Hanging out with the stars
I’m in the airport, standing up at a free computer with a red-dot mouse that doesn’t work very well, so here goes: I’m on my way back to Houston from Massachusetts, where I’ve been hanging out with the stars. [Links added May 10th] Here’s the quick and (like it or not) clean:
Snow melt trills in the streams, dandelions and forsythia blast YELLOW against the new green silky grass and the still-gray limbs of winter trees, a few hungry bees suck nectar from pink blossoms on the long fronds of weeping cherry trees. Monument Mountain still looks like a reclining woman’s torso. The Berkshires are gentle mountains where for almost 200 years artists, dreamers, monks, eccentrics, farmers, and the very rich from New York or Boston have sought refuge. The Berkshires are a place to make art and love, a place to build a kiln or a meditation center or a lodge or a mansion or a yurt. They’re a place where it’s possible to turn a barn into a theatre (Shakespeare & Company), a classical music venue (Tanglewood), or a place for dancers at the cutting edge of their art (Jacob’s Pillow).
Here a yogi from India bought a five-story double-wing monastery from the Jesuits, who had bought the land from a successful nineteenth-century millionaire whose mansion had burned down. And here, for four days, after wonderfully nourishing visits with beloved old friends, I got to hang out with some hundred twenty women and one man, and with three bonafide first-rate movie stars who are also women of conscience, clarity, generosity of spirit, and fun; with the daughter of my favorite movie director (Deepa Mehta), and with a film critic (Molly Haskell) who sounds like Molly Ivins and talks honestly about her love and hate for the ways women are (usually) represented in the movies.
It all started off with Ellen Burstyn, radiant and gorgeous (and seventy-something), who exhorted us (and especially the young women moving into the film business who made up most of the audience) to find our authentic voices, and to make what is in us to make whether anybody else says yes to it or not. As a case in point, she showed us her personal favorite of all her films, Resurrection, about a woman healer who is neither a saint nor a whore, not a mother, and not a sexy babe. It was hard to sell, she told us; the studios killed it; it never got much play, and it still isn’t on DVD. That’s how hard it is to break the mold.
Then Katya Esson introduced her short documentary, Ferry Tales, a hilarious upbeat story about working class women who ride to work on the Staten Island ferry every day. Then Jane Alexander (not the most recent link, but a good photo and accurate information) showed us her relatively unknown film, Testament, one of the first explorations of what may happen to all of us if we allow governments to continue building bombs capable of poisoning the earth with radiation. Devyani Saltzman introduced her mother’s film, Water, and talked to us about how she reconstituted her relationship with her mother by working on this film about widows in India in 1938. Finally on the last night of the conference, Karen Allen (the wonderful tomboyish actress who played a hard-drinking, fist-slinging, wonderfully un-lady-like female action hero opposite Harrison Ford in Raiders of the Lost Ark) joined us for popcorn and a replay of Raiders with (afterwards) her comments on the production and the forthcoming (big secret!) sequel which will go into production soon.
Who were we? We were a hundred and something women (and one man) who all have stories. We’re actresses, college professors, therapists, film school students and recent grads, film critics, working moms, graphic designers, novelists, a pair of young lesbian singers and one ex-nun doing a PhD in film theory. The token man was Ed Sherin, who gave us Law and Order and happens to be Jane Alexander’s husband.
Someone else wants the computer, so I’ll come back after I get home and say more. There is more to say.
Tags: Books and Movies, Devyani Saltzman, Ellen Burstyn, Jane Alexander, Karen Allen, Katya Esson, Massachusetts
Kendall
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