LIVE ‘FREE’ OR DIE TRYING!

I haven’t watched enough movies lately. I borrowed a DVD of D.W. Griffith’s “Intolerance” from the library almost three weeks ago, but never did watch it. Guess I’ll have to check it out again, because it’s due back today. Ah, the weekends, where the fuck did they go?

On the bright side, instead of imbibing the groundbreaking cinematic cross-cutting of Griffith, that dandyish Southern idiot, I watched a few films by the late Tony Richardson. While he was never lauded for directing a silent film that glorified the Ku Klux Klan, Richardson has also been the subject of books written about his life and movies. The films I saw were Look Back In Anger and Tom Jones. Both are recommended, for different reasons.

My current job is no great shakes. I work for a psychiatrist, an addiction specialist who is out in meetings most of the day. Since he’s often not around, I spend a large part of my days surfing the net and answer his sporadically-ringing phone. However, I do get assignments from him, many of which involve creating colorful charts and spreadsheets, which is a lot of fun. Also, I only live about ten minutes away by bus. You’d think that, with less commuting time than in NYC, I’d always get to work on time. But on the contrary, I’m late about as often, and by about as many minutes, as when I lived over an hour away from work in Manhattan. Guess I’m the kind of competitor who barely raises his game to the level of his opponent.

Meanwhile, other events in my life have proven strangely satisfying. I have what I would deem an internship at the Free Press, an independent publication of Boston University. My official title is “Contributing Writer.” Now, I used to write for The Beacon, the official campus paper of Swampwater University. But it’s amazing how much you can forget in just five years about newspaper reporting.

My first assignment for the Free Press involved covering a lecture by revered historian and presidential biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin at the Tsai Performance Center. I remembered the importance of getting lots of accurate quotes. But when I sat down afterward to write up the story, I was too self-conscious, too… intelligent. That was what some of the veteran reporters told me, anyway, as they helped me with some serious eleventh hour rewriting. "Dumb it down" was their mantra. I may have done the actual reporting for the piece, and gotten credit for it the next day, but if not for their helping hands, I probably wouldn’t have made deadline. Guess this means I’ll have to do the same for somebody else someday.

But back to Doris Kearns Goodwin: Her new book, Team of Rivals, explores Lincoln’s gift for making close friends and associates out of men who had been his bitterest enemies. He had uncanny “emotional intelligence,” as Goodwin put it. He forgave fellow Republicans who had thought him a long-legged hick when they were all vying for the party nomination. These men later became his cabinet members, and shed many tears after Lincoln’s assassination.

The picture Goodwin painted of the former President and his closest advisors was surprisingly warm. She spent years writing the book. Personally, I was surprised to learn that Lincoln, who used to regale his fellow Southerners with a wide variety of tales, told a great many bawdy ones. The best featured Ethan Allen, hero of the American Revolution.

When Allen visited England shortly after the war, some smart-ass Englishmen thought they’d play a prank on him. They put a picture of General Washington in his outhouse. After Nature made its inevitable summons, they huddled together, waiting to burst out laughing when Allen emerged from the shed, no doubt enraged. However, to their amazement, when Allen returned from the outhouse, he was the picture of calm.

“Why, Ethan,” one of the Britons said. “Didn’t you notice the picture of George Washington in the outhouse?”

“Yes, I did,” he said.

“And weren’t you offended?” the other said.

“No,” Allen said. He elaborated. “It made perfect sense to me. After all, nothing makes an Englishman shit faster than the sight of General Washington.”

That caused everyone to share a laugh. Then Allen macheted them.