Best of Intentions, Chapter 7

Rita, Ben, Betty, and Miguel enter Rita's house after their ride from the Mexico City airport two days before Christmas, 1939.

 

"Welcome to my home.  Please make yourself comfortable," declares Rita.

Miguel adds that, "It's a treat for me to be at Rita's.  I have a small place downtown near my office.  But Rita thought we should all be together for Christmas."

The four move into the living room to enjoy the refreshments prepared by Patricia, the maid.  Betty cozies up to Miguel on the sofa, taking his hand.  Ben and Rita sit in adjacent chairs.  Patricia carries the luggage upstairs to the three guest bedrooms.

After a quick bite to eat, Betty asks Miguel for a tour, really only an excuse to be alone with her boyfriend.  The two leave Ben and Rita alone as well.

"I'm glad you could come, Ben.  I've enjoyed your letters so much."

"This is like a dream, Rita.  When we met, I couldn't have imagined one day I'd be in your home in Mexico.  I want to get to know you and your country better."

"We've plenty of time, my friend."

 

Rita reaches out to take hold of Ben's hand.  He responds in kind.  They move to the sofa that Miguel and Betty abandoned.  As they stare into each other's eyes, they continue talking, gradually getting to know each other much better.

In the garden outside the house, Miguel and Betty are passionately kissing, touching, and holding each other in a tight embrace.

  

"I couldn't wait to do this, baby.  I missed you so."

"I missed you, too.  We'll have a great time."

"But, what are we going to do about your sister and that hick?"

"Don't worry.  I'll take care of everything.  We'll have plenty of time to be alone."

Later that night, after all say good night to each other, the four simultaneously enter their own separate bedrooms on the second floor.  After a discreet wait, Miguel leaves his and enters Betty's.

Breakfast the next morning is huevos rancheros, which as Rita explains consists of sausages, tortillas, fried eggs, and cheese.  

"It's delicious," says Ben.  "I didn't come here to eat American.  I want to swallow it all up, the food, the culture...(and starring into Rita's eyes) everything.  What's next?" 

What's next are sightseeing trips to the Plaza De La Constitucion, the Metropolitan Cathedral, and the Palacio Nacional in downtown Mexico City.
.  

After a dinner of beef burritos, Rita invites Ben to go to a nearby church with her for the Christmas eve mass.  

"Are you Catholic?" she asks.

"No.  I was born Methodist, but lately I haven't been much of anything.  I haven't been to church since..."

Ben's face appears as if he has gone into a trance.  He returns to his normal self a moment later.  Rita notices.  

"Are you all right?  You went away for a second."

"I'm OK.  I was...just thinking of something."

Rita reaches out and touches his hand.  "Would you like to talk about it?  Perhaps I can help."

"Maybe another time.  But, I'd like to go to the mass with you."

The church is crowded as the midnight mass is about to begin.  Ben and Rita find a bench in the back.  She kneels down to pray, while he looks up and stares at the crucifix above the alter.

After saying good night to each other, the four again go into their respective bedrooms.  After a discreet wait, Betty leaves hers and enters Miguel's.

Christmas morning finds Ben and Rita alone in the kitchen finishing their breakfast and drinking coffee.  

"Being in church last night brought back happy memories from when I was a kid," says Ben.  "Church was a comforting place then."

"It's always been that way for me, especially when my parents died and then my husband."

"Maybe 'cause I was with you, Rita, it came back for me.  Who knows?"

"I'm your friend, Ben, and what ever I can do...

She reaches for his hand, and he reaches for hers, as well.

"Merry Christmas, Ben."

"Merry Christmas, Rita."

They embrace.  

Later, Ben and Rita join Patricia in making tamales. They husk corn cobs, grind the corn, soak the corn husks in water, mix in beef and peppers with the ground corn, place it in the husks and then put the husks in the oven.

For the third consecutive night, the four say good night and retreat into their respective bedrooms.  After a discreet wait, Betty and Miguel both emerge simultaneously, freeze at the surprise sight of each other, and then retreat together into Betty's bedroom.      

  

 

Our Town

Thornton Wilder, the playwright and novelist, was born April 17, 1897 in Madison, Wisconsin.  As his father was an American diplomat, he lived in China for some years during his childhood.  Wilder served in the U. S. Army during World War I.  Afterwards, he earned a Bachelor's Degree from Yale and a Master's Degree from Princeton.

