I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Category: Lesbian Literary

  • Let’s Talk Movies


    I’ve been in a movie mood for the last couple of months and attribute the feeling to my perception that the new releases in the late fall are usually the award contenders and I love the Golden Globes and Oscars, SAGs and even the People’s Choice Awards when my BFF Ellen wins a total of 14 over her career – the last ten years in a row for most popular talk show host.

    The political activist me loves that an open lesbian is a woman of the people, by the people and for the people.  If you ever doubt who she is and why she is so highly regarded, watch her show for a week.  I guarantee you’ll be a believer in her populist appeal.  But enough about Ellen.

    Let’s talk movies.  The intensity of the suspense in Gravity drove me into therapy.  Well, I’m not sure about the timing exactly, but I am in therapy and when I saw George Clooney lost in space and Sandra Bullock left alone to navigate a large can containing herself through a gazillion miles of treacherous atmosphere toward earth, I admit I decided right there in the movie theater that I’d needed therapy for a while and now was a good time to start. I’d do anything I could do if Sandra Bullock could just make it home.

    Captain Phillips was also spellbinding and nerve-wracking in its own way, and whenever a movie is based on a true story, I watch in a slightly different mindset.  Tom Hanks was terrific as usual, and the supporting cast superb.  It wasn’t your typical swashbuckling pirate movie of the Golden Years of Hollywood, but I thought it was a super action movie that told a powerful story of an incident that received worldwide attention as the Americans attempted to rescue one of our own civilian sailors from Somali pirates and  bring him home to his family.

    In another Tom Hanks film based on a true story, Saving Mr. Banks, Tom played Walt Disney who tried valiantly for twenty years to convince PL Travers to release the movie rights to her Mary Poppins books.  Emma Thompson played the reclusive Ms. Travers who resisted the idea of leaving her comfortable home in England to make the pilgrimage to Hollywood to participate in the production of her stories by a man whose major claim to fame was a mouse.  A mouse that roared, however – and a movie that entertained.

    Another movie based on a true story is Philomena, and I wanted to see this movie for the same reason I go to see many flicks: the star.  Judi Dench is one of my all-time favorite actresses, and I can’t decide if it’s because I think she’s such a great actress or because she looks like my paternal grandmother Ma.  Regardless of the reason for my attraction, I was happy to watch her give another excellent performance in this movie about a woman who searches for a son she was forced to give up as a young teenager in a time when options were few for young single mothers who were good Catholic girls.  Her urge to reunite with her son drives Philomena to a life-changing adventure that redefines her idea of family.

    Occasionally I go to a movie and when I come out of the theater I think to myself, Wow!  I could go see that picture again.  It was that good.  And guess what?  I’ve had that feeling twice in the past month and through the magic of free passes Teresa earns at work, gift cards at Christmas and the advantages of being a senior citizen – I’ve done just that.  Gone to two movies two times.

    Nebraska was a film I wanted to see because I’d seen the previews at our local indie arts theater, the nickelodeon.  I am a lukewarm Bruce Dern fan and didn’t know  Will Forte or June Squibb so I didn’t go for the stars.  I went for the story.  The difficulties of caring for the elderly in their varying stages of dementia are very real to me as a caregiver who survived five years with an aging mother who was obstinate on her good days and impossible on her bad ones.  I felt for this family and expected to be moved by the motion picture.

    I was moved all right.  I couldn’t remember laughing this much in a long time.  Of course the story was tragic, but the screenplay elevated the tragedy to the glorious comedy that only occurs when we interact with our family, the people we can never really leave because we are forever bound to them by our shared genetics.  Hawthorne, Nebraska was Anysmalltown, USA and the people of the town created a place as real as my hometown of Richards, Texas.  I had been there.  These people were my people.  I would see it again.

    Finally, this past weekend I went to two different local theaters to see the same movie, August: Osage County.  I admit to going primarily to watch two of my favorite women on the silver screen – Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts, but I also went for the story.  One  house without air conditioning surrounded solely by the Plains of Oklahoma in a hot August summer contained enough family secrets to capture the undivided attention of  a William Faulkner or Tennessee Williams and it certainly captured mine.  The complex relationships between mothers and their daughters and sons, between husbands and wives,  between sisters and brothers…and everything in-between were fascinating, funny and the performances flawless in a flawed family.  I vowed to stay in therapy.

