No One Asked Me But… (January 5, 2022)

By DR. LARRY MOSES

No one asked me but… Last week I indicated that my column was the first in my 15th year of writing a column for the Progress. Actually, it was my last column for my 14th year and this is my first for the 15th year. But what is a week in the life of an 82-year-old? So, with that correction, let’s begin this new year.

No one asked me but… My neighbor called last Thursday and invited my wife and me out to dinner and a movie. This may not seem newsworthy until you realize it has been around two years since we entered a movie theater. I became disillusioned by the movie theater practice of spending twenty or so minutes bombarding me with previews and advertisements. Then COVID intervened and the theaters were shut down for over a year.

The movie was slated to start at 7:00 p.m. We arrived at about 7:10 so we were insulted with advertisements for only 10 or so minutes.

A rather interesting statement was made as they finished up the commercials: “Enjoy the movie brought to you by Coke.”
Oh, silly me, I thought it was brought to us by the 20 dollars we paid to get in.

The continual bombardment of commercials is the very reason I have stopped watching T.V. Presently if one is to watch T.V. they will see more commercials than actual shows. One must wonder if we really need to see sexually explicit commercials. Are drugs that need a doctor’s prescription really needed?

Shouldn’t our doctors know the drugs we need to take? We have an ex-presidential candidate pushing sleeping pills. How is that different than pushing any other drug except that it is apparently legal to purchase?

There were a couple of previews of movies I definitely have no desire to see. Two of the three movies were full length cartoons. Apparently, it is cheaper to draw characters than to hire actors and actresses.

While I am aware that movie characters are not real, I do like to see real people on the screen and not caricatures that a four old could draw. If I want to see cartoon caricatures I will read the funny papers.

If the term funny papers doesn’t tell you how old I am, let me clarify the issue by explaining that in my hay day (another term to date me) as a youngster, I went to movies almost every Saturday afternoon. For a dime I would see two western features, (my favorites were Roy Rogers and Lash Larue), a news reel, and a five-minute cartoon. Early on Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd were dire enemies. They were later replaced with Wiley Coyote and the Road Runner.

All of this being said the movie we saw was West Side Story. This was a remake of the 1961 movie adaptation of a Broadway play.

I vaguely remember seeing the 1961 version and when I was invited to see the remake, I was not overly excited, but what else did we have to do and I knew my wife would enjoy the musical.

Those who know me, know I have the musical aptitude of frog. However, over the years my wife has been willing to join me in so many baseball games that my trade-off is that I will sit through musicals with a minimum of grumbling.

The only unfair thing is, she has become a baseball fan and will actually watch games that I have no interest in. This has not been the case with my appreciation of musical plays. So, I arrived at the theater with the pre-conceived notion that I would suffer through it.

The movie opened with a youth gang, the Jets, dancing through the streets of the slums of New York City. They looked more like the Rockettes than a gang of young toughs under the name of the Jets.

I immediately thought they would not have lasted long in my neighborhood. However, as the movie progressed, the story, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, became intriguing.

There were some additions to the story from the 1961 version, as a trans-gender character was added. There was emphasis on “white privilege” as it was openly stated that the “brown” gang members, the Sharks, were more likely to be arrested than the “Caucasian” gang members. The Jets. There was also a subliminal statement about policing as the main police characters were Caucasians and always sided with the Jets as they broke up the fights between the two groups. Interestingly enough, the only character that had done jail time for his gang activities was the main character, a Jet.

When you get past the underlying messages and the fact that every time something important happened, the characters broke out in song or dance, it is well worth the 20 dollars and the two and half hours it takes to complete the story.

The West Side Story is a great story and the movie was well done. I can highly recommend it for an evening entertainment.

The best song of the show was One Hand, One Heart, sung in a chapel by the two main characters.

Make of our hands, one hand,
Make of our hearts, one heart,
Make of our vows, one last vow:
Only death will part us now.
Make of our lives one life,
Day after day, one life.
Now it begins, now we start
One hand, one heart;
Even death won’t part us now.
Make of our lives one life,
Day after day, one life.
Now it begins, now we start
One hand, one heart,
Even death won’t part us now.

If all married couples were to understand and accept this as their marriage vows, the world would be a better place.

Thought of the week… “What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life–to strength each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?”
– George Eliot