Thoughts While Watching Harvey
We estimate that some 60% of our population is Hispanic. The median income for a household in the little town is around $63,424. Males have a median income of $39,723 versus $27,285 for females. The per-capita income for the city is $19,287, the lowest in DuPage County. About 6.8% of families and 9.3% of the population is below the poverty line, including 19.5% of those under age 18 and 3.8% of those age 65 or over. Those demographics are exactly the reason we moved to this unpretentious community when David resigned as pastor of the multi-racial church he had planted in inner-city Chicago to assume the broadcast responsibilities of the national outreach The Chapel of the Air. We didn’t want our four children to grow up thinking the world consisted mostly of white middle-class Anglo-Saxons! The advantages of living in this type of community often don’t immediately reach the naked eye. For instance, when a derecho (a long-lived, straight-line powerful windstorm that can do great damage as it rages from its point of origin outward in an expanding triangle) hit our little town some years back, tree-fall blocked the streets and driveways, hit rooflines and porches, and was cleared by the mostly Hispanic inhabitants with their ubiquitous power saws in two and a half days. The more prosperous town to the east of us (with a per-capita income of $41,353) applied for federal emergency grant funding and many of its streets were still impassable up to two weeks after the storm. We,
however, here in this unpretentious low-income community, were
absolutely clear of windfall barricades. After all, when your
per-capita income is $19,287, the lowest in the prosperous DuPage
County, where the per-capita income is $42,050, people can’t afford to
hire “fixers,” and everyone understands how important it is for
everyone else to get to work. To the naked eye, our little town doesn’t have much to brag about, but its neighborliness quotient is high. Mayor Piñeda walks the streets after these kinds of incidents and holds coffee get-togethers in his office the last Saturday of each month to chat personally with the town’s citizens. In addition, West Chicago also has its own community theatre, I’ve discovered. Some 40 seats large. The all-volunteer company recently mounted the play Harvey, which David and I attended last month. It’s a charming piece about Elwood P. Dowd, an unusually pleasant alcoholic man who has an imaginary friend, a six-foot-three rabbit named Harvey. The play seemed a suitable choice for the volunteer actors and crew (and their 40-seat playhouse) who went to all the work of mounting it around 12 times, to the pleasure of full houses, some 40 of us at a time (that would be performances with a total attendance of some 480 folk). Also, Harvey was a good match for this little outlier community with its unimpressive (to outsiders) immigrant community, its still-affordable median-range-income real-estate market, and the lovely new sports center, the ARC, filled with its eager exercising adults and with equally eager grade-school soccer practice teams racing through drills shouted by coaches (all conducted in Spanish). To the uncritical eye, Harvey is a rather sentimental, dated piece that evokes some smiles and chuckles and a few guffaws from the audience. But in 1945, as a play on Broadway, its author was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Eventually, it was made into a Hollywood film starring Jimmy Stewart (once voted the most popular actor in the business). But sitting in The Gallery, West Chicago’s 40-seat theatre (with the chins of the audience almost resting on the stage boards), I kept sensing that a deeper, more meaningful subtext drove the narrative arc of the piece. Variety, the weekly showbiz trade magazine, explained the theme of the production: “Harvey is an exploration of the importance of human imagination and the way twentieth-century culture looks at the irrational … the focus of the play is not really Elwood’s drinking or his hallucinations. … Rather, the salient feature of Elwood’s character is that he is eccentric and different. Mary Chase’s inspiration for the character was neither a drunkard nor insane … When Chase was a child, some boys were throwing snowballs at a poor old woman. The playwright’s mother shooed away the hooligans and told her daughter never to be unkind to a person others say is crazy, because often they have deep wisdom. The lesson stuck with young Mary, and she turned it into a Pulitzer Prize-winning comedy.” So I ordered the DVD of Harvey, starring Jimmy Stewart’s enchanting performance (in addition to being an actor, he was awarded several medals for his heroic efforts as a fighter pilot and Air Force commander during World War II), and spent an afternoon watching