Wonk this way. Just steps from the Capitol, a garden offers secluded serenity.
In our nation’s capital, a place normally immune to the dictates of fashion, detail-oriented paranoia never goes out of style. For people who want to be taken seriously — that is to say, almost everyone except the tourists who come to do the museum half-marathon, take in a few memorials and buy some cupcakes in Georgetown — the gold standard for the District Look remains The Suit, and nothing but The Suit.
Obama may get away with shorts while he’s on vacation, but bare knees never look presidential.
However, D.C. in the summertime often feels like a clambake from the clam’s point of view. To get by without wilting it behooves the locals to head for shade. In most of the city this is easy. Washington is a city of trees. Their storied canopy is even protected by local law (the Urban Forest Preservation Act of 2002). You have to pay a hefty fee if you want to take down a big tree on your own property ($35 per inch of the trunk’s diameter). And that’s not counting the cost of paying some tree service to do the job.
So, D.C. is a good place to be a tree. However, the one part of town where trees and the canopy they provide is less apparent is where the federal government occupies most of the real estate. Lots of massive marble and granite buildings, not so many oases, unless you count the National Mall, which is most often awash with tourists or protesters or celebrators of one thing or another. Still, wily wonks find quiet nooks where even the most weary policy analyst can enjoy some peace and quiet in the midst of the capital’s hubbub.
There’s a tendency in other parts of our great nation to look on Washington, D.C. as a kind of foreign country, perhaps even a hostile one. Yet if you prick us, do we not bleed? If you don’t vote for us, do we not air our views in the media anyway? The point is, everybody’s got a dork side. You just have to know where to look.
The Bristol-Palace Hotel in the spa town of Karlovy-Vary, Czech Republic, served as an inspiration for the setting of Anderson’s latest film.
I confess. I am a fan of the films of Wes Anderson.
Although my infatuation with all things Anderson began with the very first film he co-wrote with his friend Owen Wilson, the offbeat but endearing Bottle Rocket, it wasn’t until 2001 when The Royal Tenenbaums came out that I realized I had found a director whose oddly surreal view of life resonated with my own.
And while a few Anderson films since then have failed to engage my passion (notably The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, a sodden misstep in my view) more often a new Anderson project is cause for celebration. Moonrise Kingdom, for instance, in 2012, featured all the elements that make Anderson’s vision unique: a flawed but likable hero trying to negotiate a trajectory through the jungle of reality, gentle humor, great music, and meticulous set design.
Anderson excels at creating on film worlds as finely detailed as a Faberge egg yet emotionally complex and surprisingly buoyant. His most recent work, The Grand Budapest Hotel, released this past spring, is a remarkable fairytale for adults. Set in a fictional European alpine state in 1932 during a respite between two wars, the film evokes the elegance and civility of a lost era. The hero, Monsieur Gustave, is the concierge at the Grand Budapest Hotel. The plot involves murder, stolen art, and exquisite pastry.
Ralph Fiennes, as M.Gustave, is marvelous. The pace is brisk, the dialogue snappy, and all of the characters bring something to the party. But perhaps top billing really should go to the hotel itself, which Anderson devised after researching and studying archival photos of grand European hotels at the Library of Congress. One of the inspirations for the Grand Budapest Hotel was the Palace Bristol Hotel in Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic.
For the film Anderson had several small scale models of the hotel produced, including one fourteen feet long and seven feet deep.
I never wanted a doll house as a child, but I find myself yearning for that pink hotel.
Of course, few these days can afford the sort of extravagance that flavors the Old World vision suggested in parts of the film. But it isn’t simply the trappings of wealth that give the world portrayed in The Grand Budapest Hotel its timeless charm. It’s the passion for civility, the idea that good manners and kindness clothe any human with dignity. And that without those things our haloes dim, our lives lose something intangibly precious.
And so it is with fairytales. There’s more to win than the crown. There’s more to lose than the throne. Happily ever after is the flimsiest of predictions. But to strive for perfection in the face of inevitable decline is perhaps the last best hope for humanity in a graceless age.
