She was a little old lady in a housecoat wearing blue Cookie Monster slippers and a fruit'n'berry hat - indoors. When she opened the door I smelled cookies baking in the oven and figured them for a church bake sale. Not at all what I'd expected. No eye make-up. No lipstick. No long fingernails. No piercing gaze. Sparse gray hair. I'd heard she'd been born with a caul over her face. Actually, I was surprised she seemed so shy. She smiled and said, "Hello. Come in."
Let's back up. I taught in the drama department at West Virginia University from 1968-1970 at which point they didn't renew my contract because I'd cast a Black coed to play Sarah Brown in Guys & Dolls, and refused to recast. Nobody said that was why, but that was why. Anyway, while I was there word circulated among the faculty that there was a clairvoyant about fifty miles south in Fairmount - mountain blood; legit. Apparently, unassuming as she was, her powers of clairvoyance, her ability to predict your future, were astonishing. I, of course, scoffed at this for months until a colleague I really trusted - a proto-feminist, cutting edge liberal, lit professor - crackerjack smart - very tuchas auf dem tisch - proposed to give it a try.
Let's back up a little more. At that time, I was a playwright and poet, pure and simple. No thought of film or TV at all - that I knew of. However, just to relax, every night after dinner I'd watch a rerun of the Dick Van Dyke show. Since I was teaching playwriting, I was interested in the structure and analyzed it so. Not really consciously. Oh, that's how it's made. I get it. Cronkite's next. Tomorrow, Chekhov. Ionesco, maybe. Brecht?
"Hello. Come in."
I'd caved in to my professor friend and made an appointment, made it, mind you, without even telling the lady my name. No personal info whatsoever. Name, rank, and serial number? Forget it. Time and place. Period. I never even knew her name.
"Hello. Come in."
Nothing unusual about her place. Neat but not overly. Kitschy. Porcelain figurines. Roy rogers and Dale Evans salt and pepper shakers. A portrait of Jesus in a distressed wooden frame was unobtrusive. Its eyes did not follow you around the room.
"Have a seat, Mr...?"
"No names, ma'am."
We sat down at a kitchen table where she stared at me for a very long time. A bell dinged. She rose to take a tray of cookies from the oven. She set them down on top of the stove and came back to the table, sat, stared at me and told me stuff that was a cinch, e.g., I wasn't from these parts; I taught at the university; married with no children. OK. Yeah. Yeah. Come on, lady, surprise me.
She seemed to go away for awhile then jolted back to the present, held my eyes, announced,
"I see a television screen with a dollar sign in front of it," she said.
Mind you at this point I'd had no conscious thought of writing for the screen, any screen. My first play was being produced by the Chelsea Theatre Center. Another play was being mentored by the poet, Robert Lowell. In that world, it doesn't get any better. I had no eyes for anything else. I remember well my last year at Yale when all the playwrights were running to take a seminar on film. They were crossing the street to the seminar, all ten of them. I was crossing in the opposite direction to meet with Lowell. Literally. Just me.
"I see a television screen with a dollar sign in front of it."
Yeah. Right.
Still in West Virginia, out of what felt like the blue, came an offer from WQED, Mr. Roger's station in Pittsburgh, ninety miles north, to write a ninety minute drama on the welfare system underwritten by the Department of Health and Human Services to be broadcast nationwide, every PBS station in America. A friend of mine on the faculty knew the director there, had read the script championed by Robert Lowell, and passed it on. It was Bob Walsh, the director of all of Mr. Rogers, who directed my script, "The Resolution of Mossie Wax," 1973. From Robert Lowell to West Virginia to Mr. Rogers. Go figure.
"The Resolution of Mossie Wax" was about an old woman who moved from West Virginia to Pittsburgh with her husband to find some kind of work, any kind, any way to survive. He dies, and Mossie is left alone to battle a hostile system.
"I see a television screen with a dollar sign in front of it."
It wasn't much of a dollar sign, but there she was, Mossie fighting just to live, all over the country, on screens everywhere.
The Resolution of Mossie Wax.
We never ever know, do we?
The following review from IMDB was written in June, 2021, forty-seven years after Mossie first aired.
"I saw this movie on PBS with my mother when I was ten. I wept and wept at how sad this was, and have never forgotten this movie..."
Another said, "One of the most profound flicks I've ever seen."
Yet, another said, "I've never had a film follow me the way this one has. It's riveting, disturbing, and stays with you forever...The look into Mossie's dilemma is the most poignant story of this situation I have ever seen. I keep going back to this movie because a better one has yet to be made."
One thinks for years, for a life time, who knows? Who cares? Who remembers? Why bother? One writes stuff and puts it out there. Then what? Mostly nothing until you realize you're mostly doing this for yourself, anyway. And then, if you are lucky, you find out that all these years it really has mattered. You just didn't know it. Which is where faith comes in.
No comments:
Post a Comment