it. Yes, indeed, there is a subtext. It’s about the outliers who live among us, often unnoticed, sometimes puzzling in their imaginative capacity, seeing things as reality that others—the more normal folk—are incapable of seeing. Indeed, it is about kindness (and unkindness), about the possibilities the misfit in society can bring to others. At the end of the play and the film, the other actors playing Elwood’s mother and sister and psychologists, also begin to see Elwood P. Dowd’s imaginary friend. That, of course, is the potential power of the imaginary genius. They create visions of ways to better the world, to follow our own deep inner instinct, to see what is at first unseen and scorned and deemed deserving of a snowball attack. Harvey is a summons, subtle and often delightful, never abrasive nor strident, to pay attention to the deep wisdom that many all around us could give to the world, if those of us in the world were open to receiving it. The misfit, the outlier, whether they be people or little unpretentious towns, often abound in a beauty, hidden and unnoticed, that many others desperately need and deeply hunger to sample. One night this week (David has been in Texas recording his 12-message study on Revelation, the culmination of 15 years of intense research and three separate discarded treatments), I binged on an Internet study of the work of Hugh Jackman, the Australian actor and song-and-dance wonder. Something got me going on this YouTube interview clip and consequent musical extravaganza. I went to bed, finally, at 4 a.m.! Perhaps it was because I had no husband at home to call me to bed. Perhaps it is because the theme of the misfit seems to be haunting my heart (unbidden by me, but insistent and persistent nonetheless). I began to detect this theme of the outcast, the outsider, the scorned by society in much of Jackman’s work, from Les Miserables through his Wolverine series, to the last of that series, Logan. It certainly is a dominate theme in his film The Greatest Showman on Earth, which is ostensibly a movie biopic on the life of P.T. Barnum, who founded the Barnum & Bailey Circus enterprise, but as Jackman explains in one of his ubiquitous television interviews, it’s really about the beginning of the entertainment industry. Barnum developed the freak show in the States, a means of displaying human oddities, all malformed in some way or another. In the film, however, the bearded lady, the tattooed man, the dwarf are given dignity, as demonstrated in one of the musical hits (the soundtrack from the movie was charted among the top five in sales all around the world), “This Is Me.” So, in my late-night foray into Hugh Jackman’s oeuvre, I not only began to appreciate the obvious moral and relational goodness of this one man, perhaps in itself a showbiz oddity, but was overwhelmed with what appeared to be an extraordinary theme in his later and box-office-busting works. Below
are the lyrics to “This Is Me,” which has been termed the Anthem to the
Outsider, as sung in the film and performed now on many a stage by the
actress Keala Settle, who played the Bearded Lady in the film. “And large crowds came to Him, bringing with them those who were lame, crippled, blind, mute, and many others, and they laid them down at His feet; and He healed them.” Matthew 15:30, NASB. Join
me in weeping, won’t you? We all can do better at respecting and
honoring and including and welcoming those who have “a deeper wisdom.”
NOTICESAn Evening for MisfitsThrough the years, David and I have delighted in offering an outreach titled “An Evening for Misfits.” This is an opportunity to chat for those who feel on the outside of every group they have ever joined, can’t find a place to minister, can’t decide which are their most impelling gifts, etc. Generally, the people who show up for these singular events are the most creative, most delightful, most original folk we know. So, I am wondering if any of you have a nagging misfit identity you don’t know what do to with. For local folk, we can meet in my home in West Chicago; for faraway folk, we can set up a conference call on FreeConferenceCall.com. My email is karen@hungrysouls.org. Let’s see what kind of response there is, then I can make some plans. Reminder!The Soulish Food e-mails are
being
posted biweekly on the Hungry Souls Web
site. Newcomers can look that over and decide if they want to
register on the Web site to receive the biweekly newsletter. You might
want to recommend this to friends also. They can go to www.HungrySouls.org. Hungry Souls Contact InformationADDRESS: 29W377 Hawthorne Lane |
 Karen Mains The misfit, the
outlier, whether they be people or little unpretentious towns, often
abound in a beauty, hidden and unnoticed, that many others desperately
need and deeply hunger to sample.
AN ASIDE
|