On January 22, 1938 (79 years ago today), Wilder's play, "Our Town," was first performed at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey. It debuted on Broadway in New York City on February 4, 1938 at the Henry Miller Theater.  Our Town won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama that same year.  

Two years later, a movie version of Our Town was made starring William Holden, Beulah Bondi, and Thomas Mitchell.  In the 1950s, as a young boy, I remember watching it on TV and being very moved by it.  The film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture of 1940 but lost to Rebecca.

In November of 2002, a revival of Our Town opened on Broadway at the Booth Theater for a limited run.  The cast included Paul Newman, Jane Curtin, and Frank Converse.  One night I was in the audience.  As a middle-aged man, I was very moved by it again.  Newman was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play. 

Our Town is a three-act play set in fictional Grover's Corners, New Hampshire between 1901 and 1913.  It is basically the story of two neighboring families who live there. The play is performed on an almost bare stage, with a stage manager acting as an intermediary between the other actors and the audience.

Act I presents the ordinary lives of the various characters that inhabit Grover's Corners.  Act II is all about the courtship and wedding of George Gibbs and Emily Webb, young people who have grown up next door to each other. Act III deals with the death of Emily while giving birth to their second child.

There are two conflicting themes in Our Town.  The first is that life is precious.  Even little things like eating breakfast with your family, reading the newspaper, noticing the sun coming up over the mountains in the morning, cutting your own lawn, throwing a ball up in the air, enjoying an ice cream soda, and looking at the moon at night can give life meaningful significance. However, because human beings don't know when their lives will end, there is a tendency to assume it will last indefinitely and thus not appreciate the beauty of seemingly mundane daily experiences.  In a similar way, we don't appreciate our health until we don't have it.    

The second theme is that life is fleeting.  As the stage manager says, "You know how it is: you're twenty-one or twenty-two and you make some decisions; then whisssh! you're seventy: you've been a lawyer for fifty years, and that white-haired lady at your side has eaten over fifty thousand meals with you."  However, for some, there is no long life that whizzes by.  In the play, Emily dies at a very young age, in her mid-twenties.  Nine years earlier, at her wedding, in a moment of trepidation, she asks her father, "Why can't I stay for a while just as I am?"  Life doesn't stand still; it flies.       

In Our Town, Wilder "ponders whether human beings truly appreciate the precious nature of a transient life." After her death, Emily is given a chance to relive her twelfth birthday, a seemingly, unimportant day in her life.  After a short time observing her family's behavior, she can't bear it any longer and returns to the cemetery.  "Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it, every, every minute?"

One of the dead responds to Emily, "That's what it was to be alive.  To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those...of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion, or another.  Now you know - that's the happy existence you wanted to go back to.  Ignorance and blindness."

Learning from Wilder, I try to appreciate what I have every day I have it.

As a postscript, I must point out that Wilder was one of three who were given credit for writing the screenplay for the movie version.  The ending of the movie is very different from the ending of the play, which is dark: the death of Emily.  In the movie, her death, her remembrance of her twelfth birthday, and the visits to the cemetery were dreams.  She survives childbirth.

This was part of a pattern in Hollywood during that period.  Movies needed to have positive endings.  A similar example is Grapes of Wrath.  In the John Steinbeck book (1939), the ending is very dark, while the John Ford movie (1940) ends on a hopeful note.        

          

MLK

On January 15, 1929, eighty-eight years ago today, Michael King was born in Atlanta, Georgia.
 

In 1934, his father, also named Michael King, attended the Fifth Baptist World Alliance Congress in Berlin, Germany.  As a result, he changed his name and his son's name to Martin Luther King, in honor of the German reformer, Martin Luther.
 

In 1939, Martin Luther King, Jr. sang with his church choir at the Atlanta premier of the now classic film, Gone With the Wind, which won eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
 

In 1944, Martin Luther King, Jr., at age 15, passed the entrance exam for Morehouse College, an all male, historically black institution of higher learning, located in Atlanta, and entered it as a freshman that fall.
 

In 1949, Martin Luther King, Jr. was a student at the Crozer Theological Seminary in Upland, Pennsylvania.  He graduated in 1951 with a Bachelor of Divinity degree.
 

In 1954, Martin Luther King, Jr. was named as pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama.  He remained in that position until 1960.
 

In 1959, Martin Luther King, Jr. published a book of some of his sermons, called "The Measure of a Man."  One reviewer used the phrase, "eloquent and passionate, reasoned and sensitive" to describe it.
 

