Charlton Heston

The Hand of God


So the daughter and I are bonding over The Ten Commandments.

Yes, THE Ten Commandments as re-imagined  by the ever so full of his own self Cecil B. de Mille and enacted with too much gravitas by a Charlton Heston to campy effect and scene chewed with relish by Yul Brynner. Who does not love some Yul?

We were in Fargo on Easter Saturday and neither Rob nor I were up for a youth infected dip in the postage stamp pool, so we talked Dee into a “movie night” and she discovered one of my Easter rituals from days of yore – watching The Ten Commandments.

I had forgotten just how bad a film it is. Notable now for the healthy figures of its leading ladies and for the fact that Yul and Charlton were looking mighty fine, Dee was enthralled. It had everything. Princesses. Injustice. Fabulous locales and just enough religious detail to set her near-pagan mind a-tingle with the need to “know more about it”.

As it is an ungodly long flick, she only got to watch up to the part where Moses is banished to the desert. Frankly, the movie goes steadily downhill from this point. Once Seti dies and Rameses are bit players, it sinks under the weight of Heston’s attempts to make Moses a regal authority when in fact, Moses had to be poked, prodded and continually ego-stroked by God to get him to do anything.

And the fact that Brynner and Heston are mostly clothed from here on certainly doesn’t help either.

Moses is a pretty lame hero. Arron, his brother the rabbi, performed most of the plague tricks and Moses whined and doubted – a lot. I think it was the whining rather than the doubting that kept him out of the promised land in spite of what Sister told us in school.

Which brings up a curious point. Why are God’s Old Testament prophets so often cowardly and whingeing? God could have chosen Joshua. Joshua was an Old Testament warrior type. He would have latched onto Pharoah’s ankle and gnawed the guy’s foot off if God commanded it, but Moses was always questioning and moaning, “Why, Lord?”

When we got back home, Dee was still going on and on about the movie, so I stopped at the library after yoga one day and picked it up for her.

It’s three hours and 39 mins long and that is not counting from Judaism sprang the true religion that eventually begat the wonder that is democracy in the United States the greatest place on earth speech that de Mille gives before the film that prompted Dee to say,

“Just go to the menu and pick scene selection, Mom.”

As we watched the first night – and this was after a long day of training – I was reminded of all the times I must have watched this growing up because I easily recognized the bits that had been edited out for commercials when it ran on television. Usually it was Yul who got his lines cut, which is a shame because he is a hoot.

Last night we watched part two which is the boring “let my people go”. Heston is quite impressive with that one line. Unfortunately they gave him a lot of other things to angst about too that really slow the movie down and his Elvira hair distracted.

After boring us with Moses’s time in exile, it surprises me that de Mille skipped most of the plagues, but he’d chewed up over two hours by the time Moses sees the burning bush and returns to Egypt and there was still Passover and a sea to part. The music swells in awesomely in the sea sequence. Still makes me tingle a bit.

Anyway, the last plague is – of course – death to the first-born of Egypt which the Hebrews ride out in their blood stained mud huts – which in retrospect is appropriate because their God is murdering innocents in their name, so smearing them with blood fits.

The superbly cheesy effect of the smoky hand of God, green and wispy, slithering across the moonlight sky before snaking to earth prompted me to think,

“Aw fuck, I forgot about the whole hand of God killing children thing.”

Dee was horrified.

“Why does God want to kill the little boy?”

Pharoah’s son –  if you know the story skip this – is of course smited by the hand of God to teach Pharoah a lesson. A lot of innocent children bite it in the Old Testament because God was, apparently, still working on his personal enlightenment. Perhaps he should have been paying more attention to the Asians because I believe they were busy coming up with what would the be basis for the Sutras and Buddhism. Although, if they had been God’s chosen, the concept of enlightenment might not have ever been discovered by humans at all.

When I was Dee’s age, I knew the story of Moses. The idea that God killed for no other reason than to teach lessons the hard way was not foreign to me and I was Catholic enough to accept this rather bloody-minded view that it was okay because it was God.

Dee has been deliberately distanced from Christianity in general. When Will died, I allowed her to believe in heaven and angels but I kept her ignorant of the hell and damnation component. Two reasons for that. First being that if she is going to believe in God in some fashion or other, I want her to do so without the fear factor. Too many people are religious for no other reason than they are afraid not to be and this, in my opinion, is the root cause of poor Christians. Second, there is no good reason to scare the crap out of children to promote blind obedience to any creed. That kind of nonsense is why Catholic priests were able to get away with abusing children and why Catholic schools were hotbeds of physical and emotional abuse as well.