Hungarian artist Gabor Miklos Szoke created this giant wood sculpture of a Hungarian Puli dog, an ancient herding breed, for the 2013 Folk Life Festival on the National Mall. Everyone loves a big dog.
They’re here! The hottest weeks of summer. That time the Romans called caniculares dies, or, for those of you who skipped that class, dog days.
Tradition holds that the dog days of summer usually occur between July 3rd and August 11th. But why do dogs get blamed for searing temperatures?
The Roman notion apparently arose from the whimsical idea that the Dog Star, rising with the sun during that time frame, added to the sun’s heat. Which may be true for all we know, though I suspect Neil de Grasse Tyson could offer a more fact-based explanation.
Still, as a lover of myths and fables and a lot of ordinary nonsense, I’m going with the Dog Star on this one. We give credit to the moon for making humans crazy, romantic, or, in some cases, exceptionally hairy. We trust rainbows to bring us good fortune. Many people spend more time reading horoscopes than they do reading scientific reports or even People magazine. Clearly, among our many cherished freedoms in this country is the freedom to believe just about anything.
As a writer of fiction I’m grateful for our national credulity, although I sometimes wish we were a tad more patient as a species. However patience is a virtue, I’m told, and we all know how hard those are to master.
So, anyway, here we are, temps in the 90s, humidity in the high 60s. Good times. Actually, to be honest, today is one of those blissful exceptions that proves the rule. The thermometer was chillaxing at a cool 59 degrees on my back porch this morning, thanks to some passing cold front. By the weekend we’ll be back up in the heat stroke zone. That’s D.C. weather. It’s a pendulum town. What with the constant politics, the thousands of visitors, and the determined lobbyists all with their pressing agendas, life in the nation’s capital is rarely laid back and mellow.
But even D.C. idles in late July and early August. It’s the only way to get through the dog days. Slow down, think pleasant thoughts, drink a lot of lemonade, or the beverage of choice. To paraphrase Noel Coward, only mad dogs and bureaucrats go out in the noon day sun. Or, to quote G. Gordon Liddy, who knew something about taking the heat in Washington, “The trick is not to mind it.”
September will be here all too soon, with its back to school, back to work agenda. We’ll all have to suit up and buckle down. Until then, I say let’s make the most of Sirius, the brightest star in the firmament, blazing down on us from Alpha Canis Majoris, the constellation of the Big Dog.
My brother Jeff watched the ducks enjoy our backyard stream.
Audiences are trained to expect comedy from ducks.
Consider Donald. Also Daffy. And, of course, the Marx Brothers, who, while not ducks themselves, knew the value of a good duck joke.
So perhaps it’s understandable that when writer/director Nicole Bettauer’s 2005 independent film Duck was released some people were dismayed by the serious issues and quiet tragedy embedded in the plot. Some internet ranters apparently felt that they’d been swindled, sold a false bill of goods. And in their defense, it must be said that the movie’s original tagline: “Think outside the flock,” is a bit enigmatic.
I was instantly intrigued when I first learned of the film. I put it in our Netflix queue last year. And there it sat, for months, constantly bumped lower by some shiny new release, or “important” film that had to be seen.
But last weekend “Duck” finally waddled out of the queue and into my heart. That’s right naysayers. I liked it.
Yes, it made me cry. But it also made me feel somehow hopeful in spite of everything. And if you’ve been reading your newspapers and feeding at the online Trough of Doom, you know that only lottery ticket buyers and reality show contestants really know how to hope.
The film stars longtime character actor Philip Baker Hall as Arthur Pratt, a widowed man in Los Angeles who has lost everything while caring for his dying wife. At the start of the film he is planning to end his life.
So then, the moment duck fans have been waiting for: an orphaned baby duck comes into the picture and takes an immediate shine to Arthur. In some other film, this could have evolved into a sort of Up parable about destiny, making the most of every minute, blah, blah, blah. (Don’t get me wrong. Up is great. But apples and oranges.) What transpires in Duck is more of a mystic journey through the loveless underbelly of a dying city. Yay! Dystopia! It’s all the rage.
