Woodward, Widowhood

"I believe I had an accident; I think I wet myself a little. Isn't that awful?"-- Joanne Woodward to Martin Balsam, 1973


After supreme efforts like this, efforts that knock the wind out of me because I assumed facts not in evidence-- that this campaign could accommodate me by making the work part time, for instance, but opps, no, sorry, fidelity to Barack Obama as an occult demigod is not to be impinged upon by the punishing reality of lifelong abuse, a huge dose of bigotry swallowed daily in my own right, and a degrading lifelong struggle against poverty, yes, I grow angrier still, and wish I had the time and the ability to take young women like the zealous Catherine and her equally zealous Cairo counterpart and give them a reality check, not that I'll be granted the opportunity, but, whoever it is that needs to know, and whatever game theory I am deploying, know this: my opposition to equality on the basis of homosexual orientation is genuine, and if liberals need to think I am asserting this because of the abuse I received at the hands of the disabled community in PA, and that I am in denial of my own homoerotic sadomasochistic impulses, if that suits your fancy, and places me in a comfortable categorization for dismissal, nothing I post will change your mind in that regard, and I am, in the rhetorical sense, being drowned in our cultural *sea change,* in attitude, not so lacking in observation as you might suppose, but I will not, and indeed cannot, allow conservative Britons like Andrew to don themselves in pedestrian gnostic normalcy without putting up a fight, and Andy is not so pedestrian that he did not test HIV positive in 93, before my scar tissue had formed, before I knew what he was, and that is yet another dose of pretension on the American landscape. I am ailing, and no doubt soon to be dead, and Google will have to make its own decisions about my voice, as it wishes, but you have been warned. I am a clever woman, not typical in how I handle my honesty or exposures about bias, and I am declaring civil war without the benefit of biblical injunction.

Which makes Woodward's late century sociological pastiche a suitable and dated point of entry, Newman's less celebrated second half. I am straining to remember what Paul said about the differences between him and Joanne when they became their parts, on his big appearance on the actors studio series, and I cannot quite recall. He worked from inward to out, whereas she had an outward starting point. It does not make me respect her talent any more or less, and in the work of her prime years, she annoys me most of the time, not always, though I believe I see, a little, what made them more the sum of their parts for each other. Last I saw of her was those public service spots for recycling, before Paul died, and yet despite the contemporary mockery that Summer Wishes is prone to illicit, I like her in the role of Rita, and the struggle she and Balsam engage to negotiate their relationship in its seasoned reality. I am, however, understandably, battle fatigued, and fighting the fear of real, and actual, total failure, and can no more turn to the disabled community on the basis of my abused trust, than I can hope for progressive willingness to open your eyes, or that a rational conservative can see me, rescue me from the injustice of this paradigm, and allow me to breathe-- when my strength rebuilds, therefore.