    As I thought about these movies and why I liked them, I noticed two universal themes.  Home. Family.  For me there are no more powerful words.  No words are more inspirational.  No  words can make me more introspective.  Home. Family. They are words that both comfort and challenge me to be kinder to the people I love.

    As often happens when I sit down to write, I don’t end up at all where I planned to go.  Today I ended up at the movies.  Tomorrow I’ll be on Worsham Street with the Huss Brothers.  Life is good.

  • A Tale of Two Cities: Dickens It Is Not


    Winter Park, Florida is an Orange County suburb of Orlando  and the best word I can think of to describe it is ritzy.  The main street is Park Avenue which lives up to my Monopoly board imagination of how a Park Avenue should look.  Swanky retail shops line both sides of the street and the entire town of approximately 30,000 people has a neatly planned appearance that made me feel glad to be driving a late-model rental car instead of our usual transportation in a 2004 Dodge Dakota pickup with Texas license plates.  This is definitely not a Yee Haw kind of town.

    Winter Park was founded in 1882 by a group of northern business moguls who were undoubtedly looking for their place in the sun – a place where snow was best confined to a plastic toy scene that had flakes when shaken but never required being shoveled off a sidewalk.

    The original residents of the area were the Seminoles who were Native Americans with no art galleries and no direct connection to their Florida State namesakes in Tallahassee that are playing for the National BCS Championship in the Rose Bowl on January 6th .Winter Park is a college town, however, with a small liberal arts school called Rollins College which apparently has no football team but has access to a country club golf course nearby.

    The Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art is located on North Park Avenue and is a museum that houses “the most comprehensive and the most interesting collection of Tiffany (Louis Comfort Tiffany) anywhere.”  Since I’ve never seen other Tiffany collections, I will take their word for it, but I visited the Morse Museum and was really moved by the awesome art collections of stained glass, pottery and paintings on display there.  I could have spent two days wandering through the exhibits trying to absorb the rich American history portrayed by the artists represented there, but alas, we were limited to two hours.

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    The Morse Museum

    Winter Park was the perfect home for the Tiffany collections.

    Eatonville is a small town three miles west of Winter Park in Orange County and the differences between the two are as distinct as black and white.

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    Display in Eatonville Town Hall

    Established five years after Winter Park in 1887, Eatonville is the oldest black incorporated municipality in America.  Wow.  Thank goodness Teresa knew it was also the childhood home of the author Zora Neale Hurston or we wouldn’t have taken Lake Drive out of Winter Park and driven the short distance to Kennedy Boulevard in Eatonville.  This is a stop I wouldn’t have missed for the world.

    The walking tour of the little town of Eatonville includes the current Town Hall which is a repository of memorabilia including newspaper clippings describing the town’s creation that was a result of the vision of a few African-Americans who wanted to have their own community.  After much effort, the land was bought from a group of white landowners that included a man named Eaton.  The rest, as they say, is history.

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    Zora Neale Hurston spent her childhood in Eatonville in the home of her influential father who was the third mayor as well as the second minister of the Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church, one of two churches in the small town.  Hurston became one of the most controversial writers of the period in American literature known as the Harlem Renaissance and wrote novels, short stories, essays and plays during her lengthy literary career.  Much of her work includes fictional accounts of the town and people of Eatonville.   A museum celebrating her contribution to the arts is also on the walking tour of the town.

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    Winter Park.  Eatonville.  Same county.  Same state.  Three miles and light years apart.  But what strikes me is the similarity of the American spirit that both towns reflect.  The dreamers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were very much alike in their fierce determination to build homes and businesses and communities that offered opportunities to pursue their ideas of happines for themselves and their children.

    What a country.

  • The Horse You Draw is the One You’ll Ride


    Through the good and lean years and through all the in-between years…is a line from Frank Sinatra’s hit tune All the Way.  I looked through the archives of my posts and saw that my final post of 2012 was a blow-by-blow recap of that year in review for my life.  Not a bad post for one titled The In-Between Years but it seems like such a long time ago in a land far away from where I am today.  A year can fly past in a hurry and yet, the passage of time, regardless of our perception of its speed, never leaves us unchanged.

    I rarely “mix” blogs, but I want to quote The Red Man’s opinion of 2013 in his final December, 2012 post.  He has such a way with words.

    I’m not sure what my plans are for the New Year, but I don’t like the sound of 2013.   It’s an odd-numbered year, and I don’t accept odd-numbered years as authentic.  I would prefer to have all even-numbered years.  So we’d skip 2013 and go right on to 2014 and then 2016 and so on.   You get the picture.

