Yesterday sort of got swallowed up. It was quite productive: I went for a run; I did a huge load of washing, which is one of the things you do in the NW of England on sunny days and it got dry in the garden; I cut the remaining meat of Sunday’s roast chicken and made soup with the carcass and some assorted vegetables; Phil finished tidying up the grass in the garden while I was invited by the smallest granddaughter to accompany them on a trip to IKEA; various tidying up jobs were completed. And suddenly it was the middle of the evening and I had not written my blog! So I gave up and watched another episode of the Spanish series we’ve been following on Netflix.
“Las Chicas del Cable”, about four friends working for a telephone company in 1920s Madrid, has wonderful fashions but a whole lot of anomalies. How do the girls in the telephone exchange afford so many lovely clothes? Why does one of the main male characters try to do a very modern looking lot of chest compressions on his father who suffers a heart attack? The latest is the lesbian who confesses she always felt like a boy trapped in a girl’s body and goes off to see a doctor who reckons he deals with such problems. Were there really such treatments back then or is he just going to subject her to electric shock therapy? But the cars and the clothes, especially the cloche hats are fantastic.
In the midst of all my scurrying around yesterday came the news that Olivia Newton-John had died. Cancer, which she had defeated twice, got her on the third attempt. Both my eldest granddaughters sent me messages with the news, both of them quite upset. They are both great fans of musicals and of course they knew Olivia Newton-John from “Grease”. The television news, of course, showed clips from the film. It was odd to see Stockard Channing, a very young Stockard Channing. For me she is now forever the mature Dr Bartlet, wife of President Josiah Bartlet in “The West Wing”, still rebellious, but in a mature fashion, and no longer the wild and crazy Rizzo.
Thinking about “Grease”, one of the things that strikes me is how old the teenagers looked … because they weren’t teenagers any longer, of course. John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John were 29 and 24 and I expect the rest of the cast were of a similar age. I don’t think they do that kind of casting so much these And then, unless my memory is faulty, there didn’t seem to be any black kids in their school. Hispanics, yes, but black kids, no!
Now, I’ve just read a book by Tracy Chevalier, “New Boy”, retelling the story of Othello but set in an elementary school playground. This is another all white school, thrown into some turmoil by the arrival, a few weeks before the end of the school year, of Osei, from Ghana originally but who has attended schools in London, Rome, New York and other places. Again there are anomalies: surely the headteacher, and other staff, of the school should be aware of his background and not assume he is a troublesome, possible uppity black boy from a disadvantaged background. And these are sixth grade (equivalent of our year six, I think) pupils, so aged about 11. I know children develop earlier these days but the intense romantic attachments seemed a little over the top to me.
All that is by the by. My main point was the whiteness of these schools. “New Boy” was set in Washington DC. Are the schools there so segregated. I suppose it depends on the part of the city where the school is located. But still it surprised me. Somehow I imagined more of a mix. And really I should not be surprised. After all, here in the UK, our children went to schools with very few non-white classmates. Our youngest granddaughter, ethnically half-Chinese, is in a minority in her primary school. There are still people who live their whole lives without getting to know anyone of a different ethnicity to their own. That’s here in the UK. Why should I expect it to be different in the USA? It’s no wonder we still have problems with racism!
On that cheerful note, I’ll finish.
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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