Strong Women

 “Tomorrow is my turn
No more doubts no more fears
Tomorrow is my turn
When my luck is returning
All these years I've been learning to save fingers from burning
Tomorrow is my turn”

    Nina Simone, “Tomorrow Is My Turn

Joe Biden fulfilled a pledge to select a strong woman as his running mate by choosing California Senator Kamala Harris, and former district attorney, attorney-general, and rival for the Presidential nomination. In typical dismissive style, POTUS called Harris nasty and inconsistently branded her a radical leftist who will disappoint Bernie Sanders supporters.  He even resurrected the racist “Birther” argument maliciously deployed against Obama even though Harris was born in Oakland, California.  Eric Trump retweeted a misogynist calling the choice “a whorendous pick” and a Trump spokesperson sniped that Harris sounded like Marge Simpson.  Initially I had hoped for Amy Klobuchar but am rapidly warming to the choice.  She’s been thoroughly vetted and Biden is comfortable working closely with her.  Her biography is inspiring, the daughter of an Indian and Bahamian immigrant scholars who met at Berkeley through their involvement in civil rights issues. Valparaiso councilman Rob Cotton wrote: “A vital characteristic of authentic leadership is evident in what Joe Biden said. Something to this effect, ‘I asked Kamala to promise me that she'd always be the last person in the room. To ask me the tough questions, to challenge my perspective, and freely offer your own without fear of disagreeing with me.’”  Ray Smock believes Kamala Harris is the most significant VP pick since a critically ill FDR selected Harry S Truman in 1944. 

 

Recent TV watching includes the Clint Eastwood film “Richard Jewell,” about a security guard wrongly accused by the FBI and press of planting the bomb during the 1996 Olympics at Atlanta’s Centennial Park. The title character was grossly overweight, lived with his mother (played fetchingly by Kathy Bates), was overly zealous, and naïve about the forces arrayed against him. The only sour note was an exaggerated, sexist depiction of reporter Kathy Scruggs as one who would do anything to break a story, including sleeping with sources.  In real life both the victim and Scruggs died young but in Jewell’s case not before learning of the 2003 confession of terrorist Eric Rudolph, an anti-abortion militant who also bombed two health clinics and a gay bar.  Similarly, the biopic “Judy” shows how child actor Judy Garland was a victim of Hollywood moguls forcing pills on her (uppers and downers) and holding her to a ruinous diet while she played Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz” – leading to a lifetime of addiction and sleep disorders.

 

I enjoyed the HBO “Perry Mason” mini-series starring Matthew Rhys, who shined on the long-running series “The Americans.”  The original CBS “Perry Mason,” debuting in 1957 and starring Raymond Burr, played a role in my wanting to become a lawyer.  It was based on crime fiction stories by prolific Erle Stanley Gardner, who published hundreds of books, including 70 about Perry Mason, beginning in the mid-30s.  The 60-minute shows climaxed with Mason out-dueling prosecutor Hamilton Berger, often with a confession from the stand. In the mini-series Mason starts out as a private investigator, secretary Della Street saves the day, and African-American Chris Chalk plays investigator Paul Drake while William Hopper (son of gossip columnist Hedda Hopper) assumed the role in the original.

 

IUN student Iris Contreras with Helen Boothe

Feisty bridge buddy Helen Boothe sent this letter to the Chesterton Tribune:

    Since the flat earthers are still refusing to wear masks, perhaps we can persuade them to wear their “Trump” arm bands, so we will know from whom we must keep social distancing

 

Ray Boomhower cited turn-of-the-century novelist Edith Wharton (1862-1937), author of “The House of Mirth” (1905), “Ethan Frome” (1911), and “The Age of Innocence” (1920): “The true felicity of a lover of books is the luxurious turning of page by page, the surrender, not meanly abject, but deliberate and cautious, with your wits about you, as you deliver yourself into the keeping of the book. This I call reading.”  A bisexual whose childhood nickname was Pussy and who engaged in lesbian affairs with Janet Flanner and Theodore Roosevelt’s sister Corrine, Wharton was the first woman Pulitzer Prize recipient.

 

Anne Koehler (right, in younger days) wrote of being unfamiliar with pop, folk or other culture when she and her husband came to America from Germany six decades ago. She recalled:

    I picked up a booklet "Folk Music USA" in Chicago and gradually came to know the people featured in it through their music. On WMFT Studs Terkel interviewed people from all walks of life. On Saturday night we did not miss the "Midnight Special,” a program of folk music and satire. On New Year's Eve they would pull out all the stops. Linda Anderson would bring many good programs and entertainers on campus at IU Northwest and it was through one of these that I got to hear Peggy Seeger In the 1990s IUN professor Ronald Cohen organized a folk music conference at Indiana University in Bloomington, which my family attended. We slept in dorm rooms.

 

After Toni and I played bridge online with Charlie Halberstadt and Naomi Goodman, it being a beautiful evening, the four of us decided to dine outside at Wagner’s Rib Restaurant in Porter, only we discovered upon arrival that it was closed. A staff member, it turned out, had tested positive for the coronavirus. Charlie suggested the Village Tavern, where I had attended several annual reunions of our Seventies Porter Acres softball team.  Inside, I recalled, was so heavy with cigarette smoke that I stripped and showered as soon as I got home. We arrived wearing masks and found an outdoor table; the only others donning masks were the waitresses.  When a guy who arrived on a motorcycle wearing a holstered sidearm asked one why she had it on, she replied that it beat being out of work. My hamburger and fries were delicious and the 20-ounce Yuengling refreshingly cold.  It was the first time Toni and I dined out since March.

Charlie and Naomi on right

Nina Simone

Charlie Halberstadt gave me a dozen CDs that he hadn’t played in years and intended to get rid of one way or another.  He had shown me a list of almost 200, mostly jazz, and I opted for Ramsey Lewis performing “The In Crowd” and several Nina Simone albums.  Born into a poor North Carolina family in 1933, probably the worst year of the Great Depression, Simone was a prodigy on the piano and won a scholarship to the Julliard School of Music in New York City.  Her vocal career took off with the George Gershwin song “I Loves You, Porgy.”  In 1963, at the height of her fame, she recorded “Mississippi Goddam” in reaction to the assassination of NAACP leader Medgar Evers. In retaliation, Simone claimed, the IRS and FBI hounded her for a decade.  A fixture at civil rights events, in 1969 she recorded “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black.” She titled her 1992 autobiography, “I Put a Spell on You,” after her trademark ballad.


While on a bicycle ride along Route 12, Photographer Martha Bohn detoured to take some great shots of Beverly Shores vistas.