1. Nurse Sheri called this morning from Sacred Heart to tell me she'd submitted an order to Kootenai Health for me to see a pulmonologist. We also talked about the difficulties she was having securing certain notes and reports from the Univ. of Maryland Transplantation Center. I told Nurse Sheri that I had the results of the testing the U of MD had ordered over the last nearly four years and she asked me to scan and email the results of my latest cardio stress test and I did.
I told Nurse Sheri, in what I hope she heard as a compliment, that Sacred Heart's program is much more comprehensive in its pre-listing examination of me than the Univ. of MD had been -- for example, the U of MD never told me to see a pulmonologist. Nurse Sheri sounded proud of Sacred Heart's program when she told me that Sacred Heart's chief concern is improving kidney patients' quality of life and that they want transplant recipients to be as healthy as possible because of the strain put on the body when the immune system is lowered so drastically at the time of transplant, making the recipient very vulnerable to infection and disease. In other words, the transplant program would like some assurance that after I've had both toxic and bacterial pneumonia in 1973 and 2009, respectively, that I'm not carrying infection to this day that might put me in some kind of risk, should I receive a transplant.
I get it. I am more keenly aware than ever that our bodies, in so many ways, are the vehicles of our fate in life. I can't do anything about having had the Zinc Plant accident, the two pneumonias, or my gradually failing kidneys. I carry the consequences of these maladies even if I didn't do anything to cause them. I have surrendered to this reality -- not in the sense of giving up, but in the sense of accepting that I must always contend with what's physically inside me. I don't deny it. This surrender actually calms me and helps me as I make decisions about how to take care of myself. I consider this surrender as central to how I understand and try to carry out my spiritual life in union with my physical life.
2. That vegetarian Portuguese stew I made on Tuesday benefited from a night in the refrigerator. Twice today I dipped into my leftover stew and added grated Parmesan cheese and sour cream to each bowl. It's chilly out and these hot bowls of stew were bracing and delicious.
3. For many of the years that I taught at Lane Community College, my next door office mate was Dan Armstrong. Regularly, he taught a course entitled (I believe) "Film of the Fifties". He loved teaching this course. As I remember, one of the most important movies in this course was All About Eve. Dan talked with me often about this movie and I always had to admit that I had never seen it.
Well, a while back, I upped my membership at Netflix so that I could order DVDs and when I returned home Sunday from Pendleton, Christy had put my mail on the dining table and All About Eve had arrived.
This evening I watched it.
I love movies shot in black and white and I took much pleasure in the lighting, the photography, the various stunning shots in All About Eve. I thought a lot about the photographic advantages the Director of Photography, Milton Krasner, put to brilliant use by virtue of shooting much of the movie on a soundstage where he could control the lighting and the effects of the pictures he created. In particular, there's a scene that occurs at three in the morning when Margo (Bette Davis) takes a phone call from her lover, Bill (Gary Merrill). I'm not sure, but I think it's the first time Margo begins to think that something is awry in her world and that possibly Eve (Anne Baxter) is not the innocent star struck fan she presents herself as. Bill calls Eve wanting her to wish him a happy birthday. He's on the West Coast. She's in New York City. We come to see that the call seems odd to Margo. After she hangs up and the lights are off, a slender bar of light illuminates her eyes (those remarkable Bette Davis eyes) and we see in her eyes the picture of bewilderment and suspicion. I know, for me, this was one of the first times in the movie I thought something was not quite right with Eve and it was the photography of this scene more than anything else that raised my suspicions.
In addition to being masterfully shot, this movie was intelligently, even intellectually, written. Much like the movie's photography which is, in the best sense of the word, artificial -- there is little natural light --, the movie's script is also highly stylized or artificial. I've read some reviewers (or critics) of the movie point out the screenplay's artificiality, contrasting it with natural speech. Many movie viewers, I think, experience speech in movies that sounds more natural as more real and superior to speech that is artificial. I thought the artificial, stylized, and elevated speech in All About Eve worked perfectly, for a couple of reasons.
For starters, while on the face of it, All About Eve is a melodramatic story about self-serving cold ambition, back biting, mendacity, and conniving lust for stardom in the New York City theater world, it is also a movie of ideas about art, theater, aging, the conflict between appearances and actuality, and psychological insecurity, especially for Margo, whose identity is largely grounded in her role as a theater diva.
Intelligent, often jaded, characters discuss these ideas in elevated language, making the witty things they say, the acidic cutting remarks they make, and the insights they articulate all the more delicious.
In addition, much of the artificial language is spoken by actors playing a playwright, two actors, a director, and a theater critic who use language as if nothing really separates their lives away from the theater from their work in the theater or their writing about the theater. This is especially true about Margo who rarely stops performing, not only in the way she talks, but in her dramatic body language and her love of conflict and interpersonal drama. So, it is true. All About Eve features a script that sounds like a script, but it features characters who love theater scripts and so speak in the style of scripts as they conduct their lives off stage.
I loved watching Bette Davis, who plays Margo, and Anne Baxter, who plays Eve, perform in this movie. Bette Davis fully occupied the grand sweep of Margo Channing's bravado, bitterness, insecurity, vulnerability, meanness, and instincts for self-preservation not only through the brilliant ways she modulated in her voice in the reading of her lines, but with her body: her hand gestures, the rhythms of her gait, the language of her face, the smoking of her cigarettes, and the expressions of her eyes.
Ann Baxter's performance as Eve Harrington was not as flamboyant as Davis's, but she brilliantly unfolded, in increments, Eve's dark, cold, predatory ruthlessness, made all the more chilling by how these qualities contrasted with the face of sweetness, plainness, and helpfulness she presented for much of the movie. Eve seemed guileless, but she is full of guile; she seemed so innocent, but she is worldly and heartless; she seemed to love serving others, but was actually always acting in service to herself.
It's times like this when I'd like to turn the clock back to, say 2009, and be able to drop in on Dan and open a conversation with him. I wish I could pop my head in his office and say, "Guess what, Dan? I finally watched All About Eve. Tell me again, how does that movie fit in your course and how do you and your students approach it?" I would relish the conversation that would then get underway and I would learn a ton about this magnificent movie.
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