1. The summer of 1981 was memorable. My wife landed a plum internship at The Oregonian and lived with her brother's family in Portland. I passed my first (of three) doctoral exams and was taking an accelerated course in German for Reading Knowledge at the University of Oregon. I thought things were going great for both of us in our career pursuits and our marriage.
I was living an illusion.
The happiness I felt that summer was mine alone and by December of 1981, my wife and I separated and within a year we divorced.
But, in the midst of my delusional happiness, I made a memorable trip to Portland to see my wife.
The best day was a Saturday. My wife put in a shift that day at the newspaper and I spent the day and evening at the movies.
It started at the Fifth Avenue Cinema where the theater was running a festival of overlooked movies and I went to see that day's double feature, both movies directed by Joan Micklin Silver: Between the Lines and Head Over Heels, later retitled Chilly Scenes of Winter.
Later, that day, I went to another double feature at the Bagdad Theater on Hawthorne Blvd (before it was purchased by the McMenamin brothers).
I saw a movie I'd seen, and absolutely loved, earlier in the year in Eugene, The Return of the Secaucus 7 and a movie I would return to in early 1982 in Eugene, Tell Me a Riddle.
Between the Lines and The Return of the Secaucus 7 both tell stories about an ensemble of men and women who, like me in 1981, are in their late twenties (maybe early thirties) and are trying to navigate the worlds of teaching, politics, journalism, medicine, and drifting while also trying to figure out their love relationships, friendships, and sexual dalliances.
Head Over Heels was also about a man and woman who'd had an affair. The man, played by John Heard, is not only trying to come to terms with this woman, played by Mary Beth Hurt, he's crazy about, but also trying to do what he can for his aging parents.
The last movie I watched that day, Tell Me a Riddle, took me out of the worlds of characters near my age into the world of an aged couple who've reached a crisis point in their domestic life together and in their love life. This movie was delicately and sensitively directed by Lee Grant and featured Melvyn Douglas and Lila Kedrova.
Its conclusion so moved one woman in the theater, either in Portland or Eugene, that she bawled, like scream cried, filling the theater with the loud sound of her grief and suffering.
2. That glorious, albeit delusional, day came back to me because I watched the short documentary, Carol and Joy, last night. Carol Kane rose out of obscurity back in 1976 when she earned a Best Actress Academy Award nomination for her work in Hester Street.
Joan Micklin Silver directed Hester Street and the first two of those movies I saw in Portland and that led me this evening to dive into the library of the Criterion Collection to see what Joan Micklin Silver movies were available.
The real payoff, though, was discovering that Criterion also held a filmed interview with Joan Micklin Silver from the early 1980s.
I watched it. It reminded me that Micklin Silver had directed a short movie version of F. Scott Fitzgerald's story Bernice Bobs Her Hair for the PBS American Short Story project.
Wow! My near future movie viewing is taking shape:
Hester Street
Tell Me a Riddle
Bernice Bobs Her Hair
3. I guess you can tell that that day in 1981, which turned out to be bittersweet later in the year, was a pivotal day in my life.
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