Making of movie and making of a mensch

Documentarian Tiffany Shlain was showing her works — particularly her newest, “The Making of a Mensch” — at the San Francisco Jewish Community Center on Friday, Sept. 18, which she proclaimed as the second annual Character Day. The auditorium was pretty much full. Shlain talked — by herself and also in conversation with Michael

Krasny — about the movie, which has been shown on 6,700 screens in schools, workplaces and homes around the country. Also shown was the new-ish “The Adaptable Mind,” about the traits that lead to getting things done.

Krasny and Shlain are pals and they expressed admiration for each other. The talk was ambitious and full of goodwill, and also pretty chummy. But truthfully, I was feeling a little hard-boiled. Literally, the Yiddish word “mensch” means a “person,” but it is widely used with deeper implications: a mensch does right, behaves in an honorable way. And I can’t quite believe what seems to be the movie’s premise, that there’s any chartable, describable shortcut that could teach menschiness, or that anyone could consciously become one.

When Krasny and Shlain called for people in the theater to talk to their neighbors about the subject, I turned obediently to a tall, blond stranger on my right. Much of Shlain’s work has been about Judaism, but the woman said she had been raised Catholic. Most people think Pope Francis is a mensch, said I. And, I added, to me, mensches don’t simply behave well; they behave well even when it costs them something.

Then “The Adaptable Mind,” was shown (its second premiere, said the program). This was in praise of the qualities of someone who recognizes a problem, works on a solution and — with the help of others — effects that solution. The example presented was that of a Southern California artist who, while watching news reports of the Ebola epidemic in Africa, had noticed that patients were being treated by medical workers so suited up in protective clothing that their faces couldn’t be seen.

She began thinking of a way to reveal their faces, in order to personalize their roles as healers. And she came up with a way of imprinting pictures of them on stickers to be affixed to the fronts of their protective clothing. Thus, each patient could actually see the face of the medical worker trying to help.

This idea was hatched by one person who had not only the imagination to do it, but also the perseverance and force. At the end of the movie, Shlain said that the woman was in the audience. She asked her to rise ... and it was the woman next to me. Mary Beth Heffernan, artist and associate professor of art at Occidental College, got huge applause and a standing ovation.

I talked with her afterward. Her idea was hatched and discussed — including “donning and doffing” procedures for protective clothing — with docs, and supported through various grants, over a period of about 4½ months. The day after she arrived in Liberia, in February 2015, medical workers affixed the first picture stickers to the fronts of their suits, she said.

And I felt embarrassed to have sat there alongside a mensch and dared to talk about the definition of the word. She is living it.

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