In 1964, Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered a lecture at The New School in New York City entitled, "The Summer of Our Discontent," in which he talked about "economic hardship in black communities, the resistance among political leaders to civil rights legislation, and inequality in public schools."
 

In 1969, when he would have been just forty-years-old, Martin Luther King, Jr. was dead, the victim of an assassin in Memphis, Tennessee the year before.  It is ironic to note that both he and Mahatma Gandhi, who according to King served as "the guiding light of our technique of non-violent social change," were victims of violent deaths.

 

 

Oswego

The name Oswego derives from the word "osh-we-geh" which means "river mouth" or "place where river pours into lake" in the Iroquoian language.  The Iroquois Confederacy consists of six indigenous tribes (Mohawk, Cayuga, Seneca, Oneida, Onondaga, and Tuscarora) that lived in what is today central New York State prior to the British invasion.  

The Oswego River in that same part of New York State starts at the confluence of the Oneida and Seneca Rivers, north of the current City of Syracuse, and ends at Lake Ontario, the smallest of the Great Lakes.  The beginning of the current City of Oswego, located at the junction of the Oswego River and Lake Ontario, dates from 1722 when British fur traders established a settlement to facilitate trade with the Iroquois.  It created a connection from their state capital in Albany through the Mohawk Valley to a new western outpost.

From 1754 until 1763, the British and the French engaged in the so-called French and Indian War to determine who was going to control northern North America.  As protection for their trading outpost, the British built three forts during this period, George, Oswego, and Ontario, in what is today the City of Oswego.  In 1766, Chief Pontiac of the Ottawa Nation met Sir William Johnson, the British Superintendent of Indian Affairs, at Fort Ontario to formally end hostilities between the Indians and the British. During the American Revolutionary War, the British maintained control over Oswego and stayed there until 1796, well after the establishment of the United States of America.

In 1829, the Oswego branch of the Erie Canal opened allowing for the economic blossoming of the city over the next 5 decades.  "Flour, grain, lumber, iron, salt, and cornstarch" were shipped out of Oswego via the canal.  In 1861, the State of New York founded the Oswego Primary Teachers Training School (today known as the State University of New York at Oswego).  

The population of Oswego hit its zenith in 1920 with 23,626 residents.  Currently, there are estimated to be less than 18,000.  In 1944, 982 Holocaust survivors from Europe were relocated to Oswego's Fort Ontario by order of President Franklin Roosevelt. They remained there for eighteen months.

In 1904, my grandparents, Julius and Naomi Karch (in their early 20s), and their baby, my aunt Frances, immigrants from the Russian Empire, settled in Oswego.  My mother, Margaret Karch, was born three years later. In 1925, my father, Harry Lasky, a native of Troy, New York, moved to Oswego to take over the management of a local business, The Netherland Dairy.  Needing to observe kosher laws, he boarded with the Karch family for some period and thus met my mother. They married in 1930 and I was born 15 years later in August of 1945.

My family, which included four boys, lived in a three-bedroom, two-family house at 30 East Oneida Street (corner of East Third Street) until November of 1956.  Across the street was the East Side Park (where I spent many happy hours playing) plus a Catholic church and the Oswego County Courthouse.  I attended the Fitzhugh Park School from kindergarten through the middle of the sixth grade.  In the spring of 1956, Little League baseball came to Oswego and for three years I played on a team sponsored by the local Police Department.  Games were played on fields adjacent to Fort Ontario.

Just before Thanksgiving of 1956, my family moved to 327 West Seneca Street (corner with Draper Street) at the very western end of Oswego.  Instead of six family members sharing one bathroom, I now shared one of the four bathrooms in our brand new, pink brick, ranch-style house with my older brother, Ted.  And that bathroom had a shower, instead of a bathtub.  In January of 1957, I transferred to the Kingsford Park School where I remained until the end of the ninth grade in June of 1960.  I then advanced to Oswego High School until my graduation in June of 1963, following which I left for the world beyond Oswego.  However, in my dreams it sometimes seems as if I never left.

