A feeding tube for thought

From eating a bagel cut into small triangular pieces for lunch to the most splashed face on TV, Terry Schiavo has come a long way. We could term it to be a journey but to me it's an ordeal of gigantic proportions.

Most of us will always remember her as a file photograph taken in 2002 (after she was kept alive in a vegetative state for 13 years) and flashed all across the length and breadth of this country by media networks. An inanimate figure with cropped hair and glazed eyes smiling in a retarded manner to the touch of her mother. I wonder if that's how Terry wanted the world to know her. Would she, who suffered from an eating disorder as she was afraid of being overweight, have liked us to remember her as this unsightly figure who could elicit nothing but a tepid sympathy?

We will never spare the time or the effort to read who Terry really was. We will never know that she was a shy and insecure kid who had more birds than friends. We will never know that she was so conscious of her looks that she veered into an eating disorder that caused the cardiac arrest. All that we will ever know is that she's someone who, for most of us, has become synonymous to a feeding tube.

Terry does not deserve it. She deserves to be left alone with her family and not crucified everyday on national television. She does not need the support of pro-life demonstrators; she needs a peaceful end to the drama that has surrounded her life. She does not need Congress or the President to use her misfortune to prove a point; she simply needs to retire far from the madding crowd where she's treated like a human being and not a primetime reality series.

In times that we live, sometime that's too much to ask.

A little waltz for a night

Remember in 'When Harry met Sally', Harry Burns had this peculiar habit of reading a book backwards. I don't have that problem but I, for one, did see the second part of a sequel without watching the first. Strangely, I don't regret it and like most of the people who can't wait to see the sequel, I can't wait to watch the prequel.
I am talking about 'Before Sunset' starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy and directed by Richard Linklater. It, IMO, is not a movie it's one hour and twenty minutes of meandering through the streets of Paris by two brilliant characters sketched by Hawke, Delpy and Linklater.

Before Sunset is an essay in human relations. It portrays the chasm in the life of the two characters left by the day they spent together in Vienna, nine years ago. Both Delpy and Hawke render brilliant performances. They are older and skinnier from their previous film, Before Sunrise, but still hopelessly in love with each other. There are moments in the film when Hawke looks at Julie with this touching helplessness, when she's not watching and she reaches out to almost touch him when he's not looking. The tension portrayed between them is mesmerizing.

The highest point of the movie is it's climax. Julie Delpy, in her melancholy song and the impersonation of Nina Simone leaves you with a feeling that's as simmering as the Chamomile tea she offers Hawke. Her dance fades into the titles and leaves you floating with the opening bars of her song....let me sing you a waltz!