As a suddenly homeless person, with a duck, Arthur has to find a way to survive in a society that views him as a quack. I won’t spoil it for anyone who might want to see Duck, but I have to say, there are some surprises. There are lots of movies about boys with dogs, girls with horses, even musicians with cats. There aren’t a lot buddy movies with a duck as the co-star.
It’s possible I was drawn to this film because in the first years of my life we had ducks at the house where I was born in Erie. A small stream with a little bridge over it ran through the backyard. My dad bought a bunch of baby ducks that lived for a while in a pen until they got big enough to paddle in the stream. I don’t know what happened to them after we moved away. I’d like to think their offspring are still swimming around in Lake Erie, unless they’ve relocated to L.A. to work as extras on Duck Two: The Punchline.
Twinkle, twinkle little drone, why won’t you leave me alone?
I want an Iron Man suit.
I think a full-body indestructible metal suit is a must-have for the modern wardrobe.
True, it may clank a bit, and the weight may slow you down when you’re fleeing zombies. But then again, clad in your iron suit you’ll have no need to flee. Also on the plus side, when the drone with your name on it falls from the sky, you’ll be able to walk away from the scene of the crash with a smile on your lips and a song in your heart.
Ah, I know what you’re thinking. You’re paranoid, Con.
Well, yes, this is no doubt true. But, also true, the fact is that hundreds of these unmanned aircraft fall from the sky each year, as was reported in a sobering, yet strangely entertaining, article that ran in The Washington Post recently. Spoiler alert: they don’t all crash harmlessly into the ocean.
Like many an optimist, I would like to believe that the people in charge know what they’re doing and that scientists will eventually solve all our problems, etc., etc. Of course, the flaw with this hope is that the people in charge and the scientists are, for the most part, human, and as flawed as the rest of us. Which goes a long way toward explaining why it might not be a bad idea to plan for the unexpected, yet somehow inevitable, arrival of a drone in your backyard, or perhaps on your car.
And that’s when you’ll be so glad you took out the third mortgage and got the Iron Man suit.
Realistically? Not going to happen. Out of my price range. So what’s a Chicken Little to do?
Well, as is often the case, I take comfort in fiction, and science, sometimes simultaneously. While others endorse the soothing homilies of various religions, I’ve never been able to keep my eyes closed long enough to feel at ease with faith-based systems. I’m more inclined to offer my slender prayers to fact-based science systems, even though I realize that those are also prone to human error. But at least they have data.
Data can be so bewitching. It’s like Play-Doh or silly putty. Malleable. One study tells us coffee is bad for us. Another insists it will quicken our wits. Many studies suggest that consuming animal fat shortens life spans. But there’s always another study. And, as Woody Allen joked in his timeless film Sleeper, it may turn out that fried food and animal fat are the secrets to longevity.
Taking this to its illogical extreme, if a food is fried in animal fat it would be a win-win, right?
Not long ago I had lunch in a delightful little cafe in Tarpon Springs where the menu was written in the argot of culinary refinement with confits of this and aioli of that and demi glace this and that. But the most intriguing signs of cutting edge cuisine were the duck fat fries. Thumbing their noses at the cholesterol police, these chubby cuties graced almost every lunch plate. I had to wonder, will lard be pardoned next?
Lard has gone through some tough times since we learned something about heart disease. Could there be new data that hasn’t made it into the popular press? Or is there a lard conspiracy perhaps? A coalition of dairy enthusiasts determined to maintain the butter monarchy?
Well, conspiracy theorists can’t all be wrong, can they? Sooner or later even an unmanned conspiracy theorist lands right side up.
My Dad, who would have been 91 tomorrow, was a lifelong cat lover, but he had room in his heart for dogs. This is Laddy, our collie who made life interesting in our tiny house until he bit the mailman and had to move to a farm where there was more room for him to run off his high energy.
Did we learn nothing from Planet of the Apes?
