The War Against Clutter (Part 3 - A Candid Camera Moment)

In the early 1920's, Dad began a fifty-year love affair with home movies: 17.5mm, 9.5mm, 16mm, 8mm, and Super 8 which he helped develop in his film laboratory on Wacker Drive in Chicago. Scores of heavy steel film cans lined his projection room in our basement, all meticulously marked with indelible ink on fabric tape: Palace Posters and Mechanical Displays; Four Generations: Little Grandma, Mom, Ev, Alice; Around the World, Part One; Stephanie and Piano March 1947; and so forth.

After Dad died in 1973, the film cans in the basement sat untouched for nearly twenty years, but for spiders and dust motes. Then one day while Elliott was home visiting from Colorado, Mother asked him to set up a projector in the dining room so we could look at the old movies. Some films were odorous and brittle and plunked directly into a trash basket. Others, upon being viewed and deemed silly or otherwise unnoteworthy, rewound themselves directly into the trash. Mother no longer had a need to hold onto the films or the memories they evoked. The movies we didn't have the time and patience to look at that day went downstairs, back onto the projection room shelves.

Six years later after Mother died in 1998, the remaining film cans fell under my jurisdiction. The house was sold, I was moving out, everything had to find a new home.

Two dozen weighty cans moved with Bill and me into a condo in Glenview for three years, up to a condo in Wisconsin along the shore of Lake Michigan for a year, down to a house in Tulsa for the past seven years. Inside the Tulsa house, the cans have lived in the dark shadows of a high closet shelf until tornado season when they have been sequestered in hall drawers, so as not to clunk us on the head if we have to wait out a tornado in the closet. And every single time I move them I say, "This is absolutely the last time I'm moving these cans!"

A few days ago was absolutely the last time. I sat on the office floor carpet with the cans spread around me, their provocative titles like fish hooks in my heart. Should I spend the money to have these films transferred to DVD? How many times would I even want to look at them again? The prospect of spending so much money for what might be little return disturbed me. I picked up a 10.5 inch steel can marked 1927-1928 Pathex Pictures, Wedding, Grandpa, Willow Pattern, Mary Wedding, Love and Sand, Charleston, Adolph Weidig. I really wanted to see Love and Sand again, a silent movie Dad had created and photographed on the sandy beach of Illinois State Park with Mother in the role of femme fatale. I opened the can. Inside sat a reel big enough to hold 800 feet of film, but the reel was empty. Not one foot of film. I opened Second Trip to South America Aboard the Santa Maria and Paula. Another empty reel. And then I laughed out loud.

If you're going to keep it, move it around, fret over it, at least know what it is you have!

The War Against Clutter (Part 2 - The Cold War)

“If this had been an actual emergency . . .”

I was a yearling when the United States dropped “Little Boy” on Hiroshima and “Fat Boy” on Nagasaki in 1945.

While my sister Alice was falling in love with her handsome cowboy in 1949, the Soviet Union tested its first nuclear weapon and I played “up in the air so blue” on my swing. While Alice was choosing her wedding gown in 1950, the North Korean army marched across the 38th Parallel and I played “The Fairies’ Harp” on the piano. In 1951 while Alice was nursing her firstborn son in Colorado, President Truman established CONELRAD and I played a new game at Lyon School called “Duck and Cover.”

While Alice and her family were continuing their struggle as ranchers along the Front Range in 1956, the United States continued its testing of hydrogen bombs in the Nevada Test Sites, its production of plutonium at the Rocky Flats Plant northwest of Denver, its processing of uranium and vanadium ores at the Old Rifle Mill southwest of Denver. That was the year I fell in love with Elvis Presley. But no matter how hard I leaned against the high fidelity speaker while he crooned “Love Me Tender,” he could never be mine, so I set my sights instead on the tinsel-toothed boys in junior high. From then on, every week when the air raid sirens blew, every time WJJD paused for a test of the emergency broadcast system, I wondered what the point was of being “good” in a world that was going to end at any split second. I wanted to live long enough to kiss a boy.

In 1971 while I was shopping in the vacuum department of a Sears Roebuck store in Illinois, an air raid siren screamed through the building. The long-awaited nuclear attack had come at last! I clutched my two-year-old son and mourned that I would never again see my husband and parents. I saw all of us facing the mushroom cloud alone. When I opened my eyes to gaze at my child, I saw everyone mindlessly going about their business buying and selling vacuum cleaners. Was it already 10:30 on a Tuesday morning?

Yesterday the air raid siren blew as I walked across the Target parking lot on a cloudless Wednesday noon in Tulsa OK. I’ve grown accustomed to hearing the siren blow for approaching tornadoes, but just like Pavlov’s dog, I still and always react with my conditioned response. While the enemies we face in 2009 don’t play by the old thermonuclear world rules, I am a product of the Cold War fallout that continues to contaminate my life. I’d like to let it go, but then again I’m not sure if I can or want to. It’s one of the strongest threads that weaves me in and out of Alice’s life.

Alice died in 1961 from leukemia.

The War Against Clutter (Part 1 - The Lana Effect)

If you don't know it exists, can it be clutter?

Seven years before I was born, Lana Turner sat at the counter of the Top Hat Cafe on the southeast corner of Sunset Boulevard and McCadden Place and ordered a Coca-Cola. She was a 16-year-old skipping her typing class at Hollywood High. Thanks to the publisher of the Hollywood Reporter who liked what he saw sitting at the counter, she was discovered and cast in her first film within the year. So began her journey to stardom. It was the kind of Hollywood lore repeated often in my childhood, the fairytale magic that feeds fantasies and caused my mother to urge me never to appear in public without looking my very best. You never know who might be out there, she'd say before I walked out the door.

During the 1950's, I frequently sat at the fountain of Huerbinger's Drugstore on the northwest corner of Glenview Road and Waukegan Road and ordered a Coca-Cola. I watched the soda jerk in his white bib apron and paper hat fill my glass with syrup and soda while every cell in my body tingled with anticipation. Someone might be out there. But if the publisher of The Glenview Announcements was sitting in a booth admiring me from afar, he never came forward with an offer I couldn't refuse. Like Lana, I too took a typing class, but not knowing how to skip class in a suburban high school so far from town, I learned to type. It came in handy when I had no other marketable skills after graduating with a liberal arts degree in anthropology.

I was out for my usual early morning walk last Sunday, musing on how it felt to shake the hands of aspiring actors after a local production of The Fantasticks, how it felt to look them in the eye and say a few encouraging words, how it feels to be onstage myself and have audience members congratulate me after a show. Someone might be out there. That's when Lana Turner wrestled her way up out of my unconscious and, no fairy godmother, confronted me until I admitted to myself that I was still waiting to be discovered, whether as an actor or writer or simply someone out in public looking her very best. I was still waiting, as if my journey to stardom had yet to begin. Sixty-five years old and my psyche was still paying ransom to the Lana Effect.

If you don't know it exists, it can still be clutter. Once you see an outworn message for what it is, though, you can let it go. Adios, amiga.