First off, I want to welcome all the new subscribers to our Substack community. On Saturday, a SES/SUMS IT UP column about Kelly McGillis was chosen for Substack Reads and as a result we got lots of new subscribers -or, as I like to think of you, new community members.
I took a few days off when I got back to Hudson, New York, where I live in upstate New York, to settle back in after over two months away in New York City and London. I stared at the stove and wondered if I would feel more of a sense of home if I began to cook my own meals again. I have yet to turn on the stove but the sense of home I now have has settled during this trip somewhere more deeply inside of me. Where that somewhere is will be what the rest of my 60s will be about. I will be writing about that search in my next column about Finn & Matty, my cats who are much more than cats. Even referring to them as mine seems too possessive as the settling-in after this latest trip involves reassessing what possessions mean to me in the context of that deeper sense of home.
Being back in America has also involved turning MSNBC back on and watching the news. I did not watch a second of news when I was away in London. I read The New York Times and the Washington Post most days, but hot having the visuals and the hyped-up cable news hum finding harbor in my brain was a relief. I love this country, but coming back to its brokenness as I am trying to heal my own has been disconcerting. It once made me angry and I turned that anger into political passion and activism. Part of the disconcertion is discovering that the anger itself is settling in and finding a sense of home in the deep sadness I have felt all my life since I was a little Mississippi sissy who survived the emotional trauma of losing my parents so violently and suddenly in 1963 and 1964 from a car accident and cancer. The embedded sadness was too difficult to solve for a sissy boy already struggling to fit in in such a place. Indeed, solving such a sadness makes it sounds like a math problem or some sort of scientific inquiry. I was never good at math or science and maybe that has to do with their being about solving problems in an unsentimental way that leads to everybody having the same answer. So as a replacement for solving my sadness, I turned away from it and focused on the world around me in Mississippi in that critical year in its own history. It was liking living in a war zone as Civil Rights demonstrators were being killed and a sense of a siege being underway. The year before at Ole Miss a racist riot occurred called the Battle of Oxford during which 2 people were killed and 300 injured. Every conversation could turn in an instant from from talking about your folks (even politesse could cause me pain since such palaver reminded me I was parentless) to the white-hot anger of hatred for the federal government and outside agitators. Nothing could yank a conversation away from the polite drone that drove so much of it quicker than the rallied-around resentment of yankees could.
But I found myself longing for those damn yankees to yank me away from such a place where I felt my loneliness had doubled-up on itself. The only thing worse than a little sissy sashaying around 1960s Mississippi was a little liberal one with a mouth on him. The larger country out there somewhere I had never been seemed more a home to me than the place where I was born just as the larger construct of politics let what seemed enormous to me in my one little life seem not only less important, but less lonely. Each - a country larger than 1960s Mississippi and the political passion it engendered - offered the refuge I was seeking. One was a refuge toward myself, the other away from me. In many ways, life is about seeking refuge. The choice we must make is which is the kind of refuge that is calling us home in a language we understand.
So when I arrived back in America what was so troubling to me is that it no longer offered either refuge. It wasn’t Hudson that didn’t feel like home. It was America, a place which has become in many ways 1960s Mississippi writ large. This morning I woke up and thought let’s purposefully use a sense of America as a positive. Let’s change the narrative. So I decided to make this latest RUBRICS about the most American actress I could think of. The first one that popped into my head was Helen Hayes. But the second thought was not many people will still know who she is. The third thought was Reeve Witherspoon who knows a thing or two about southern politics and polite conversation and changing her own narrative. I first really became aware of her when I was flying home from a Vanity Fair Oscar party and watched her first film The Man in the Moon while sitting next to Richard E. Grant who had attended it as well. Though really good at conversation as a performative art, I have always had a hard time at the polite kind myself. So when sitting next to someone on a plane and such a conversation is required, I turn to the movie selection. That day turning to Reese’s film was a polite way not to have to be polite.
A year later I interviewed her for the “Spotlight” feature in Vanity Fair, which was usually reserved for a young actor who was no longer just on the rise, but not quite a star. It took up 1 to 2 pages in the well. Here is what I wrote at the time:
“Twice-cotillioned Reese Witherspoon was born in New Orleans where her father an ear-nose-and-throat specialist, was stationed in the air force before he took his family back home to Nashville. There she matriculated at the toniest local all-girls school before shunning Vanderbilt to study English at Stanford. (She dropped out before the arrival of that other budding southern belle, Chelsea Clinton.)
“The 22-year-old actress has made a name for herself in a wide variety of roles. from the eager hoyden in The Man on the Moon to the convenience-store Lolita in S.F.W. to her starring role in Freeway, a nihilistic takeoff on Little Red Riding Hood. ‘Being a southerner, I get frustrated with people who have absolutely no manners. I think everybody has been raised by wolves out here in Los Angeles.’ she says, sounding a little like Little Red Riding Hood herself. ‘I’ve been thinking about being in this business for five more years, then going back to school. I even want to go to med school.’ Do her parents worry about her out there with all those wolves? ‘No, they know I’m happily in love with my boyfriend (actor Ryan Phillippe).
“Last seen as the daughter of Susan Sarandon and Gene Hackman in Twilight, Witherspoon’s next projects include Pleasantville, in which Toby Maquire plays her brother, and Election, a dark comedy which costars Matthew Broderick. In that, she says, she plays ‘a chronic overachiever, but there is something slightly off about her.’”
I ran into Reese on a street in Soho a year or so after having done that phone interview with her. We passed on the sidewalk but I then turned around and introduced myself to her. She was polite but looked slightly askance and more than slightly bewildered at why I thought she had to engage with me any longer. A wondrous bewilderment, come to think of it, is the essence of her appeal as an actress as well as a description that gets at some of what I’ve been feeling the last few days about America no longer feeling like home.
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