While that classic sci-fi film may be a bit dated and far-fetched, the ideas it raised remain compelling. In particular, the way the film exposes the tendency of humans to view themselves as masters of all other species.
Of course, we have books, written by humans, which codify this conceit. However, simply because something is written in a book, or even a law, doesn’t make it necessarily true or right. The argument has been around for centuries, long before Darwin suggested another way of looking at things. Yet we are no closer to a clear understanding of the Big Picture, even when it’s screened on IMax.
So why do I care? Well, this morning, in my glutton for punishment way, I was reading the newspaper and came across a story about recent research into the mechanisms that cause depression. Such studies have been going on for decades. You might hope they would have figured it out by now. But no. What they have figured out is how to cause debilitating depression in mice. And dogs.
That’s when I began to feel depressed myself.
I mean, obviously I understand the need to conduct research to find life-saving drugs. And I realize that it isn’t always possible to use human subjects for all tests. Yet when it comes to problems humans face, stress doesn’t seem to me to be high on the list. Yes, we live in stressful times. But there has always been stress. Being chased by a sabre-toothed tiger? Not exactly a theme-park thrill. Yet stress is a natural part of existence, and overcoming naturally occurring stress is part of the process of being alive.
But there’s stress and there’s stress. Someone you love dies or becomes very ill, that’s stress. When someone forces you to walk barefoot on an electrified floor with no apparent means of escape, that’s torture. A different breed of stress entirely.
That electrified floor was used on dogs in a well-known 1967 study which showed that when dogs are made to feel that they have no options, they develop what is called “learned helplessness.” In other words, they learn to give up hope. This induced depression can be traumatizing to a human. How much more traumatic it must be to a dog, a creature which has been bred to trust humans.
I have no moral high ground on the issues of animal rights. I’m no vegetarian. But I draw the line at dogs. Also cats, but that’s a much harder argument to win.
Dogs, on the other hand, are, in fact, Man’s Best Friend. Everybody knows this. Even people who claim to dislike dogs have to respect the heroic qualities of our canine companions. They sniff out bombs, they save babies from burning buildings, they lead the blind, they comfort the sick and aging. They go into battle and they don’t do it for medals. They do these things because we ask them to.
For some incredible reason, dogs love us. God knows why.
Some may argue that we humans deserve our “right” to dominion over all the animals because of our superior intellect. I would argue that if we wish to consider ourselves “superior” to any other species the proof of this edge must begin with greater compassion for all other species. But especially dogs.
A few years ago the brilliant comic writer Tom Holt penned a remarkable satire called Blonde Bombshell which riffed wildly on the idea of a planet where “a dog’s best friend is his man.” It’s a lot funnier than Planet of the Apes, though that may owe something to the fact that a human dressed up as an ape could never hope to rival a golden retriever.
It’s been more than two thousand years since a wise teacher gave us a golden tip: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” The luster of that line has sadly dimmed in these me-first times, and realistically, maybe we’ll never be able to love one another. But if we can at least learn to treat our best friends as well as we’d like to be treated, that would be a start.
Like a portal to a timeless era, Washington Square arch is an iconic landmark of Greenwich Village.
I was intrigued when I saw the trailers for the recent Coen Brothers movie Inside Llewyn Davis. The carefully composed images of Greenwich Village evoked the gritty glamor of the early 1960s in that neighborhood where poets, artists and musicians found cheap lodging and community.
I was some kind of excited when, at age twelve, I went with my Girl Scout Troop on an overnight trip to New York City in the early 1960s. We toured the United Nations, saw a Broadway musical and the Statue of Liberty. But what I was really looking forward to was seeing Greenwich Village. I’d read about the beatniks. I had a set of bongos. I aspired to be cool.
However, my hopes of breathing the air of Washington Square were squashed by the caution of the trip chaperones. Our tour bus did pass by the famous square, but we weren’t allowed to get out of the bus. Who knows what we might have inhaled?
The frustration I felt only made me more determined to experience the city on my terms. Five years later, in the winter of 1966-67, I moved into a small apartment on the Lower East Side. Suffice it to say I learned a lot.
