Lessons in becoming an American
It was reported herein a few months ago that President Trump had yet to tape a welcoming video for new immigrants, to be shown at naturalization ceremonies. Apparently, that’s been remedied. When Joshua Greenbaum’s daughter, an eighth-grader, went with classmates to see naturalization ceremonies at the Paramount Theater in Oakland, “a video ‘from our president’ was shown to the crowd of proud new citizens.” This was greeted, says Greenbaum — and as Nick Hoppe also mentioned in his column on Tuesday — with “a sustained chorus of boos.”
That’s probably in keeping with becoming an American, to have the right to do that. Greenbaum concurs: “Between the swearing-in ceremony, which was lovely, and the ‘swearing at’ reaction, the kids all learned a helluva lot about our wonderful and wonderfully flawed democracy.”
P.S. POTUS is all heart. Not only did Trump send his “warmest condolences,” via tweet on Monday, Oct. 2, to shooting victims in Las Vegas, but also over the weekend, he dedicated the Presidents Cup golf trophy to victims of recent hurricanes in Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico. “Well, that ought to put to rest any criticisms about his lack of empathy,” observed reader Terry Gordon.
P.P.S. And when Pussy Riot founder Nadya Tolokno spoke at a California Institute of Integral Studies event on Sept. 15, she proclaimed herself delighted to be in the Bay Area, a center for what she called “forward-looking thinking.” During the sound check before her onstage conversation with Jadelynn Stahl, she sang a Russian pop song from the ’90s called “American Boy.”
There was a lot of talk about Trump and Vladimir Putin, and when she was asked about how to be an activist here, she said, “It’s hard.” (That’s an amazing assessment coming from an activist in a country where activists have been murdered!) “You have to be smart, while your president is so dumb.” Her whole conversation will be available on YouTube (at CIIS Public Programs) on Thursday, Oct. 5.
William Rodarmor doesn’t understand why “hundreds of dead and mutilated bodies” were shown in “the gripping and sometimes horrifying Ken Burns-Lynn Novick series ‘The Vietnam War,’ ” but “in Episode 9, they blurred Jane Fonda’s nipples in a twosecond clip from ‘Barbarella.’ No wonder Europeans think we Americans are bloodthirsty Puritans.”
Oh, one more name for the Salesforce Tower: “Let’s call it the Dubai Hilton,” suggests Dr. J.
After the Rafael Film Center’s Thursday, Sept. 28, showing of Jennifer Kroot’s documentary “The Untold Tales of Armistead Maupin,” Maupin and Bill Weber, the film editor, talked onstage. Dan Fost, writer, friend and sometimes spy, reports that Maupin said he hadn’t known the filmmaker before he saw “To Be Takei,” her documentary about actor George Takei. “I was sitting in the Castro Theatre seething with envy that this had happened to another gay geezer and not to me,” said Maupin.
He also mentioned that when he’d been introduced to Mary Badham, the actress who played Scout in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” he’d mentioned to her that the filmmakers’ first idea, before casting Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch, was to cast Rock Hudson, Maupin’s friend and playmate. “Mary told about the thrill of riding around the room on Rock Hudson’s shoulders,” said Maupin, “and I couldn’t help myself. I said, ‘I had that thrill myself.’ ”
The movie will be shown on Jan. 1 by PBS as part of its “Independent Lens” series. Maupin also mentioned the Netflix sequels to “Tales,” now in development, and said that Netflix had also bought the first three miniseries, “so you can stream them at the same time . ... You want bingeing? We can binge across decades.”
The San Francisco Department of Public Works is stepping out on the public stage Friday, Oct. 6, with the debut of Public Works TV, a weekly TV program accessible by subscription through YouTube. Each installment will be five to 10 minutes long; the first is about the Navigation Center.
A department rep says the segments will be “educational and (depending on the topic) humorous, offbeat and poignant.” So I was picturing a water main break that creates a swimming pool for Labrador retriever puppies. “There’s no shortage of topics,” emailed DPW’s Jennifer Blot, “including toilets. We’ll air an episode about our Pit Stop Program in conjunction with World Toilet Day on 11/19.”