character as I don’t generally get to do in musicals. Twelve-year-old me would never have enjoyed the vulnerable and tender moments between Judy and Gene, especially in “You Wonderful You” and “Friendly Star.”

The supporting cast is a Who’s Who of some of the finest character actors ever on screen: Ray Collins, Eddie Bracken, Phil Silvers, Marjorie Main, and Hans Conreid, as well as up-and-comers Gloria De Haven and Carleton Carpenter, and an ensemble of wonderful dancers. (One of those key dancers is Jeanne Coyne, married then to Stanley Donen (who will go on to co-direct Singin’ in the Rain with Kelly two years later), who was one of Gene Kelly’s dance assistants. Both people divorced by the late 1950s, Kelly and Coyne married in 1960. I think that’s sweet.)

Still, there are curious things in the filming that make me realize Summer Stock was not a top priority in the MGM perfection department. Charles Walters’s fine direction notwithstanding, there are couple of clumsy edits, unusually sloppy for MGM, both featuring Judy. In addition, as I mentioned, “Get Happy” was added in a re-edit of the film post-production, and great as that number is—possibly her best on screen—it doesn’t quite jibe with the rest of the proceedings. Also, after several viewings I finally paid attention to the final credits, where a noticed an actress named Nita Bieber “as Sarah Higgins.” And I’m like, who? So I deduced in subsequent viewings that this was the dancer who wears glasses and is always reading and has one featured dance moment; and I inferred there was probably a story for her that ended up on the cutting room floor, surely for the best. Her screen card may have remained for contractual reasons, or possibly out of laziness.

And when critics all point out that Garland is “obviously” thinner in the added number (and I noticed that the scenic background at least is in an earlier part of the film), I have to say I don’t see it. “Get Happy” is the only number where we see Judy’s legs, and on a 4’11” frame even five pounds would be a lot, as if it matters. And throughout the film, Judy dances like a dream, and dances a lot, and is clearly in great physical shape. I don’t know why critics feel compelled to talk about her weight. I really hate that. Judy Garland is simply great.

You might think Judy deserved a better or more glamorous movie send-off as her contract expired. The studio, which her talent literally helped make great, got her hooked on pills and then got mad when their work horse wasn’t able to perform and had no-show days on films such as The Barkleys of Broadway, where she was replaced by Ginger Rogers (in her last appearance, and only one in color, with Fred Astaire), and Annie Get Your Gun, where she was replaced by Betty Hutton. (Hutton told TCM host Robert Osborne that the crew of that film resented her terribly for taking Judy’s part, which is unfair, of course; by all accounts I’ve read, the crew at MGM loved Judy Garland.)

But I’d like to say that I think this lovely, mature, sweet, goofy musical treat, a kind of retrospective of all the films of Judy’s great MGM career, is a perfect movie for the middle aged, for the summer. If you need something to take your mind off the unutterable evils swirling nonstop around us, you might try the pretty, tender, talented world of Summer Stock (commercial-free on TCM). In the meantime, you might take a look at the duet arrangement Judy made of her iconic “Get Happy” with Barbra Streisand’s “Happy Days Are Here Again.” The number that keeps on giving.

Love to all.

Bowl Picks

Random talks with my dad, Bernie

Over Christmas I was sitting in the living room watching a bowl game with my dad, Bernie. All the O’Haras print out a sheet of the bowl game contenders, make our picks, and keep score. (Fun fact: I won this year—just picking schools I “liked.”) That evening, I don’t remember who was playing, but the winner had become obvious, so during the commercials, we’d flip the channel to see what was playing on TCM. Dad and I started watching the last part of I Remember Mama, where Irene Dunne’s brother is dying, and Barbara Bel Geddes writes her story, and Mama reveals her big secret, and I looked over and my dad is weeping, and I’m weeping, and then we see each other doing this.

I remember my mom (I tell my dad)—who had already gone up to bed this bowl evening—coming downstairs years ago to tell me, “Lisa, at eight o’clock on TCM, I Remember Mama is on. Now, watch it.” I had neglected to do it for years, sure that it would be super sentimental and make me cry, and I hate crying—or do I? Anyway, I watched it, I wept happy tears; and every time I watch it now, I start crying at the very beginning and weep, more or less all the way through. (The same is true of the 1939 Goodbye, Mr. Chips, which I watch any time I notice it’s on, crying right away.)

I tell my dad about this, as I say, as we dry our tears from I Remember Mama, all these movies that make me ball, how I still watch them knowing I’ll be crying all the way through them, and then Dad’s talking about movies like that for him too; and I look at him, because he and I have started crying just talking about these movies, and then we look at each other and we begin laughing so hard, I mean shoulder shaking, helpless laughter—the depth of emotion in us O’Haras is so huge, running the gamut from A to Q to Z and back to fast it makes your head hurt, but I gotta say, my heart is always lighter for these wild expressions of emotion, in a span of a few minutes at most.

