BlissAndConversation.com

Reviewing Your Life On Stage and Screen

How often do we go to a theatre to escape the problems and mundanities of everyday life?  How often do we come out of the theatre talking about what we saw, what it meant and, specifically, what it meant to us and how it made us feel about ourselves in the world as we see it?  This series is a contribution to that dialogue.  We hope you’ll add your comments to reviewing your life on stage and screen.  

THE AFRICAN QUEEN

  Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart

            A wonderful adventure story but an even more unique love story, this 1951 classic, based on C. S. Forester’s novel and directed by John Huston, pits religious spinster Rose (Katherine Hepburn) against hard-drinking boat captain Charley (Humphrey Bogart).  Heading down river in Africa away from the Germans during World War I, their flight is necessarily slow, giving the pair plenty of time to overcome their initial antipathy.  Thrown together in enforced solitude for days, they gradually get to know each other.   

            Rose believes she can only appreciate someone like herself and her brother, someone spiritual with the Victorian moral standards that were drummed into them.  Charley has strength and the kind of integrity that gave birth to those Victorian standards.  Unlike Rose, he doesn’t think there’s anything bad about feeling good.

            In this world, we look for soul mates, filling out questionnaires on E-Harmony to see how we can bypass those strangers we might encounter and find someone exactly like us.

            Opposites finally attract in “The African Queen” and I’ve seen how that worked in my own family.  My parents were childhood friends who lost touch until my father, a college basketball coach, spotted a magazine article written by my mother, a psychiatric social worker.  They got together and got married, much to the anxiety of my mother’s mother who thought they were too different to be happy.  But my gregarious Dad brought more people to the house “than I ever would”, in Mother’s words.  And she helped him with business projects and introduced him to people in her world that he would never have known and who would never have reluctantly acknowledged their pleasure in this handsome, eager man with his fun-loving personality. When he died, the funeral home was packed.with his “boys” and the people of the town who knew they would miss his bright smile and ebullient presence on their Main Street.

            Don’t disdain your opposite.  Give him room, if not house room.  See what he brings out in you.  Appreciate what you can do for him.  He may not be your soul mate but he may be the complementary half of yourself.