I was on stage at the Portland Film Festival when I was asked the same question every time I screened The Game Changer, a short film about the dance programs I directed at maximum security men’s prisons.
What are “they,” prisoners really like?
I flashed on the previous week’s class in the prison attended by an 80-year-old Jewish man who committed a famous crime, a 30-year-old Korean man from Scarsdale who had never been in trouble until he witnessed a murder at the age of 17. He was charged along with all the other people present at the scene. He was sentenced to 18 years. Also included in the class was a young black man from the inner city, a Bard College student inmate who participated on the winning team in a debate against Yale University.
Although the majority of the men came from similar demographics, mostly black and brown, they were as different from each other as you and me. Some were traumatized in childhood, others from families that were intact and high-functioning, each with different dreams, aspirations, romantic histories. Some were once teenage fathers who still longed to be reunited with their sons or daughters. Others, elder and childless, all with unique tastes, varied talents and profound wishes for a happy life, just like you and me. Asking what are “they” like is the same as calling any group of people a “you people.”
According to Professor Google, the average person encounters 80,000 people in their lifetime. Some of us will cross paths with some celebrities along the way.
What are famous people really like?
I was once on The Phil Donahue Show. He was just like the priest played by Bing Crosby in the 1944 film Going My Way. I met Ann Bancroft and Mel Brooks in a theater in East Hampton. She was friendly and gracious. I preformed a little dance with a curtsy and sang his iconic line from the 2000 Year Old Man, “A lion is eating my head off! Will somebody call the cops?” A famous acquaintance of mine (local, so name withheld) did the same when she ran across him on a street in New York City.
Wearing nothing but my skin, I wound up in a sauna with Judy Collins.
I have a picture of myself with Renée Taylor, the actress who played the mother in the TV show, The Nanny. The same summer in the same town I met Renée, I also met Ram Dass.
Now I ask, “What is Donald Trump really like?”
In my reverie, I imagine encountering him crossing Route 32 on his way to Huguenot Street. What song would I sing as I sidle up next to him? “Fools rush in where wise men fear to go?” He might respond with, “I’ve got no strings to hold me down to make me fret or make me frown… Hi-ho the me-ri-o. That’s the only way to go. I want the world to know nothing ever worries me!”
My first Google of the day: “What is Donald Trump really like in ‘real’ life?” Online are thousands of stories about anecdotal encounters with Donald Trump.
“When you’re one-to-one, or few-to-one with Mr. Trump, he comes across as a genuinely interested, well-mannered, businessman. He asks how things are going in the building, if there’s anything he can do or improve and he offers to help without being asked. He was genuinely humble. The character he portrays in the media couldn’t be more different.”
“He was like one of those characters in an 18th-century comedy meant to embody a particular flavor of human folly. Trump struck me as adolescent, hilariously ostentatious, arbitrary, unkind, profane, dishonest, loudly opinionated and consistently wrong. He remains the most vain man I ever met. And that was him trying to make a good impression.”
“He rigged at least one pageant so that the black contestant would not win. When a black woman did win, after he had made it clear he didn’t want a black Miss USA, he walked out of the event and refused to attend the after party.”
“He pulled up at the window when I was working at Chick-Fil-A. He paid me in exact change. He thanked me and drove away. I held the change in my hand, stunned that I knew what he was gonna eat for lunch!”
I know someone who knows someone who knows someone who does his hair and makeup every day, a task reported to take two-and-a-half hours.
All the non-stop daily outrageous edicts, at first shocking, compelling and difficult to ignore will become tiresome. Eventually, the reality show which is America now will lose its shock appeal. The public will become deadened to the incessant droning repetition of off-the-wall pronouncements.
In my imagination, I cross paths with him in a sauna, both of us unmasked, in the raw, him with melting orange make-up dripping down his body, me with all the wear and tear of aging exposed in the misty surreal light.
That’s a visual I hope will dissolve in consciousness as soon as I hit “send.”
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