And in that exchange up there you might better understand why my dad, Bernie, who is 90 now, is the parent I always had the deep talks with. Politics, religion, societal changes, boyfriends, school. I told you this story, how once we had a deep argument about homosexuality, which concept Bernie couldn’t get on board with or begin to understand, but I his college-age daughter felt compelled to push him on because being in the theater, I now had so many male friends who were gay. “What is your problem, Dad?” And he finally admitted, “I don’t like to picture those people having sex.”  “Okay Dad,” I replied, thrusting my arm to point across the street, “Bob and Hazel Hunnicutt, Dad, you want to picture them having sex?” He quickly made an ick face. “Ew, ew, my God no.” I looked at him, “Dad, how many people do you really want to picture having sex?” He thought about it and couldn’t think of any. And scene.

Years later, my friend Richard and his partner (now husband) John were finally having a child via surrogate (and got twins!)—I shared this news with my folks on a Sunday morning phone call, since they’d known and loved Richard since our college days. My dad couldn’t understand it. “I got on board with the gay marriage thing,” he said, my mom recalling the time then-Mayor Gavin Newsome made the case on the Today show and my parents had no arguments, “but why do they want to bring kids into it?” They want to be parents, I explained. My dad’s voice softened, “Oh, oh. I understand that.” And I said, flatly, “I don’t.” Beat. “You don’t?” he said. Nope, I never wanted to be a parent. I have no idea what that feels like, that desire, though I’ve seen it often enough in other people. Like my parents. And…scene.

I’ve written about my mom a lot in recent blogs, probably too much or too personally for public enjoyment, but it’s what I’ve needed to write; publishing helps me not lose my memories. And while I’ve never had perfect relationships with either parent, I can’t help thinking about the ways in which all of us relate to our parents, if we are lucky enough to know parents who love us, who sacrifice for us, who rear us. This is about my dad.

Miss O’ with dad, ca. 1975.

When I came home after my first year at Virginia Tech, I was sitting there in the living room, talking intently about all the learning I’d amassed in my three quarters of classes, 18 and 19 hours’ worth of courses each quarter, the shows I’d worked on in the theater department, my new friends. I don’t know what exact smart thing I’d said to trigger his move, but my dad got up and went into the kitchen. I followed him. I continued educating him as he pulled out a whole roasting chicken from the fridge and put it on the counter. “Clean it,” he said. I just stared at it. He looked hard at me, saying, “You still can’t clean a chicken, can you.” No sir, I can’t. That shut me up.

Miss O’s graduation from Virginia Tech, June 1986, made possible by Bernie’s union meat cutter job. Hardest working human I’ve ever known. And glad to do it.

And I know I told you that story, what Bernie told me after my first serious breakup, with the guy I thought I would marry. I’d been quiet, depressed for months. My dad asked me if I wanted to come to Springfield Mall with him to pick up my mom’s Christmas present. I did. We didn’t speak the whole ride. When he pulled into the parking space, as I took off my seatbelt, he said, sharply, “I know you’re upset. But a boy like that, he’ll always have a harem. You didn’t lose nothin’.” Over time, that observation saved my heart. When I recalled that story to my dad recently, my mom said, “Did he tell you that?” And I said yes, and my dad nodded, and my mom said, “That’s good,” because I know she had been charmed by the boy too—and now she realized, I think for the first time, that Dad was absolutely right. (Note: said boy went on to live with no fewer than a half dozen women, possibly more, and enter into dozens and dozens of relationships in between; many of these women I met, including his wife; and it might interest you to know that the boy recently divorced her after nearly 20 years of marriage and four children, whom he raised while she worked—funny how all the women he leaves (I broke it off with him, for the record, because I just knew this couldn’t end well) have the same common fault: they get “angry” with him, “throw things,” and he “will not be yelled at” (how many times did I hear that and shut up; and I will not be shut up). All these breakups in an endless loop, as he repeated his habit of luring in attractive, smart, industrious, dynamic, multitalented, independent-minded women and then, as his gift, moving them into a ready-made box to try to contain them, limit them, redirect them for his pleasure, and then becoming disappointed when they’d “rebel.” You didn’t lose nothin’. You said it, Bernie.)

Bernie O’Hara, aged 90. in his natural habitat. Photo by LO’H 2023.

Sending love to all of you who could use parental advice, maybe, via parents or surrogates, to have good cry, enjoy a shoulder-shaking laugh, or hear the truth.

Love,

Miss O’