A couple of my favorite places in Oswego were the Oswego Theater at the corner of West Second and Bridge Streets, where I watched many memorable films, and Rudy's, a food stand just outside the city on the rocky shore of Lake Ontario, where I ate a lot of hot dogs and hamburgers.  We also skipped smooth flat rocks into the lake.  Growing up in Oswego during those eighteen idyllic years gave me a sense of belonging to a time and a place I will always remember and cherish. O-S-W-E-G-O, Let's go.                                             

Shut Up and Deal

"Shut up and deal" is one of the great last lines in movie history.  And the movie in question is the 1960 production, The Apartment, written, produced, and directed by Billy Wilder, the man who ten years earlier gave us Sunset Boulevard (see my blog post of 11/1/2015).  The movie starred Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, and Fred MacMurray.

 

The Apartment won five Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Writing (Original Screenplay), Best Film Editing, and Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Black-and-White.  It was also nominated for five other Academy Awards including Best Actor (Lemmon lost to Burt Lancaster in Elmer Gantry), Best Actress (MacLaine lost to Elizabeth Taylor in Butterfield 8), and Best Supporting Actor (Jack Kruschen, lost to Peter Ustinov in Spartacus-see my blog post of December 4, 2016).
 

I chose to write about this movie, not only because it is a great movie, but, as today is New Years Day, 2017, we can celebrate The Apartment as a New Years Eve/Day movie since its climax happens on New Years Eve/Day.

C. C. Baxter (Lemmon), a nebish, works for a large insurance company in a skyscraper office building in New York City.  He lives alone in a small apartment on the west side of Manhattan near Central Park.  In an attempt to climb the corporate ladder, Baxter agrees to permit four of the company's executives to use his apartment for their extra-marital trysts.  This creates problems for him such as being unable to enter his apartment during the normal dinner hour, having to abandon his apartment late at night when he needs to sleep, and dealing with his landlord and neighbors who think he is the one who is entertaining a myriad of girlfriends multiple evenings during the week.  Baxter also has to maintain a supply of liquor, snacks, and clean glasses (not sure about clean sheets).
 

Although Baxter has no girlfriend, he has a crush on one of the office building's elevator operators, Fran Kubelik (MacLaine).  He casually suggests that she have lunch with him, but she kindly avoids responding to his suggestion.  Kubelik likes Baxter, but she is in love with Jeff Sheldrake (MacMurray), the company's Personnel Manager, who is a married man.  Kubelik and Sheldrake are having a secret affair.  Unbeknownst to her, she is one of a long line of Sheldrake's mistresses.

  

When Sheldrake discovers what Baxter is doing, he tries to force him to cancel his arrangement with the four others so that Sheldrake can have the exclusive use of Baxter's apartment.  In exchange, Baxter receives a promotion which he can only keep if Sheldrake can keep using his apartment.  Baxter accepts the arrangement.  This is sexual harrassment, a term unknown in 1960.

On Christmas Eve, Sheldrake takes Kubelik to Baxter's apartment for a private party.  However, they get into a fight as she has discovered Sheldrake's past history of affairs.  He abandons her to return to his family in the suburbs, but not before giving her an impersonal $100 bill as a Christmas present.  Depressed, Kubelik tries to commit suicide by swallowing a huge number of sleeping pills she finds in Baxter's bathroom.

When Baxter arrives later, he is surprised to find Kubelik asleep in his bed.  When he can't awake her and finds the nearly empty pill bottle, he realizes what she has done.  With the aid of his neighbor/doctor (Kruschen), Kubelik's life is saved.  However, she must remain in Baxter's apartment for a couple of days to recuperate.  During this time, Baxter and Kubelik start to develop a relationship.

Upon his return to the office (and Kubelik to her home), Baxter cancels his arrangement with Sheldrake and quits his job.  He said he wants to become a mensch. 

On New Years Eve, Sheldrake takes Kubelik to their favorite Chinese restaurant for the celebration.  He tells her about Baxter's surprising (to him) decision.  Sheldrake mentions that Baxter emphasized that he could no longer bring Kubelik to his apartment.  However, Kubelik understands Baxter's motivation.  At the stroke of midnight, when Sheldrake is singing Auld Lang Syne with the others in the restaurant, she leaves.

Kubelik now realizes that she is in love with Baxter, who is in love with her.  She runs to his apartment.  When Kubelik arrives, she tells him that she has left Sheldrake.  She also wants to engage Baxter in a game of cards, something they did a lot when they spent their two days together.  When Baxter tells her that "I love you, Miss Kubelik...I absolutely adore you," her classic response is "Shut up and deal."  It is a unique way to end a movie and begin a beautiful love story.