“Baby, if there is a God, do you think he would kill little children?” I asked her.

“No,” she replied wide-eyed and very serious.

“Moses is a made up story. Churches used to tell horrible stories like this to scare people into believing and being good,” I said – and that’s about as age-appropriate simple as it gets.

“Why?”

“A very good question,” I said. “But I don’t know the answer.”

“God is a good person,” she assured me. “And Daddy Will and Grandpa live with him in heaven and do good things too.”

Seriously, can you wish more for your child than believing this?

But, naturally, the green glowing hand of God came back to slap me about a half hour after I’d put Dee in bed.

“Mom?’ came a plaintive wail from upstairs which I followed and discovered a wide-awake worried child at its tail.

“Can’t sleep?”

“It’s that hand of God,” she said.

Dang-it hand of God. Curse Cecil B. De Mille.

Epiphanies are the Hump Day Hmmm


Last week it was 1976 with side trips to 1992 and 1974. My political awakening, understanding and jading. Politics, though it touches our lives in ways most of us barely acknowledge if we realize it at all, are not what brings music to our soul or dance to our toes.

The summer of ’93 brought me back to writing via a pocket sized notebook I took along to New York City. I was staying with a friend, Lisa J, who was in one of what turned out to be three different internships. I think it was surgery that time because she was doing a lot of needlepoint. I remember being a tad disappointed when she didn’t settle on pathology because I thought it would be cool to have a medical examiner for a friend.

Her apartment was one of those renovated old buildings/warehouses in Brooklyn with a doorman. It was within walking distance of the subway station. She instructed me in its use during a day trip to Manhattan. We went to the Battery and took the ferry out to Ellis and Liberty Islands. Someday I would love to go back to Ellis and just sit and write. There is the start of a story waiting there for me, I think. I have no interest in Liberty. That surf pounding last scene in Planet of the Apes where Charlton Heston curses the American goddess has turned the statue into something I will forever identify as creepy and apocalyptic.

I wrote and wrote and then went home and taught writing to 8th graders, who were frankly not much of an outlet. I have never truly enjoyed teaching writing to children when it went beyond the building blocks. Most of them – like most adults – suck when pushed to be creative. Competency can be taught but flair and the ability to tell a story? Not so much.

It was the next year that I wrote my first novella. The same one that I am slowly transforming into a novel right now. The inspiration came from a week long seminar my SisFriend and I took at Grinnell over the summer. I can’t remember the instructor’s name anymore. Morris Something or perhaps that was reversed. He was very – different.

I had taken the seminar before through my school districts AEA. It was a quick way to rack up credits towards re-certification. The first year had been a Thomas Jefferson scholar named Clay Jenkinson. He gave lectures while in character. That was a bit freaky.

He was cute though – that rumpled, long haired professor thing – and all the middle-aged women at the seminar damn near broke each others bones to sit with him at supper in the dining hall every evening.

I was invited to eat with him once after I mentioned that I didn’t care for the characterization of Ophelia in Hamlet. I have always found her “mad” scene after the death of her father to be over the top. I may have also admitted to thinking that Hamlet is one of the most selfish characters I have ever read. An opinion I still hold.

Getting back to Morris then, he had us write a short story based on an illustration taken from the Chris Van Allsburgh book, The Mystery of Harris Burdick. Interestingly I used that same book as story starters for my students.

So I wrote a novella. I had people read it for the purpose of feedback. I revised it many times and it was one of the pieces I submitted to the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa.

And I got rejected. The end.

I just didn’t have the self-confidence to write and put it out there. This despite the fact that I took creative writing courses over the summers before and after that where I received quite a bit of praise and admonishments to try and publish.

Jump ahead with me to 2006 and masters seminar. I tossed out my written presentation on a whim as I listened to the presenter ahead of me and, riffing off her, totally winged it. The guy who gave his thesis presentation after me was toast. Poor guy. But one thing came out of that presentation that I should have seen coming and yet it caught me a bit off guard when I heard myself close with “…I had thought that obtaining a masters would renew my interest in education and instead it has shown me that what I am meant to be is a writer.”

Epiphanies. They aren’t angels’ bells on a Capra-esque pine, but they jingle just as sweetly.