Ebertfest 2013

             I learned of Roger’s death from a text I received from my sister-in-law.  I had just arrived at Café Kopi that afternoon to grade a pile of papers.  I went up to the counter and waited until Paul, Kopi’s owner, had served the customer in front of me, and then asked, “Did you hear that Roger Ebert died?”

            “Yeah.”  Someone from the local paper had just told Paul.

            “It’s so strange.  Hard to believe.  Ebertfest is supposed to be on soon,” I gestured in the direction of the newly restored Virginia Theatre two blocks away, where the fifteenth annual Roger Ebert’s Film Festival was to begin in two weeks.  “Well, I’ll be back to place my order in a minute.” 

            “You just wanted to tell someone?” Paul smiled.

            “Yes, so it would feel real.  I know he was sick, but still.”

            Paul nodded.

            When Chaz, Roger’s wife, announced that Ebertfest would go on as planned, my partner, Marilyn, and I were thrilled and relieved—as I’m sure were hundreds of other festival regulars.

            (Chaz.  Roger.  That’s how festival goers refer to these celebrities, even if they have never had a chat with them in person.  Even the festival guests, even the superstars, are drawn into the intimacy.  This year, we had Tilda [Swinton], with her film Julia. 

Chaz Ebert, Tilda Swinton, and festival director Nate Kohn chat after Julia.

            “Did Tilda make it in?” we’d ask, after Jack Black was kept away by weather too stormy for flying.  He was with us by phone though to discuss his role in Bernie).

            At the festival, interesting conversations occur in the line at the restroom.  On Saturday, after the screening of Escape from Tomorrow, a young woman in the restroom doorway said to all who could hear, “Does anyone know what it was we watched for the past ninety minutes?”

            “That was a film made for men by a man,” someone in line replied.

            “There sure were a lot of phallic symbols,” I chimed in, as I headed to one of the marble-walled stalls.

            I returned to the auditorium for the Q & A with the director and cast.  A woman in the balcony received the microphone: “In the ladies room just now, some people were saying yours is a film made by a man for other men.”  Hearing her slight German accent, I looked up and recognized the woman at the restroom sink who had been trying to make the line move efficiently. I chuckled.  Writer and director Randy Moore didn’t seem offended by her question and discussed connections between the film and his relationship with his own father. 

            That conversation coming full circle was quintessentially Ebertfest.  Roger always had a way of getting people talking to each other, and this year was no exception.

            The most welcome words from the festival stage this year came at the very end, when Chaz said, “See you next year!”

 

Chaz had gifts for those who had attended all fifteen festivals.

A detail of the gloriously restored Virginia.

Roger's presence was felt at the festival.

In the upstairs foyer of the Virginia.

A detail of the ceiling in the upstairs foyer.

I took this photo in downtown Champaign as I walked to dinner Saturday night.

Roger, of course, for bringing us the festival.

Laughing with my Desi Sisters

Bangles by the dozen in Southall, London, England.  My partner and I spent an afternoon laughing and eating chaat with Anjana and Mina in this "Little India" in the spring of 2009.  That evening, I shook hands with Annie Lennox as she signed a CD for me at the Oxford Street HMV, but hanging out with these dear women ranked as high as meeting the superstar.  Memories of that day came back as I wrote the post below about women I met last week. 

“I don’t know.  Shit!” I replied, as I drove a car full of passengers to a local hotel that I should have been able to find easily.  Laughter greeted me.  I laughed, too, and my passenger, a Tamil woman I’d just met at an interdisciplinary conference about India, chuckled: “You sounded so Indian right there,” she said, repeating my words and my emphases. 

We were returning from dinner downtown: four women and a baby who had met on the first day of a three-day conference.  Over dinner at a Thai restaurant, I had had the unusual pleasure of not being the only desi, the only Indian at the table.  In fact, there were three of us, all academics.  The fourth woman with us, a white lesbian from California, is the mother of the baby.  So I wasn’t the only lesbian either.  It was a liberating experience, one that I sunk into the way my I slide into favorite old pajamas that I had forgotten about but which feel just right. 

Our conversation was loud and wide ranging, joined by occasional squeals from the baby.  We talked about gay people we know in India, about the papers we had heard that day, about the books we read growing up (by Enid Blyton, of course), about whether the only one at the table without a smart phone ought to get one.  We laughed as we took photos of each other and planned reunions—in California or at the Niagara Falls—reunions that we all know might never happen.  “Conference promises,” I think someone called these recently.

