Month: February 2017

Movie review: Hidden Figures

After seeing the trailer way back in October 2016, I KNEW I wanted to see the movie Hidden Figures. Unfortunately, it didn’t make it to our neck of the woods until January 6, though it showed in LA and NYC so it could be considered for the Academy Awards. On the ML King holiday, the Wife, the Daughter, and I went to the Spectrum Theatre in Albany.

I’ve seen a lot of movies of late, many of them quite good. But a lot of them were downers, frankly. This adaptation of Margot Lee Shetterly’s book is a solid docudrama depicting the US space race with the Russians in the early 1960s that – no spoiler – we were losing. A group of African-American women working for NASA helped save the day, despite not only the racism but the sexism they faced.

The cast was a great ensemble. Taraji P. Henson (Empire) as Katherine Johnson, Octavia Spencer (The Help, Zootopia) as Dorothy Vaughan, and Janelle Monáe (Moonlight) as Mary Jackson, are all actual NASA staff. At the end of the film, we get to see their real-world accomplishments. Katherine Johnson, for instance, received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama in 2015.

Other solid performances included Kevin Costner as the supervisor of the project, Kirsten Dunst as the boss of the colored women who were “computers”; i.e., they computed numbers. Jim Parsons, that sweet guy in Big Bang Theory, played a composite character who was less than supportive of Katherine. Mahershala Ali, who, like Janelle Monáe, was in the movie Moonlight, plays a very different role here, Colonel Jim Johnson, a suitor of Katherine.

There are space scenes that were, if not as intense as those in Apollo 13, nevertheless put the viewers on the edge of their seats, even though WE KNOW that they all made it home safely.

Hidden Figures is a feel-good story with great reviews – and see Ken Levine’s take as well – also doing well in the box office. The audience at the showing we saw applauded vigorously. It may not be the BEST film of the year, but it may well be my favorite.

Burying mom: easy/not easy

We were all orphan adults, the folks of the oldest generation of our tiny tribe.

trudy-raymond-frances

I was talking to one of my sisters, in November, just before what would have been my mother’s 89th birthday, on the phone – it’s easy to go 90 minutes. We noted the odd dysfunction that seems to take place when the Greens all got together, from missing a wedding we all traveled to in 1991, to the fight on my parents’ anniversary in 1995, to the return of my father’s black cloud in 1997, and I could go on, and on…

It was weird, then, to note that there was no particular drama when my mother died. I mean, her death was relatively sudden (stroke on a Friday, died on the following Wednesday) and heartbreaking and all that. But it wasn’t complicated to arrange.

Initially, I thought that, because we had gone through the process sorting out whether my father would be cremated (he was) and where he would be buried (in a military cemetery 40 miles from Charlotte, NC) that this made the decisions of what to do with mom easier. And of course, it was.

But I also think that, with her gone, we were all orphan adults, the folks of the oldest generation of our tiny tribe and that we gave each other room to grieve in our own particular way, without trampling on someone else’s space.

My mother, who was an only child, would constantly go on when we were kids about how we shouldn’t fight and should get along. She did have cousins she loved in her city of Binghamton, not too far away. The boy is Raymond, who was born 10 years and a day after my mom; he died two decades ago. Frances was three years younger and still alive. But those relationships were not quite the same thing.

Because fight my sisters and I did, even into adulthood. It has only recently occurred to me that we have outgrown whatever sibling rivalries, maybe because there’s no parent to take OUR side. It’s a bit sad that it took her passing to get to that place, but there it is. Not that we don’t have issues, still, but we have no parent to curry favor with.

Six years since mom died, the first and only person to date that I ever saw die. THAT wasn’t easy.

Welcome to Black History Month 2017

“:Unfortunately, though unsurprisingly to me, that ‘post-racial America’ failed to materialize.”

black_history_month_logo_250Last year, in the summer of all that is orange, a friend who is a minority woman, but not black, wrote, “I actually don’t enjoy talking about being a racial minority…” for all sorts of good and understandable reasons.”

I related. I wrote, “I LOATHE talking about being a minority. And do so at least once a year – you know the venue – because I think it’s important.”

“And I rail at not being considered ‘black’ by white people or ‘black enough’ by black people because of the way I speak or write.” Interesting that in one of those several exit interviews Barack Obama had last month, Lester Holt of NBC News asked the outgoing President PRECISELY that question. Most of you have NO idea what a PITA that is, not the question, but the experience.

I got that vibe a LOT when I first got the job I now have. For the first six years, our library provided reference service for the whole country, not just New York State. Most of our work was on the phone, and mail.

When people got to meet me at the annual conference, I often got two different responses. From the white people, it was a surprised look, trying NOT to say with their eyes, “I didn’t know you were black.” From the black people, it was more an overt “Hey, brother! I didn’t know you were black!”

In this month’s church newsletter about Black History Month 2017, I wrote:

“Back in 2009, during Black History Month at FPC, I remember quite distinctly a conversation during adult education about how much longer we would be doing the event. After all, the United States had just elected a President who identified as black. Surely, the solutions to the problems of racism were just around the corner.

“Unfortunately, though unsurprisingly to me, that ‘post-racial America’ failed to materialize. The divide between races seems as sharp as ever. Happily, FPC has continued to attempt to address issues of race, class, and other attributes that keep us apart.”

I should specifically note that I am THRILLED a white couple in my church will be leading the discussion of the book Waking Up White and Finding Myself in the Story of Race by Debby Irving, which the Presbyterian Church USA has recommended as part of its “One Church, One Book” project aimed at jumpstarting discussions about race.

My friend also wrote about how people not of her culture tried to teach her, and others, the more “authentic” pronunciation of HER OWN NAME. This reminded me of this old segment of Saturday Night Live featuring Jimmy Smits, where all the Anglos in the newsroom overemphasize their Spanish pronunciation.

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