Home web out of commission--I should be back tomorrow or Tuesday, y'all!
In the meantime, I wanted to post the entry I typed up last night after seeing
Hairspray:
The short, nonspoilery version? It’s FABULOUS. RL folks, we're definitely going next weekend.
( It did what I hadn't dreamed it could—was as fabulous as the play and kept the good points of the original movie )But okay—in case you didn't know, Hairspray is about fighting prejudice—against size and skin color, specifically. I went to see it with my sister, my stepgrandma, and my grandfather, who is seventy-nine. He's very old and slightly senile and dying of three different kinds of cancer—all of which are very sad, but not quite as sad as the next part of my story.
His first words when we got out of the theatre? "Well, that was a good bit of propaganda for Them." Capital-letter Them, the Them that have black skin and/or don't think there's anything wrong with having it.
A little later, when he was telling a story about the way he, as a member of the staff of his university, helped to shoot down mixed casting in a college play, my stepgrandma interrupted him. "Well, we've made a lot of progress in fifty years."
"Well, this is going to sound racist—" ya think, grandpa?—"but I think we haven't so much pulled them up to our level as let ourselves be dragged down to theirs. You wanna call that progress…"
No, seriously.
I got out to my own car and had to laugh. Had to laugh or I woulda cried.
Yeah, okay, he's a product of other times.
But to think of those times makes me sad, and the fact that he hasn't changed between then and now makes me even sadder.
At least there are now two-hour romps for people to watch that will help to fight against those times being any more influential than they already are.