By the end of the night, my vowels had changed in shape and my consonants were more sharply enunciated.  I was saying “caan’t” and “baathroom,” though I was mostly still too shy to throw Hindi words into my sentences as the other two Indian women did.   I speak Hindi so rarely that until I am with my mother or back in India, I feel like it will come out all wrong. 

That absence of Hindi is one of the losses I have grown used to, almost to the point of not noticing it—until an evening like the one I just had, when its presence reminds me of what is missing the rest of the time, and the part of me that is missing, too.  The woman who was tickled at my pronunciation of “Shit!” is a linguistic anthropologist and had been teaching me how to say certain “n” sounds in different Indian languages, including Sindhi, my mother tongue.  I almost got them right, too. 

The other Indian scholar and I ended up going to a late showing of the new Hindi movie Kahaaniat the local Art Theatre.  We laughed at the subtitles, grabbed each other’s arms at the scary parts, and talked about the ending of the film when I drove her to the house in Urbana where she was staying.  But neither of us had to translate the film for the other, and both of us were curious where in India the star, Vidya Balan is from.  (She is Keralite and grew up in Chembur, Bombay, I found out on IMDB later http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1821480/). 

              

All this happened last Friday.  Since then, I have missed my new friends and the ease with which we shared our meals and told our stories.  Yesterday, I received an invitation to a cha, a tea being given for a group of queer desis up in Chicago later this month.  I could connect with old friends there and laugh some more and hear my accent change again.  April is a demanding month at work, and the drive up there is tiring, but I am considering it seriously.  Now that I remember the familiar, comforting feeling of being among my desi sisters, I don’t want to forget it again anytime soon.

Beginning a New Year with Marilyn

           Tomorrow, Marilyn and I will both return to work.  Having had almost two weeks off—I chose not even to check my work email account until today—I have settled into a kind of expansiveness, a sense that time is elastic, that my body and my mind can relax and follow whatever pace feels right at the time. 

I know that very soon the pace will pick up, that I will be racing past others in the hallways on campus, hurrying to classes, my heavy backpack just adding to my momentum. When I stop to chat with a colleague, I will have one eye on the clock, very aware of where I will need to be next and how many minutes it will take me to walk there.     
           So today, my last day off, I want to record the first few hours of this new year.  As each new year begins, I like to do some of my favorite things as a way to set a good precedent for the rest of the year.  Others might eat right or exercise.  I often make art or write letters.  This year, I walked in the sunshine with Marilyn, baked a cake from a new recipe, and went to a movie on a Monday afternoon.  

On New Year’s Day, after writing cards to friends and family and re-watching episodes of the first season of Downton Abbey, Marilyn and I went for a walk in the prairie.  The light there is different every day.  I loved the sun on the grass yesterday.  The wind blew us sideways a lot of the time; we figured we got a good resistance workout.

I had been wanting to try a recipe for Buttermilk Plum Cake because the picture in the magazine reminded me of European bakeries.  I am not a baker by any means.  I don’t usually like following recipes, so I cook on the stove where I can adjust ingredients as I see fit. But I love the idea of stirring batter and baking from scratch.  And this picture was just so pretty.  So I began to gather ingredients--turbinado sugar, buttermilk—and even looked up blogs to see what to substitute for whole wheat pastry flour.  Then I couldn’t find any plums.  I hadn’t noticed that this May issue of the magazine called for seasonal ingredients.  Ah well.  I was determined to bake this cake, so I used blueberries and strawberries instead; they are clearly seasonal somewhere and were in our grocery store.  What a luxury it was to whisk and stir and bake on a Monday morning, watching the clock only after the cake was in the oven.  This was definitely a delicious start to the New Year.

The title of this film tickled me.  I want to photoshop this to say My Life with Marilyn.  We went to see the film this afternoon—a Monday!—at our wonderful local Art Theater in downtown Champaign while snow flurried down.  In the past ten days, we have seen three very different films, all entertaining in their own ways: The Descendants, Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol (I laughed at the idea of getting through Mumbai traffic in three minutes; fortunately, I had checked my disbelief at the door), and My Week With Marilyn.