By then the folk music scene had given way to upstart rock bands. There weren’t many bongo players around. But there were still a lot of scruffy young men wandering about with guitar cases filled with dreams.
When I watched Inside Llewyn Davis I was expecting to see something of that tumultuous time when civil rights and social justice were at the forefront of public discourse. But I hadn’t taken into account that this was a Coen Brothers film. The award winning duo has made some amazing films, among them Fargo, O Brother Where Art Thou?, and No Country for Old Men. Some even consider The Big Lebowski a great film. Who am I to judge?
I wanted to like Inside Llewyn Davis. It has the Village, folk music, Justin Timberlake. It even has a cat in a supporting role. But try as I might, I just couldn’t warm to any of the characters. Except the cat. The cat was cool, cooler than Llewyn, and considerably more likable.
The movie follows Llewyn Davis through one week in midwinter as he attempts to restart his career as a solo performer, after his former singing partner (spoiler alert) jumped off a bridge. The movie doesn’t spell out why this happened. But after an hour or so of watching the anti-hero floundering around from couch to couch, I didn’t much care if he jumped off a bridge too.
There are a lot of almost funny little scenes, slyly mocking the folkies of the early 60s, and the earnest fans who believed in them. There is a brief road trip sequence that channels the spirit of Jim Jarmusch, complete with an inscrutable drug addict and a chain-smoking Beat poet.
However, though I tried to care about this story of a lost musician, in the end it was just too much like work. When the film first came out the soundtrack inspired talk of the resurgence of folk music. But really, folk music never goes away. We take it for granted, assuming it will always be there, like that person who always knows the words at the hootenanny. Like Woodie Guthrie. And now he’s gone. Who could take his place? Not someone like Llewyn Davis. Unless maybe he takes up bongos.
Rock falls in ultra slo-mo beside the tumbling Lower Cascades.
The slabs of stone curve impossibly high above the ground, looming like some silicate tidal wave about to crash.
We were hiking in Hanging Rock State Park in Danbury, North Carolina, where lime green buds swelling in the damp spring air lit the forest with a glow of energy. I had come to see a few of the state’s multitude of waterfalls. We visited three in the short time we had earmarked for outdoor exploration, and each one offered a different note in the music of water flowing over stones.
Yet though I was delighted by the waters, I was astounded by the stones. Hanging Rock State Park occupies some 7,000 acres in the Sauratown Mountains, sometimes described as “the mountains away from the mountains,” a range east of and apart from the nearby Blue Ridge Mountains. Ancient quartzite rocks worn down through millions of years frame every view with dramatic weight.
Blue Ridge haze to the west.
The beautiful oak and pine forest is interwoven with dark swathes of Canadian and Carolina hemlock. Groves of wild rhododendron, azalea, mountain laurel and galax flourish in the damp understory. We were there too early for the blooms, but the promise of spring was abundant and intoxicating in every direction while massive rocks chiseled by time into impossible sculptural forms and graced with the delicate tracing of lichens, moss, and ferns kept me spellbound.
The Hidden Falls slip down stone stairs centuries old.
I had been keen to see some of North Carolina’s waterfalls after reading about them in various online guides to the state. But my itinerary wasn’t limited to natural sights. There was also what some might call the baseball agenda.
In my growing passion for the game, I’ve begun to branch out, adopting a kind of when-in-Rome policy. Thus, when we learned that the local Class A minor league Greensboro Grasshoppers would be playing the Delmarva Shorebirds while we were in town, I was determined to see a game. It did not disappoint.
The Hoppers currently rank number 2 in the Sally League, but I had a feeling that no matter what happened on the scoreboard I would enjoy the experience because of Babe and Yogi.
Nice work if you can get it.
Babe and Yogi are two frisky black labs who work as batdogs for the Grasshoppers. They retrieve the bats at home plate efficiently and cheerfully, and add charm to the easy-going minor league atmosphere.
Even though there was a light mist falling throughout the game, the fans lingered and cheered, especially when the game went to extra innings and Grasshoppers pulled out the win in the 11th inning with a walk-off hit.
