Shine a Light
I heard about the new Scorsese documentary on the Rolling Stones from Bryan who was my student in the 70s when I taught high school English. We’ve stayed in touch through good times and bad and now both find ourselves washed up on the same far shore where hair grows grey and waistlines expand.
Anyway he wrote me an email last week about this sensational Stones movie, saying he was going to see it at an IMAX Saturday night and he’d bought all these tickets and why didn’t David and I come see “Shine a Light” too? I knew Dave and I couldn’t go that night but like a good girl I dropped everything, looked up the film and watched the trailer which you will see here in a sec; then in my answering email told him how it affected me. I found myself strangely moved I said and he wrote right back in an email that reached me on my Blackberry while I was standing by the Conventional Broccoli section at the food store. “You're such an English Teacher! It said “’I felt strangely moved.’ You don't feel strangely moved by the Rolling Stones! You feel adrenaline, you get goose bumps, you feel horny, you filled with anticipation, you’re not ‘strangely moved’!
Then to add insult to injury a few minutes later he texted to say he bet I didn’t even know that Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain” was directed to Mick Jagger.
“I bet I do,” I texted right back, thinking that’s givin’ it to him right between the eyes, and then when I got home and read Outlook’s copy of that first mocking email, I hit ‘Reply’ and said a little more: “Hey, my reaction is my reaction and please note I am 60, or almost 60. The Stones’ ravaged faces, the passage of time, the energy they put out despite how tired they must be... That’s all very moving to me. I don’t speak to how they affected me at 23! And also let me just note that I don’t have testosterone."
“So you never got high and danced to the Stones?” he wrote back.
“Of course not, I was a teacher! And even before I became a teacher I was a serious person.” Heck by the time I was old enough to drink I was married. Plus we were always broke. Or always reading our books or working on lesson plans or studying or in David's case blowing bubbles so he didn't have to clean the closets.
Ah but I did love the Stones. My brother- in-law Toby and his partner Rusty would have these parties in their Cambridge apartment and this one night they invited the whole family, David and me and the other Marotta brothers and even their mom and we ate some sort of chicken-backs in peanut butter sauce and danced to Sympathy for the Devil. I remember that like it was yesterday. I even went and dug out this blurry picture of us from that night and emailed it as an attachment it to Bryan.
And when he opened it this darn kid who has mocked me for over 30 years and indeed even in a subtle way when he sat in the fist seat of the row that was one row in from the windows wrote back once more: “Wow is that you? I had never seen you before you had a mature, sort of professional demeanor. I guess I forget that before you were Mrs. Marotta the English teacher, you were just Terry Sheehy, a regular young girl.”
I felt grateful to him for saying that; for seeing me or trying to see me as I was and I studied the picture more myself as I am studying it again now. I see that I had heavier eyebrows then. And God I remember that dress which I bought at Filenes' Basement for $7. That’s Rusty peeking over the counter and David’s brother Skip with the mandatory 70s-era mustache and their youngest brother Jeff with the Twelve Apostles hair. Toby must have been taking the picture and I remember that their mum was surely there that night it must be that she and David must have been off in one corner talking.
I look at it now and I go back to the top to look again at this picture of Bryan, still a hopeful boy sitting with his old car in his old back yard. I look again at me with my daring dress and my Janis Joplin hair. I look at the photos of the Stones and think how little Bryan, or I, or the Stones themselves knew what was ahead for them in the way of joy or suffering. Then I go back to the trailer for Shine a Light and I watch it again and again and again and believe me when I say that I can’t WAIT to go see this movie which I will do with Old Dave and his insane-Stones-fan Len and Len’s wife Mary the very first day it comes out. And David and I are going there directly from the airport even though we've been away all week and the cats are so fed up they're rigging the place up with booby traps. Because we might be old but we’re sure enough still dancing - just a little more slowly…