    Yes, Red Man, I do get the picture and you are a prophet in your own ‘Hood.  2013 was one of those lean years Frank Sinatra sang about.  To tell the truth, the bad so outweighed the good I won’t bother to review it.  The better news is it’s finally coming to a close and 2014 is just around the next Bowl Game.

    I was talking to a cousin who called me on Christmas Day to wish me a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.  I appreciated the call and the visit we had.  The thousand miles that separated us couldn’t break the ties that bind us.

    We were talking about the vicissitudes of life, as my daddy used to call them, and Gaylen who has spent over forty years hanging out with cowboys at rodeos told me one of their favorite quotes:  The horse you draw is the one you’ll ride. 

    I like it.  No apologies.  No excuses.  No whining about why did I get this horse.  No wondering about whether this rodeo was one I should’ve signed up for.  No mulling over how I ever got to be a cowboy in the first place.  It’s now or it’s never – so you ride.

    I have hope for 2014 along with The Red Man who loves even-numbered years and am optimistic that I will be a better person in the New Year.  I can’t control the rodeos around me, but I have been reminded I can still ride.

    I hope the horses you draw in 2014 will be ones you’ll want to ride.

    Teresa and I wish you all a Happy New Year from our family to yours!

  • No One is Born Hating


    My heroes when I was a child growing up in Grimes County, Texas were always the cowboys in old western movies I watched on Saturday mornings with my daddy.  They were men who settled their differences with guns but fired only at the bad guys who were easily identifiable as thieves, cattle rustlers, or other desperadoes out to do wrongs to innocent ranchers or townspeople.  The bad guys were often found drinking whiskey in saloons in the company of women with loose morals – women that sometimes turned out to be damsels in distress.  The cowboys rescued damsels in distress whenever they spotted one and fought to bring justice to the lawless frontier that was the American West.

    As I aged, my heroes have changed, but the people I most admire are still the ones who try to lift my vision toward higher ground, and by higher ground I mean a place where justice and equality reign in tandem against the forces of unfairness and dishonesty and outright evil.

    My cowboys have been replaced by men and women who choose to settle their differences with words that effect change as powerfully as the guns of the Wild West.  They are people whose examples give us hope of rescue when we find ourselves in the saloons we make of our lives.

    Nelson Mandela was such a hero to me, a man whose extraordinary personal sacrifice changed the hearts of his own nation and inspired dreams for peace and fairness around the world.

    “No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion.  People must learn to hate, and if they learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.”

    Twenty-seven years of his life unfairly imprisoned, and this man speaks of love.  Twenty-seven years of a life without personal freedom, and this man becomes a symbol of freedom for his nation and the rest of the world. Twenty-seven years of his life taken away, and this man gives…and gives…and gives until he dies.

    For me, Nelson Mandela was as brave as any cowboy I watched in the Saturday morning westerns of my childhood.  He didn’t have to ride a horse or shoot a gun to save a damsel in distress. Rather, he showed me the power of peace in the midst of turmoil and hope for  unity in a world divided artificially by the hate we’ve learned to love.

    I will miss knowing he is here.

  • The Words She Didn’t Say


    She wanted to speak, but the words wouldn’t come.

    They stuck in her mind like pavement to gum.

    Release me, release me the words cried today.

    I’m afraid, she said, as she held them at bay.

    We will be heard, they told her with force.

    She shook her head to quiet their source.

    They rattled around in the core of her brain,

    But got up again and began to raise Cain.

    Leave me alone, she shouted out loud.

    They mocked her and told her they came in a crowd.

    So even if caught and turned  out to sea,

    Others would come and one day be free.

    It must be the holidays because I’ve just written a poem with the same meter as ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas. Good Lord.

    My usually introspective self typically becomes more reflective during the holiday season, and I believe this poem officially crosses the line to brooding.  However, Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday of the year, and Teresa and I once again look forward to making the trip to the Upstate to spend an evening with her family in the recreation hall of the First Baptist Church of Fingerville, South Carolina.  Even if I didn’t love her family, I’d go to a Baptist Church with that name.

    To everything there is a season, and this is the season for being thankful before the madness that is Christmas and New Year’s Day overwhelms us.  My wish for each of you is the familiar admonition to count your blessings and name them one by one. And if there are words you want or need to say to someone, set them free.

    From our family to yours – have a safe and Happy Thanksgiving!