And then there were fireworks. Not just fizzling little streaks of colored light either. Booming rockets of exploding color for five solid minutes. Totally awesome, even if it was minor league. It was an up close and personal experience, like getting close enough to waterfalls to feel the spray on your face, or climbing hundreds of steps carved in massive stone old as the planet.
Tomorrow is another Earth Day, and we celebrate once again the miracle of our lovely planet. Sometimes I think it’s funny that it’s called Earth, when that substance is such a small part of the whole. The precious earth which provides our food and the trees that keep our air breathable occupies only a thin layer above the dense stratum of solid and molten rock that make up most of the planet. Yet each year we pave and pollute more of it, as if we thought that more earth can be manufactured. Humans can be such short-sighted beings.
On Earth Day, and every day, I am grateful for the trees and the rocks, the dogs and the waterfalls, the fireworks of life.
And still hoping for an 11th inning miracle for us and our season on this planet.
I shot this portrait of my brothers Sam and Josh in 1959 with my first camera.
When I was nine years old I got my first camera through an offer on the back of a comic book. It wasn’t a Nikon.
However, although the camera was limited, it allowed me to take my first steps in the mysterious dance with time that is photography.
Not everyone feels driven to capture the fleeting moments in which we exist. But these days it’s hard to go anywhere without seeing someone taking a photo with their phone or camera or other device. The volume of images being made at this point in history must surely be the largest ever. And yet I wonder, of this bounty how many will be cherished in years to come?
As someone who grew up when “taking a picture” usually meant a break in the action, and often honored a significant event or gathering, the modern mania for documenting every passing second of one’s passage through life, including, but certainly not limited to, endless portraits of pets and pals, as well as selfies, I am bemused by my fellow humans and often delighted by their photos.
Still, the question remains: what will become of all these images? In the past, historians and archivists laboriously catalogued and preserved precious photos. But when the pixels pile up like grains of sand on a beach, will sheer volume be enough to guarantee a footnote in history? Or will these digital images be lost to oblivion like so many virtual sandcastles?
In the new televised version of Carl Sagan’s classic science series “Cosmos,” Neil deGrasse Tyson at one point uses a photograph to illustrate the concept of space/time. He describes how light moving through space could be carrying images from all of history, so that, in theory, if you could travel faster than the speed of light (big if) you could conceivably catch up with your past self and perhaps have a chat with your long lost parents or whomever. Right. In a sci-fi universe all things are possible.
Here and now, in our everyday “can-I-put-you-on-hold?” universe, time isn’t so easy to stop, much less slow down enough to catch. Unless you own a camera or better yet a really smart phone.
I didn’t get a “real” camera until I was in college, where I learned to use a dark room and went through a phase of trying to take “artistic” photos. But film and darkroom chemicals and paper had to be bought, and money was scarce, so I never shot photos with the kind of wild abandon that kids today take for granted. As a result, the few photos I have from those early days actually are precious to me. And the older I get the more precious they become.
Some people think photos are a waste of time and space, a self-indulgent exercise in vanity and self-promotion. Surely some of them are. Maybe a lot of them. I went through a period in my cocky youth when I rarely if ever took photographs of anything. I was into letting go of possessions, living in the moment, all that Zen crap. I’ve had plenty of time to kick myself since then.
Thus, when my kids came along, I went nuts with the photos. I’ve got shoeboxes full of them. Sometimes I can barely stand to look at them because each one brings back a world of memories. And you know how it is with memories. They’re always blended, joy and pain woven tighter than a starlet’s red carpet gown. Lights, cameras, tears.
I have tried to stop taking so many pictures. I’ve thought about why I do it, and I believe it as a lot to do with the recognition that all of this — life, the universe, and everything — from ice cream cones to puppies and roses — cannot last forever. But a photo? Those shoeboxes will be orbiting Neptune when I’m long gone. And time traveling me of the future will be so happy to open them and see those faces I will never forget.
