Oct
28
2009
theater 6 comments

a real rainbow

I used to occasionally go to a hole-in-the-wall piano bar in the West Village called Rose’s Turn. Singers of all stripes — and with a wide range of quality of "pipes" — would offer up their best renditions of "Me and Bobby McGee" and "Cry Me a River" and everything in between. One night I was treated to the vocal stylings (really, the vocal kick-assings) of someone named Terri White. She had a worldly-wise, hardscrabble edge that you just can’t get at an average open mic night, and she had a mean way with a tambourine. She knew how to make her audience soak up her joy and reflect it right back to her, magnifying and multiplying it until the whole room was one giant elated crescendo.

Unfortunately, Rose’s Turn closed a couple of years ago, and I didn’t really think about Terri White again. That is, until this week, when an article about her appeared in The New York Times.

Not just an article: a fairy tale come true.

As it turns out, Terri’s sadder-but-wiser aura was no act: she’s hit rock bottom and then some. Last year at this time, she was homeless, and now? Well, now she’s wowing the crowd in Finian’s Rainbow on Broadway and making plans for a commitment ceremony. Good times and bum times — she’s seen them all, and my dear, she’s still here.

I could say more, but it’s best to refer you to the article again (and the video that accompanies it — you have to hear Terri sing!). It’s not just a great story; it’s a very well-written story. If Terri’s tale is a testament to both human will and human kindness, then the writing of it is a shining example of both careful reporting and caring about your subject.

The daughter of traveling performers, Ms. White has been performing in musicals since she was 8, and the language of the medium infects her life narrative.

That’s just plain good. What’s more, the lesbian "angle" is both incidental and integral to the article. That’s probably the best way to handle anything gay, and it’s not easy to achieve. (And bonus: we’re talking about lesbians of a certain age! That’s, like, the polka-dot unicorn of feature topics.)

Best wishes to you, Terri. Maybe it was Rose’s Turn once, but it’s your turn now. And thank you, Susan Dominus of the NYT, for reminding us all to keep on keeping on, preferably with a song on our lips and a tambourine at our hips. There’s gold at the end of that rainbow — even a cynic like me can see it shimmering.

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Oct
25
2009
movies 4 comments

lifetimes of lovely

Last week Meryl Streep received the Golden Marc’Aurelio Award (the lifetime achievement award) at the Rome Film Festival. Photographer Alberto Pizzoli took this awesome photo of her on the red carpet:

As The New York Times notes, the photo was risky:

[Alberto Pizzoli] gambled that a radical crop … showing hips and hands (and nothing else), a confident posture and subtle folds of fabric, black on black on red, could summon a whole personality. … Since he had his match in the subject, Meryl Streep, Mr. Pizzoli’s gamble paid off.

It also brings to mind a phrase from the pen of Maya Angelou:

It’s in the reach of my arms
The span of my hips,
The stride of my step,
The curl of my lips.
I’m a woman
Phenomenally.

Streep did a Julie and Julia press conference while she was in Rome. Here she is talking about the pressures on young actresses — skip to 1:04 if you don’t speak Italian:

(Part 1 and part 2 are on YouTube — in part 1, she uses the word "encomia." Be still my vocabulary-loving heart!)

Rome certainly does love Meryl. She was lauded and laureled at every turn. She even got a literary award (for what, I’m not quite sure) at the Rome Center for American Studies. Here she is at the Film Fest’s breathtakingly grand venue (the Auditorium Parco della Musica):

But in all the swooning over Meryl (which I completely understand, of course), another honoree has been somewhat overlooked: Helen Mirren won Best Actress for the film The Last Station, in which she plays Leo Tolstoy’s wife.

I’ll look forward to that. I did finally see State of Play, and although I didn’t love the movie overall, I enjoyed Mirren as usual. And her glasses!

I just wish her role had been bigger. Way too much Russell Crowe; not enough Mirren and Rachel McAdams. Mirren plays the frosty, fiery editor in chief of a newspaper. Why can’t I work for someone like her?

Once when I was singing Mirren’s praises, a witty friend teased me about my “old lady fetish.” But what’s not to love about "old ladies" like Mirren and Streep? I’m glad Rome agrees with me.

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Oct
10
2009
movies 3 comments

star shine

You’ve seen the bonnet movies. All of them. Right? You fluttered your way through Sense and Sensibility — before you knew Emma Thompson was soft in the head (but you can still love Kate Winslet) — and you pondered and hmmmed your way through Howard’s End, Jane Eyre and even that breathless Keira Knightley version of Pride and Prejudice. You’ve done the bonnet movies and then some. Maybe you’ve even seen Mrs. Brown — which is really above and beyond the call of Romantic, Victorian, and generally English duty.

But I promise you this: you’ve never seen anything like Jane Campion’s Bright Star. It is unique. Full stop.

The film is ostensibly about John Keats: his work, his poverty, and his love — not at all in that order. But what it’s really about is poetry, and I didn’t think film could truly capture that. Early on in the film, Keats says that "if poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all," and that’s the entire point of Bright Star. It is natural. Is that possible? It’s a movie about Romantic English folk, about Romantic English folk obsessed with poetry, and yet it’s fully natural, organic, and raw.

That’s largely because of Abbie Cornish, who (despite her fondness for the poseur Ryan Phillippe) seems to have sprung from ripe, ready earth. She is honest and pure; not innocent in the least, but instinctive and guileless. And she’ll make you want to be true to yourself, against all odds and all tuberculotic twists of fate. She finds and embraces the center that can and will hold. She yearns, in the best possible way.

(The New York Times calls Cornish "as good as Kate Winslet, which is about as good as it’s possible to be." Amen to that!)

And director Jane Campion is even more visceral than her star. She amplifies the burgeoning spaces in poetic lines, and she pauses on the fullness of the all-too-human. She sees a breeze floating through a casement and sends it up the skirt of an uncertain, hungry young woman. She waits — as long as she must, which is sometimes intolerably long — for a word and a look to land exactly where they are meant to settle and thrive. She shows us love, of words and people and life.

I’ve effused too much already, but I can’t help myself: this is the glory of poetry on film. Few films have conveyed the seductive pull of the written word — An Angel at My Table, The Hours, and Out of Africa come to mind — and even fewer make you want to dedicate your days to a steadfast pursuit of nature and rhyme and rhythm and breath. Who can claim to be like Keats, happy to lend himself to a poem at the expense of everything else — even his own heart?

I wish we all could. So in honor of National Poetry Day UK (I’m off by two days), I had to pen an ode to Bright Star. I intend to study, savor, and emulate it, because it knows how we should shine.

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