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My Day with Gloria

~ patponderslife ~ 1 Comment

In the eighties, After I got immersed in my beautiful career in south Florida, I invited Gloria Steinem to speak at a women’s empowerment event at Palm Beach Community College. Fortuitously, it happened to fall on election day 2000—the one where George W. Bush became President because Palm Beach County’s ballots were so confusing that people of average or lower intelligence messed them up. The recount ended up taking so long that the Florida Supreme Court declared the winner and we tipped the electoral college votes to Bush. Al Gore, with his high ideals about saving Planet Earth conceded.

But back up just a day or two: In the middle of the recount, Gloria spoke at our event. She was inspiring, funny, and genuinely warm, but I don’t remember exactly what she said because before the applause died down, we started asking her if she could do anything about the recount and the hanging chads, and she went calmly to work rallying the important people she knew to see if she could get some clarity. She stayed with us even though she had other engagements. She was amazing. We were in a panic, even then knowing that the planet couldn’t afford a Bush presidency, but she posed for a photo with me. And I found it today, forty years later, while cleaning up, so that when I die the kids aren’t faced with a mountain of stuff that means nothing to them.

The day I met Gloria Steinem came rushing back. I remember everything about it—the mood of sheer terror over the election, the passionate commitment to feminism and progressivism, the fight for diversity, equity, and inclusion, even though those terms weren’t a thing yet. Freedom and justice for all. Tolerance of difference, kindness for people less fortunate, empathy for people struggling to find a better life, hope that women would be able to find their way onto the arena, that they would have a say, be heard, earn respect, show the world that they had a lot to contribute.

Instead, we went to war with the wrong country and set Iraqi women back hundreds of years. From a secular existence where they had a place in society, we condemned them to religious servitude and ignorance for all the years to come. No coming back from that.

Since then, have women in the US make any progress at all? Sure—at a glacial pace.

I thought I’d live to see a woman in the White House, and when we ran a person who had experience, wisdom, and brilliance, I knew the time had come. The most qualified human being in the entire country lost to a buffoon. Thanks to Russian trolls. And he’s back! Bested another woman—not as qualified, but certainly more dignified—back to do more extreme damage. He’s vengeful and petty this time and has surrounded himself with toadies who will sell their souls to kiss his ring. Environmental protection is of a thing of the past. We will put profit ahead of the survival of our grandchildren. We will burn fossil fuels, drill into the ocean, and we will pollute Earth until it is uninhabitable—by us, anyway. He will help us prove that homo sapiens don’t deserve this beautiful planet with its millions of exotic animals and vulnerable plant life. We are a failed experiment, I’m saddened to predict.

What does any of that to do with Gloria Steinem? Just this for me: It was a time of so much hope. I spent a day with a woman who, with so much class, fought the good fight and made me proud to have had my picture taken with her. I’m grinning in that picture, and I remember feeling that we could do anything then. I love remembering that day.

A movie I saw . . .

~ patponderslife ~ Leave a comment

I have seen but one of the Academy Awards nominees this year and, oddly, it’s Anora. If you’re easilly offended by graphic sexual content or strong language, don’t bother. I’m not, exactly (offended easily, that is), but I don’t love it, and sometimes I feel as if it’s there for shock value. Not with this film. It’s a portrait of an event in the life of an exotic dancer/stripper/prostitute, something I have zero experience with, and (I’ll admit it) before I saw the movie, little curiosity about. Okay, so not entirely true. Ages ago, I and a couple of other gals took my sister-in-law to a male strip show for her fortieth birthday because that’s where she wanted to go. We were probably a little embarassed and trying not to show it. We drank and laughed and squealed and put dollar bills (I said it was a long time ago, okay?) into the g-strings of the sweaty, smiling guys dancing on stage. I think my sister-in-law had fun, or at least she wasn’t disappointed, and that was the point, but I never repeated the experience, and me, being me, I ended up thinking about those guys and wondering how many of them were okay with what they were doing and how they felt and what they thought about those silly women in the audience. I’m burdened/gifted with an abundance of empathy, so I often wonder about stuff like that.

But I digress.

Back to the movie: One night Anora “entertains” Ivan, a young man who likes her enough to ask her to be exclusive with him for a week, which she agrees to for $1,500. It’s a week of perfunctory sex (but lots of it), parties with many anonymous hanger-ons, mountains of drugs, loud music, more sex, most of it at the absurdly oppulent mansion of this manchild’s parents who are Russian oligarchs. Impulsively, Ivan asks Anora to marry him. He says it’s so he can stay in the USA and won’t have to return to Russia. Once she sees that he means it, she agrees. We can see hope in her eyes. We can see that she warms to the idea of an escape from her life with this proposal, something we have the sinking feeling will never happen. Sure enough, when Mommy and Daddy find out, they … well, no need to spoil it for you, if by any remote chance you ever see the film.

The ending of the movie is powerful. Stunning, even. And it gave me something to ponder. To that end, I looked up what had been said about it, and one of the movie critics whose job it is to interpret works of art caught my eye. I’ll degress one more time and say lots of people who watch Anora won’t agree about the label “art,” and I respect that but don’t have a desire or any credentials to debate it. Anyway, his thesis in my words is this: (more or less) the minions—us, I assume–are shuffling along behind and catering to the unpredictable needs and wants of the rich and powerful while they don’t see us, which serves to demonstrate the growing reality of inequality and shows us with painful clarity that we can never be them and that they will never see us. The gap is huge.

He goes on, but even though I saw what he was saying, I couldn’t help but relate to–of all people–the parents. Sure it was easy to see that Anora’s life was empty and that she hoped beyond hope that she could get lucky and change it, but the odds weren’t in her favor. She was one of the minions, after all. But at one point she yelled (there’s lots of yelling) at Ivan that he hated his parents. Something so obviously true smacked me in the face with its honesty. I thought, How terrible to be hated by your child. It must be the cruelest blow of all. When would I ever have a chance to use that empathy of mine to relate to a person so wealthy as to be in the multiple mansions, private jets, people following them around wating to do their bidding rich? Ridiculous wealth. We might as well live on different planets.

Still, they were parents, right? They’d given and given and indulged this feckless child who had never done anything in his life to make them anything but worried, perplexed, and exasperated. They’d bailed him out countless times. There was nothing they wouldn’t do for him, and he hated them for it. Why? Because what all this gifting proved to him was that his parents didn’t believe in him. They had no faith that he could do anything or be anything if tested by the everyday standards that the minions were tested. His parents had failed him and knew it but didn’t know how to fix it except to throw more money at him. He’s their child and he hates them.

What parent doesn’t worry that they will fail/are failing/have failed their child? Well, okay, there surely are some, but I’m pretty sure I’ve tapped into a common feeling shared by rich and poor alike. By people from different cultures, different ethnicity, different in multiple ways. People (parents, anyway) who might disagree about abandoning daylight savings time, consuming meat products, or even Donald Trump, I bet would agree that they worry about whether they are good parents.

There were lots of universal themes in Anora–some I understood at an intellectual level, some I probably missed–but that one was easy for me. I didn’t like either of Ivan’s parents, but I felt bad for them. Who wouldn’t?