This photo, also shot with my first camera, shows one of my Dad’s early efforts to share his passion for trains. The cat, Meow, was another of my Dad’s ideas. The bear rug under the train set was given to us by someone Dad had helped move or something. Details are sketchy. But there it is. Proof that for a while we had a bear rug.
Even though I rode a bike at a young age, I knew I was a girl. Check out the footwear.
Contrary to popular mythology, I didn’t learn everything I know from my cat.
I was schooled by the lyrics of Broadway musicals. In our house when I was growing up, these classic gems of melody and harmony and wit were played regularly on the tiny turntable in the living room which served as our entire “sound system,” the same system that played “You Ain’t Nothin’ But A Hounddog” and “Bye Bye Love.” And along with learning all of Elvis’s moves and the Everly Brothers’ songs, I learned the words to all the songs in My Fair Lady, Oklahoma, and, perhaps most beloved, South Pacific.
Set in World War II, that Rogers and Hammerstein romantic drama included some genuinely thoughtful songs about prejudice and gender issues. The most memorable of these, “You’ve Got To Be Carefully Taught” eloquently expresses the pressure societies exert to ensure that rigidly held conventions remain unchallenged, as the American Lieutenant sings to the island girl he loves: “You’ve got to be taught, before it’s too late, to hate all the people your relatives hate. You’ve got to be carefully taught.”
Last week when I read in the news about the eight-year-old Virginia girl who was asked to leave the Christian school in which she was a student because she failed to “dress and act like a girl” I was appalled. Of course private schools make their own rules. And that’s their right. But as a former tomboy myself, I was shocked and dismayed to see yet another example of how little we’ve changed as a species.
I grew up as the only girl in a family of five kids in the ’50s in Northern Virginia. I wore my brother’s hand-me-downs for much of the time, except to school of course, where girls were expected to wear skirts or dresses. Thing were different then. But outside of school and church, I wore pants. Try riding a bike in skirts, fellas. Talk about drafting.
Close to Washington, D.C., the area tended to be less conservative than much of Virginia, but even so, traditional views were still in force. Title IX, which opened the doors for girls to play sports with something approaching equal support in 1972, didn’t exist back then. The idea of gender equality wasn’t taken seriously. Men were in charge. Women took dictation.
All of that has changed for much of the world, thankfully. But clearly not everyone is happy with the changes. People who yearn for a time when things seemed simpler may try to put the Jeannie back in the crinoline, but I don’t think women will stand for it anymore.
I recently watched “Wadjda,” the first film directed by a Saudi Arabian woman shot entirely in Saudi Arabia. This amazing film, which centers on the struggles of a 10-year-old girl who wants to own a bicycle, has garnered considerable critical acclaim. The young girl who plays the lead shines with pluck and resourcefulness. But what makes the film so important, from a gender standpoint, is how it reveals the incredibly restrictive social conditions for women in Saudi Arabia.
Wadjda wants a bicycle because she wants to race her friend, who is a boy. In the film gangs of boys ride bikes all over the place. But girls are discouraged from riding bikes because of the commonly held belief that bike riding will destroy their virginity, and thus make them unmarriageable.
Yikes. I remember hearing similar tales when I was growing up. In the real “olden days” that’s why ladies were supposed to ride sidesaddle — not to protect their skirts but to protect their virginity. Anything to keep the women from passing the menfolks.
I rode a bike everywhere when I was 10 years old. Well, not everywhere, because I was a girl. My brothers were always allowed more freedom, and whenever they could do something I wasn’t allowed to do, I asked my father why I couldn’t. The answer was always: “Because you’re a girl.”
I understand now that he was trying to protect me from a world full of dangers, many of them men. But at the time I only felt the unfairness. As a child I wanted to live in a just world, where everyone has the same freedoms, the same opportunities, the same benefits.
I’m still waiting. But signs of progress are everywhere. That eight-year-old tomboy who got kicked out of her Christian school? Her grandparents stood by her and she moved to another school. And Wadjda? I don’t want to spoil the movie for anyone, but trust me, fortune favors the brave.
